“Dangal” made me cry.

I hate crying in movies. Especially in a cinema. Especially when I’m next to my mom. But Dangal made me do all that. Twice.

I had a discussion with my mom afterwards. After-movie discussions are great, especially when you get the view of a parent on a movie that’s about a father forcing her daughter to fulfil his dreams (let’s be real, it is). But I have quite a few thoughts of my own too.

Is it a realistic movie? I don’t think so. Neither is it dramatic in the sense that the film tries to fit in something deliberately to make the movie extra tragic, like the death of a relative or a close friend. I’m extremely thankful for that, because I don’t want to become a water fountain in the middle of row G.

But it certainly is unrealistic parenting. Only in a rural village in India or any country that is so overpopulated that the only way to stand out is through extremely harsh training commencing at a very young age is it acceptable for a man to wake his daughters at 5am every morning, force them to exercise, throw them in a river when they want to quit and cut their hair when they disobey. All in the pursuit of his own dream; his dream to win gold for the country. Put him in a cosmopolitan society like Hong Kong and his dreams would’ve disintegrated within a week. Either his daughters will not do it, or he will be sent to see a psychiatrist.

I was conflicted at the beginning of the movie. I didn’t know if I wanted the crazy, ignorant dad to achieve his goals. But at the same time, his persistence in his dream—even when all four of his children turned out to be girls, the least likely contenders for wrestling—is a romanticised ideal I greatly admire. It is indeed selfish of him to bend his daughters to his will, to strip them away of their freedom, but in the end, the daughter is thankful of what he has done, isn’t she? If she is happy shouldn’t we all be happy?

I wonder what truly brings about happiness. All her youth Geeta is restricted to her father’s harsh and obstinate teachings. When she is finally accepted into the National Sports Academy and wrenched out of her father’s hands, she discovers a world that she has arrived late in: the world of television, shopping and looking good. But in the end she turns back to her father, even though it means back to waking up at 5 am, putting in extra training and even disapproval from the national team coach. Why? Because she believes in her father. Maybe it’s because her father has helped her win all the competitions and her NSA coach helped her lose every single one. But it’s also because there is a sincereness in the father that nothing can replace. She discovers that through trial and error, but when she comes back, the faith is stronger than ever.

What of love then? Is what the father did done out of love? As I said before, I doubted it at first, but the more I think about it, I believe that my view of the father, just as his stubbornness, has slightly changed as the movie went on. Although he is still stubborn as a bull—the way he deals with the coach near the end, almost provoking a fight, is similar to how he tried to punch the guy who didn’t let Geeta compete in her first competition ever—he has in fact changed in small ways, such as when he decides after a long hesitation to pick up the phone and answer her daughter’s repentant cries. It’s true the dream originally started off as his own, but her daughters have become a part of it, and has become just as important to him as the dream itself. Why do you think he was so insistent on training his own children and not any other? Not even his own nephew, who is a boy.

This love may not be nurtured in a normal, bourgeois sense. The father isn’t reputable in society, and instead of being the breadwinner of his family he gives up his job to train his daughters for competitions. Not exactly to make them happy. Not a word of “I love you” passes between them, and yet when the father tears up seeing his daughter so do I. It’s the things that both father and daughter goes through, the things that are weakened when spoken out loud, the things that cannot be articulated, which makes the whole bonding much tighter, and moving.

And it isn’t just the love of the father. So many different kinds of love have come together to witness a young girl making her way to the podium. The love of a stupid cousin, the love of a silently watching yet always present mother, and the relentless faith of a sister.

Relentless faith. In the end, it isn’t about the method of the father’s parenting. It’s not about the fierce motivation of Geeta. It’s the relentless faith that characters have in everything that moves me. It reminds me of the purity in us that I have often lost to temporary distractions. Even when I debate about whether the father truly loves his daughters, or when I debate his parenting methods, I am missing the big picture, the thing that truly makes this story authentic. The mother’s faith in her husband, enough to let him work her kids like slaves; the cousin’s faith in Geeta, enough to make him put his aside the indignity of being shown up by two girls all his life; the sister’s faith, enough to move Geeta to return to her father; Geeta’s faith in her father, no matter what hardships he makes her go through without ever smiling; but most importantly, the father’s faith in his dream, so unrelenting it became a love for his daughter that has moved audiences worldwide.