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Business News/ Mint-lounge / A true survivor
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A true survivor

A true survivor

Survivor instinct: Raj Rani at the Panjab University grounds in Chandigarh. Photo by Priyanka Parashar.Premium

Survivor instinct: Raj Rani at the Panjab University grounds in Chandigarh. Photo by Priyanka Parashar.

Raj Rani

Hockey player/Reality TV participant, 25

Tonight, Raj Rani will fight another battle. A smaller one. If you follow the TV show Survivor India on Star Plus, you will see this player from Haryana get into a cat fight for the first time in the 36 days she has been on the reality show as a participant.

Survivor instinct: Raj Rani at the Panjab University grounds in Chandigarh. Photo by Priyanka Parashar.

Raj Rani is from Kheri Safa, in Haryana’s Jind district, and plays state-level hockey tournaments on and off. She says her mother decided to name her Rani because she was to be the last child in the family. The last of five children, and the fourth girl in the family, Raj Rani, or Raji as she is fondly called, recalls growing up as a tomboy. “I was always out playing. Working around the house? I don’t think I ever did much of that. Once I even got thrashed for playing chor-police, was trussed up with a rope and thrown inside a room because I did not listen to a chacha (paternal uncle) who wanted me to come back home for some work. I must have been in class V, and I remember crying myself to sleep that day."

Raj Rani narrates this story quite nonchalantly, as we sit in the afternoon sun at the Panjab University sports grounds in Chandigarh. She has just returned from the local Shiva temple, where she had gone to pray on the occasion of Shivaratri. On the field, she shows us her hockey skills. Around six months ago, Raj Rani returned from Caramoan Islands, Philippines, where the first season of Survivor India was shot, and is eagerly waiting to be part of the finale episode to be aired in mid-March, for which she will travel to Mumbai.

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A reality TV addict, it was Raj Rani’s dream to participate in MTV Roadies or Zee TV’s Dance India Dance. When she heard that Survivor India was conducting auditions in Chandigarh, she signed up. This week, the girl who did not even have a passport until two days before leaving for the show’s shooting schedule, is among the show’s top eight contestants and is rumoured to be among the top three. “To lose my temper with Payal (Rohatgi, another contestant) is so unlike me. I learnt early in life that confrontation over trivial matters is just not worth it, and that fight was over a small thing," she says.

She has learnt to keep a rein on her emotions since childhood because, “in villages, girls have to keep quiet even when boys harass them because if the girls report it or fight back, it can lead to a bloodbath. And in the end, the girl suffers more because she is married off in a hurry. My own sister complained about a boy winking at her and my family was ready to kill the boy."

Raj Rani on the sets of <i>Survivor India<i>.

Chandigarh has been Raj Rani’s home for the last 12 years. She moved there at the age of 13 after she secured a place at trials for a scholarship at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI’s) training centre and hostel in the city, which has now shut down.

“I was in class VII at the government school in Narwana (in Jind) when a coach came to our class and asked who wanted to play hockey. I just put up my hand. I had never played the game before." Within a year, Raj Rani was playing so well that she was among the few girls from her school who got a chance to play at the district level. “At that time, people in Haryana did not think sports would help their children get jobs or make careers, just maybe better education. That awareness has happened now."

Raj Rani believes her parents were confident she could take care of herself. “If a girl wants to change her life, she has to work hard for it. TV has made a big difference in our lives; people are seeing what all girls can do. But the girl has to inspire confidence in her parents that she will not cross the line. My parents had that confidence in me and they knew I loved sports." Raj Rani’s parents never said no to her gruelling hockey practice schedules—it meant travelling 10km, one way, in a public bus every morning and evening, wearing a track suit throughout the day instead of a salwar-kameez, or going away from home for a couple of days at a time to Yamuna Nagar or Ranchi to play in tournaments. “In a village, it is a big thing for a girl to be wearing pants and T-shirt all the time. I also had a ‘boy cut’ for my hair. When I look back I realize that my parents must have felt that if I was going to be travelling in buses alone, I should not look attractive enough for boys to tease me," she says, breaking into a wide grin.

Though Raj Rani played hockey for Chandigarh, she never got selected for a team India camp. She reasons that the coaches at SAI in Chandigarh were always at odds with the national selectors; and that she herself understood the game very late in her career. “I was just a fast runner, and could dodge and hit the ball hard. My coach wanted me to play at centre-half position, but I always thought being a right or left forward. Other girls said that newspapers only wrote about girls who scored goals. I wasted a lot of time."

Raj Rani has almost hung up her hockey boots for now. Reality TV is her new playground. She lives in a small two-room rented flat, close to the university grounds, and recently quit her job as an aerobics instructor-cum-receptionist at the Oceanic Gym, Chandigarh, where she worked for three years. “Well, since the show got aired, people who came to the gym wanted to know who will win. They got upset when I refused to tell them what will happen next. So I quit."

She is also a guardian to three nieces and two nephews (her eldest sister’s children and their cousins from Madan Heri village), who live with her. Four of the five play badminton and have been sent to live in Chandigarh so that they have access to better coaching. “People do a lot of dekha-dekhi in villages. If one girl achieves something, then the parents of other girls feel encouraged and are willing to allow their daughters to try that out... In Chandigarh, all of them are studying and are being trained to play badminton. They will be national-level players, I hope."

seema.c@livemint.com

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Published: 02 Mar 2012, 09:30 PM IST
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