With the second season of Pro Panja League starting on August 5, we had the founders, Parvinn Dabass and Preeti Jhangiani, visit our office studio for a podcast shoot where we spoke to them about the journey of PPL.
The tournament follows an IPL-style format with franchises competing for the coveted title over 17 days. The first season was won by Kochi KD's in a tightly contested final to be crowned champions.
Preeti is also the President of People's Arm Wrestling Federation of India as well as Vice President of Asian Arm Wrestling Federation.
Along with hosting the Pro Panja League Season 1 which is now a renowned televised tournament, they also helped India host the prestigious Asian Arm Wrestling Championship in association with PAFI (People's Arm Wrestling Federation of India) featuring more than 500 athletes from 14 countries (including Kazakhistan, Iran, Nepal, Somalia and also India).
Excerpts from our podcast:
Origins of PPL
Parvinn: I've been a big MMA fan and of all combat sports like boxing and kickboxing. I had also started this podcast called MMA India Show in 2017 which did quite well, post which I had started a website too. So that was my introduction to it- as I felt there was a vacuum in the combat sports market here and I always wanted to do something involving sports. But when it came to the promotional side, I also wanted to be part of it. There were already some people involved in MMA, so we wanted to get involved in something else, where we could also make a difference. That's when I thought of panja, because as kids also we had so many memories of it. The idea was how do we introduce it in the sports format, and not just something recreational. It had an Indian name, mass appeal and emotional connect, so we started off with some tournaments, which eventually led to Season 1, which saw 32 million unique views on TV, which was quite crazy. There is a huge craze about it in the tier 2 and tier 3 cities. For one event we had 20,000 people packed into a football ground! Interestingly, the TRP number stats showed us that there were a huge number of people watching from Mumbai and Delhi too.
History of Panja
Parvinn and Preeti: Panja is a very ancient sport. Alexander used to select his generals based on arm wrestling. Infact, it also believed that Hanumanji did arm wrestling with Ravan and that is when Ravan realized the power of Hanumanji.
Suniel Shetty gets involved
Parvinn and Preeti: We bumped into him at an event in Dubai. We were pleasantly surprised that he knew about PPL and had seen what we had been doing and was very appreciative. He's somebody who's known to have a very good business acumen. He has some fantastic ideas out there and loves sport and has a passion for sport and raising the athletes like we wanted to. He's always open anytime when we reach out to him for advice or any kind of feedback.
Nurses, travel agents, policemen…
Parvinn and Preeti: The athletes are from all walks of life- physiotherapists, nurses, travel agents etc. There was this lady from Haryana who's husband was against her participating, but once he saw her on TV and she was winning, he put up a huge screen in his village, and he called everyone to see.
