Boxing champ Nikhat hopes to meet Salman some day
World’s new boxing champion, Nikhat Zareen, is raring to go, game after game. After her recent win at the 2022 IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships in Istanbul, Turkey, which made her the fifth Indian woman to win a gold medal at the world championship, she feels there’s no stopping. With high confidence levels, she laughingly says, “I need to ask my mom ki kya kha ke paida kiya mujhe.”
Since her victory on May 19, the boxer has been flooded with congratulatory messages from all quarters. Among the most memorable exchanges on social media were wishes from Olympic gold medallist (javelin throw) Neeraj Chopra and her favourite actor, Salman Khan. “The first [congratulatory] tweet was from our honourable PM Narendra Modi ji. I was really happy to see his tweet. Second was Salman Khan. I never expected a tweet from him. It is my dream to meet him one day,” she says.
Her journey as a boxer hasn’t been easy: “In 2016, I participated in the 54kg category, but I couldn’t win the world championship. I managed to win two bouts, but lost in the quarterfinals. In January 2017, I dislocated my shoulder and underwent a surgery. I was away from boxing for a year and that hit hard. It made me physically, mentally strong.”
Actor Raveena Tandon is basking in the success of her latest film K.G.F: Chapter 2, which not only managed to set the cash registers ringing, but also started a debate around Hindi versus south films. Both K.G.F: Chapter 2 and RRR did well at the box office, eclipsing the Hindi films that released around that time. But Tandon doesn’t look at it that way. In fact, the 47-year-old asserts that there shouldn’t be a divide on the basis of regions and languages, and all the film industries should be looked as one big industry.
“Let’s first count it (each film, irrespective of the region) as an Indian film. If our audience is pan India, then the question of north, south, east or west divide shouldn’t arise at all. There is no competition or comparison; we are all one industry,” she says.
Tandon says that film choices are specific to each region and the language spoken in that region. While film lovers in the north are aware of all Hindi films that release, people in the south largely keep track of movies from their region. So, any comparison or debate is illogical.
“Like our Mumbai [Hindi film] industry, the south industries also try to make different kinds of films. They, too, have some films that do really well and some that don’t. While we (Hindi film lovers) hear about every Hindi film that releases, we are not always aware of every south film. We only learn about the super successful south films,” she explains.