Amitabh Bachchan starrer Jhund has released and is receiving positive response from both the audience and critics alike. In the film, Big B is playing the role of a football coach named Vijay Barse. However, do you know who he is?
Vijay Barse is the person who introduced slum soccer in India. He appeared in an episode of Satyamev Jayate, which was hosted by Bollywood actor Aamir Khan. In the show, Barse had revealed that he used to work as a sports teacher at Hislop College, Nagpur, when he once saw some children kicking a broken bucket and playing in the rain. Thereafter, he offered them a football. Later, Barse saw another group of children kicking tennis balls around. This is when he realized that as long as young children are on the field, they are away from bad habits.
“I realized that these kids were off bad habits as long as they were playing on the field. What more can a teacher give?” he said on Satyamev Jayate.
Hence, Vijay Barse invited these kids to a playground which eventually became famous as Slum Soccer. He called this club Jopadpatti Football. “All the players I knew came from living in slums, and I only had to work for them so I should continue with this name,” he said during his TEDx talk.
Slum football soon became extremely popular. As the club grew, matches took place at the city and district level. Even the media started reporting it and the eagerness of children to join the group increased. Later, after Vijay’s son, also living in the United States, read an article about his father in an American newspaper, he returned to India to help his father.
In 2007, the national tournament of slum soccer was also covered by the BBC. Barse was then invited to Cape Town, South Africa, where he also met Nelson Mandela.
Meanwhile, talking about Jhund, the film marks the debut of Nagraj Popatrao Manjule in Bollywood. The film is produced by Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar, Savita Raj Hiremath, Raj Hiremath, Nagraj Popatrao Manjule, Gargi Kulkarni, Meenu Arora and Sandeep Singh under the banners of T-Series, Tandav Films Entertainment and Atpat. It is Zee Studios’ worldwide release.
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