WHEN the British hit film Bend It Like Beckham opened in Indian cinemas last year, millions flocked to watch the exploits of the football-mad heroine Jess defying her Punjabi parents for a chance at sporting stardom.

While some laughed at the jokes and sang along with the songs in the dark, hundreds of schoolgirls sat marvelling at the heroine’s football skills and all of them had the same thought in their head: that could be me.

The months since the film opened have seen an ex- plosion of interest in the game among schoolgirls, turning it from a tiny marginal sport to the hottest new pastime for those with a sporting bent.

So much so that last month the country’s first girls’ football league — a development that organisers attribute directly to the inspiration provided by the film, opened.Bill Adams, a football coach from Leeds, was teaching 40 girls at the mixed India Youth Soccer Association when the film was released last year. The impact was immediate and startling.

“Girls were inspired by it,” he said. “They started turning up for coaching within a month of the film being released.”

He started separate sessions for girls when his players told him that their friends desperately wanted to play, but were either afraid of playing alongside boys or forbidden to do so by their parents.

“Lots of my friends wanted to play after they saw the film, but were scared of playing with boys because they are really mean and mock you if you make a tiny mistake,” Alisha Bannerjee, 13, said.

“So when they heard they could play in their own team, they came.”

The tactic worked, and by the time the league was started, the number of girls attending coaching lessons had risen to 150, a threefold increase since last year.

Tiya Tejpal, 16, is one of those who credits the film with inspiring her to sign up for coaching.

“I had always liked football, but Bend It Like Beckham inspired me to take the sport seriously and start playing at a club,” she said.

Unlike the heroine’s parents in the film, hers had no objections to her playing and have even gone along to cheer her on in her matches.

“They have been very supportive. It’s the boys that are the problem. They are the ones that rib us and try to put us off.” Bend It Like Beckham may not have had much impact on the boys’ outlook, but Mr Adams believes that it did much to assure parents that there was nothing strange about their daughters playing the sport.

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