Dolly Singh practises with a punching bag at Alipore Bodyguard Lines. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Like most girls, Dolly Singh would have a male family member accompanying her whenever she stepped out of home at night.

That is history. The 19-year-old Alipore girl now goes out armed with a fierce right punch that has changed her life and made her Bengal’s very own Million Dollar Baby.

“I escort my younger sister, if need be. Fear is a word I have almost knocked out of my life,” says the slight, 5'4' girl who is the state’s sole representative in the national boxing camp.

Dolly, a police sergeant’s daughter, picked up the gloves in 2010 after a five-year hiatus and became a full-time boxer after her Class XII examinations. Her first big achievement is winning bronze in the national championships.

“There has been no looking back since. I sometimes look at my daughter in wonder,” says father Rajkumar Singh, whose love of the sport had prodded his daughter into the ring.

In the 2004 Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby, Hillary Swank plays 31-year-old waitress Maggie Fitzgerald, who fights the odds to become a champion boxer under a cynical trainer who had at first refused to take her in his ring.

Dolly hasn’t seen the film but her life has certainly changed from that of “an ordinary girl”, which she admits she once was.

“Boxing has instilled in me confidence and a kind of independence that my friends don’t enjoy,” says Dolly, a former student of St. Paul’s Boarding and Day School in Kidderpore.

Father and daughter often sit at their modest Alipore Bodyguard Lines apartment and watch Rocky Balboa’s rags-to-riches story in the first of the Rocky films starring Sylvester Stallone.

“I am not so much into films, but this one is different. It shows what hard work can do,” says Dolly of the reel-life character who inspires her.

She has also picked up tips from The Contender, the TV reality show featuring professional fighters presented by Stallone. “I made notes about their training methods. I did the same when they showed an interview of Mike Tyson on a sports channel,” says the girl next door with hands of steel.

If one Hindi film inspires her, it is Shah Rukh Khan’s Chak De! India.

“I was so moved by the way he changed the thinking of the Indian women’s hockey team in that film,” gushes Dolly, who has been training since May 2010 at the Sports Authority of India’s Vizag facility and doing an undergraduate correspondence course in arts.

She usually practises seven hours a day and stretches it to over nine hours when there is a competition bout round the corner.

“I fought my first bout when I was barely 13. I won a medal in the sub-junior nationals. But it was almost a full stop after that because of the gruelling school schedule. I started entering competitions again only from January this year.”

Since then, she has won bronze in the All India University Championship, bronze in the National Games, gold in the inter-zone national championships and bronze in the senior nationals.

Dolly was a step away from a slot in the London Olympics squad when world champion Mary Kom beat her in the semi-final of the national championships in the 54kg category.

“She has age on her side and fire in her belly,” says Asit Banerjee, the vice-president of the Indian Boxing Federation.

She has also shown the courage to pursue a discipline that takes a big heart and finds very few takers in Bengal.

The bronze in the national championships may not have got Dolly a ticket to London 2012, but it did ensure her a place in the national camp in Patiala.

“I always knew I would make a comeback to the ring,” she says. “But I did not know boxing would shape my character.”

Calcutta could do with a Dolly in every woman to take on the rogues on the road.

What makes a woman strong: spunk or steel? Tell ttmetro @abpmail.com