Bend It Like Beckham made me believe that brown girls could really have it all

I was eight years old when Bend It Like Beckham (2002) landed in cinemas. Gurinder Chadha’s raucous, cross-cultural comedy—the tale of Jess (Parminder Nagra), a football-obsessed Punjabi girl, who meets Jules (Keira Knightley), a fellow player who aspires to greatness, and joins the latter’s scrappy local team in Hounslow—hit me like a truck. Like so many other people, I felt like it was made solely and specifically for me.

I was born in Kolkata, in northeastern India, and raised on a diet of Bollywood movies, musical extravaganzas in which everyone looked like (albeit older and far more sophisticated versions of) me. All of that changed when, shortly after my seventh birthday, I flew to London with my mother. She’d won a scholarship to do a master’s in the UK, but didn’t want to be apart from me for the whole year, so, together, we moved into a tiny flat in north London, and I joined a new school where, suddenly, almost no one looked like me.

It took some adjusting. The winter was cold. I spent weekends obsessively rewatching the Bollywood movies I always turned to for comfort. I read a lot—books felt less complicated than people. But one of the few things that got me out of the flat was football.

The first summer after we moved, it was the 2002 World Cup, the tournament dominated by the ultimate champions, Brazil, and their top scorer, the almost balletic Ronaldo. (Not Cristiano, he was only 17 then.) I was captivated. Once I started playing myself, at school, I couldn’t get enough. There was something about running wild on the pitch—tackling classmates, dribbling through a crush of muddy football boots, passing, scoring, hitting the post, the smell of dirt and grass stains on everything. I felt totally free and outside of my head, in a way I never really was otherwise.

And it was that year that Bend It Like Beckham came out. I staunchly believe that it was and remains a pretty perfect film. (Okay, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Joe telling Jess that he understands how she felt being called a “Paki” on the pitch because, “I’m Irish”, wasn’t great, but apart from that.)

It’s infinitely quotable. (Including “I’m Irish”, to be fair.) The extended credits sequence is one for the ages. The needledrops couldn’t be better: Blondie’s ‘Atomic’, Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move on Up’, Texas’s ‘Inner Smile’, Basement Jaxx’s ‘Do Your Thing’ and Bina Mistry’s ‘Hot Hot Hot’, as well as both Victoria Beckham’s ‘I Wish’ and Mel C’s ‘Independence Day’.