Khali wrestles with his destiny

More than wondrous achievements, <i>The Man Who Became Khali</i> is a tale of pitiful naivety

The Man Who Became Khali

Dalip Singh Rana (with Vinit K Bansal)

Penguin 

178 pages; Rs 250

For all its farcical qualities and specious fighting antics, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) was genuinely thrilling once upon a time. For kids, the sight of one man spuriously pummelling a hapless opponent, sometimes with steel chairs, ladders and wooden tables, always made for irresistible viewing. That still may be the case, but with so many of the sport’s mainstays – a long list that includes The Rock, Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Hulk Hogan, Batista and The Big Show – having long walked into the sunset, the exhilaration quotient has expectedly plummeted over the years; pulses are now seldom set racing. For Indian fans of the sport, this exalted list would be incomplete with the mention of one man: The Great Khali.

When a 7-foot-2-inch beast, weighing some 400 pounds, walked into the WWE ring in April 2006, the world of professional wrestling was visibly stunned. The crowd cupped their cheeks in utter bewilderment, the commentators fumbled for words. The man in front of him that day, The Undertaker — the WWE’s most seasoned and sacrosanct figure — was left astounded by Khali’s monstrosity. A couple of minutes and two giant right hands later, The Undertaker was floored. And then, obediently following the script, he never got up. “I am Khali,” blurted out the man who had knocked him out. The glittering world of WWE wrestling had found a new star. 

For the man who was born as Dalip Singh Rana, however, the accolades had taken a long time coming. To borrow a famous Lionel Messi line, it took Mr Rana a lifetime to become an overnight success. Mr Rana’s autobiography, The Man Who Became Khali, charts that very journey, of a man who spent the early part of his life toiling away as daily-wage labourer; of a man whose physical anomalies were more a hindrance than strength. The ridicule, after a point, had become claustrophobic.

More than wondrous achievements, The Man Who Became Khali is a tale of pitiful naivety. Mr Rana candidly talks about his failure to get a proper education, and how that handicap haunts him even today. He captures his own credulity in a few succinct incidents. On being paid by his contractor during one of his first jobs, he writes, “There were twenty-three notes, each of Rs 20. I tried to count them. I could not. I didn’t know how much they were but they seemed a lot… the guilt of not having completed my education struck me hard at that point.”

Another time, Mr Rana was deceived by his employer. Still a teenager, he returned to his village – Dhiraina in Himachal Pradesh – one day from Shimla, ecstatic. After toiling in the mountain mist for more than three months, Mr Rana was paid what he thought was a hefty amount. His delight was quickly punctured by his father — he had been paid less than half of what he was promised. 

Surprisingly, the book reserves little space for Mr Rana’s days as a WWE entertainer. Instead, it relentlessly harps on the importance of hard work — so much so that you honestly start to wonder about the authenticity of his story. In other parts, he talks about his time in the Punjab Police, his tryst with Japanese wrestling – easily the most entertaining bit of the book – and his fabled annihilation of The Undertaker, which is narrated with such grandiosity that you begin to doubt whether this form of professional wrestling is actually a real sport. 

Elsewhere, Mr Rana talks about the film that catapulted him to instant stardom in the US, The Longest Yard. The 2005 film, which also starred Adam Sandler, Burt Reynolds and Chris Rock, became Mr Rana’s ticket to the WWE. “The Longest Yard somehow helped boost my career. It was when I came for the movie’s promotion to New York that I got a call from the WWE saying that Vince McMahon, the CEO of the company, wanted to see me,” he writes. 

To keep the reader engrossed, Mr Rana also manages to fit in a more sombre occurrence: A training fight that cost a close friend his life at the All Pro Wrestling School in San Francisco. The accident, he writes, distressed him so much that he felt like quitting the sport forever. 

Mr Rana deserves credit for his attempt at telling a sincere story, but the book is undone by its trite prose, which encumbers an otherwise frank – even inspirational – account of a life afflicted with onerous struggles. Despite the book being replete with compelling anecdotes, Mr Rana fails to effectively stitch them together to produce a readable autobiography. The book is reduced to a string of endless struggles, and is a terrible missed opportunity. Thankfully for Mr Rana, he didn’t miss his chance in the ring.