 I am here with Parveen Abbas and I hope I pronounced his surname correctly. He has formed the pro-Panja League which is basically arm wrestling, bringing back arm wrestling in a proper official manner in India. So Parveen, over to you. Tell us exactly how did you go about starting this whole league and how did the idea sort of germinate in your mind? Well, thanks for having me and thanks for calling it that we're bringing it back because it's not a new sport. It's a reintroduction of the sport. Everybody knows about the sport, everybody knows the basic idea behind it but the only thing is we're introducing people to professional arm wrestling. How is it being professionally? So the idea came to me in about 2016-17 which is when I started working on it and when I was younger also a lot of my cousins we also used to indulge in it but I've always been a sports person and I was always looking at a sport to enter as a promoter and I've been involved in MMA and they had quite a few sports sites which I had started in 2016 but I identified Punjab mainly because it has an Indian name. Abroad it's known as arm wrestling, India it's known as Punjab so everybody knows about it, Riksha Walao, Banyo, everybody knows the sport and the idea, it's very accessible and it's a sport where I felt I could make a difference. A lot of other sports, there are already a lot of people doing things but arm wrestling I felt was a sport where I could make a difference and make a difference to the athletes as well. So also one other important aspect about Pro-Punja League is that I mean and about arm wrestling is that it's a non-violent sport right I mean apart from MMA and so many other things that's a non-violent sport and also one sort of a question which came up in my mind that was a very famous Sylvester Stallone movie called Over the Top which was about arm wrestling, did it sort of play a part in you getting this into India? See a lot of us when we were younger you know growing up in Delhi as well at that period of time when that film came out a lot of us got into the sport and it became big because of that film. It introduced us to arm wrestling so that is always there in our mind and Sylvester Stallone, Topi Guwata when you get serious and all those little things so that definitely brought us into the world of arm wrestling and stayed with us as a cultural film so that definitely was there from the very beginning Have you messaged Stallone on Instagram to collaborate with you in any way? I think that's a good idea, I think I'll do that now. You can give me credit for that later. Tell us about some of the famous players who are associated with arm wrestling with the Pro-Punja League something about the background etc which you know most people might not know about. See what's very interesting about the players and athletes from the Pro-Punja League first of all we're an equal opportunity league. In our league men have six categories for men, three for women and one for especially able so they all get equal treatment depending on their ranking it's the only league which is an equal opportunity league. There are people the athletes here are son and daughters of the soil you know it's like we have a farmer for Mariana Karaj Varku who's one of our you know big players. We have Harman Maan who works now in a travel agency his family's into furniture we have Sanjay Deswal who has a small his own furniture business also we have Sachin Goyal who's a student we have Chetna Sharma who's one of our female champion who's a police cop who works in Gohati and we have Josie Qualum from the from the northeast who works in an office you know we have Manish Sharma who's a government officer who's our especially able champion so we have people like Saeed Mahmub Ali in Telangana who's a gym trainer and also Samir Viti who also works in a gym in Kerala we have Raul Panika who works in Dubai also and keeps coming and going in some of the biggest gyms there so our athletes you can see our students they are farmers police people you know gym trainers you know they come from all walks of life they come like I said from their son and daughters of the soil they come from tier two tier three and beyond town some of them of course are from Delhi which is also tier two tier three town but I can say that I leave that to the comment section yeah okay yeah so like I said I'm from there so I can say that so you know so it's a lot of them don't come from the big cities you know some of them but a lot of them are more from the tier two and beyond city and that is our target audience you know that is who we want to speak to so so like I said they're they're very down to earth guys but but they're very strong you know they're mentally very strong they're physically very strong and it's a very technical it's not just strength it's technical it's strategy it's there's a lot of brain work involved in it a lot of strategizing so you have to be a complete player you know let me just give you an example right now we had a promotional event in IIT Mumbai where we did a mini tournament amongst the students and we picked the top four guys and one girl and we offered them 10,000 rupees to beat our female champion one of our female champions like I said Chetna Sharma from Guwahati we flew her down gave you know they they had played in so the top four guys and big guys you know so we gave them the opportunity they weren't able to beat her you know so it's not even though they're stronger than her you can see they're stronger than her but it's not just a strength game it's technical it's thinking it's reflexes there's a lot of things involved so how many sort of competitions have you had I mean you started this off in roughly this year and how many competitions have you had till now this was February 29th 2020 just three weeks before the first lockdown you can say fortunately or unfortunately just a little hello so we were fortunate that Mr. Kiran Rajuji at that time the sports minister and the general saying they both came to inaugurate and it was a very big event at Yagraj in Delhi after that as we all know the lockdown happened so we had to take a pause we did come back in between the the first and the second lockdown we had a huge event in Mumbai at the radio club pier in front of the gateway of India then we did another event on top of a casino boat in Guwah which is again in association with the vision they're saying a huge event it was on top of a casino boat and then again the second lockdown happened so again we had to take a small break so then we had our last event which was in December 2021 which was at the Sheru classic in Bombay which is a huge fitness festival so now we are looking at starting now what we feel is we've been doing these events which we have been looking at as concept events to show the people you know what the idea is and everything and now all our stakeholders are starting to join us and our first full Fledged season is going to start this year now so we already have an event planned in June which is a Sheru classic and then our ranking tournament in which a thousand players have registered from across India you know a thousand players have registered is going to be taking place in the month of July so and three months from there we'll be having our league that we'll have 16s in the first year first two years and then we'll be growing from there so like a live telecast or something yes we're in talks with a broadcaster final talks with somebody so it will be live broadcast our go event was also broadcast on Sony sports it wasn't live but it came afterwards okay okay and what is like the youngest and the oldest player oh the youngest or a worse 17 18 in our first unit but now people as young as 15 and registered for the ranking tournament okay and the oldest I think would be 50 55 16 okay okay and my final question is what I mean if someone wants to register someone who's seeing this video okay wants to register for Panjali how does he sort of register or he or she register I mean according to there's any age limit upper lower whatever there's no age limit we do have weight categories and it was mainly for see we didn't put it out in the public because we were mainly we had a tie up with the federation the official federation which is the Indian arm wrestling federation so a lot of it was done through them and through the state associations and also through our social media so every arm wrestler in India knew about it so you know most of the arm wrestlers everybody knew about it everybody has registered but yes if you want to still look into it then pro panja.com you can come on on there and check it out got it got it okay so for anybody who's listening to this who's interested to getting into arm wrestling into the pro panja league that's how you do it we'll be putting out these interviews soon thank you so much Praveen for talking to us I mean you're definitely one guy who I will not be shaking hands with but till next time it's not me you have to be afraid of I'm not the one on the table but the other guys let me tell you forget about the guys that's all I want to say always Namaste or Saseekal so I can go with that but thank you for talking to us and all the best for the future thank you so much for taking