The Ghazi Attack: What sells more than sex?

Nationalism. And this movie has dollops of it.

But before I come to that, I must mention something else – I am stunned (a la Rannvijay of Roadies) that not one Bollywood reviewer has pointed out that Ghazi Attack depicts events far closer to those of WWII, than those of Indo-Pak war.

The movie, which claims to be inspired by the purported sinking of Pak submarine Ghazi by an Indian destroyer INS Rajput, instead shows two subs in a death dance, where the Indian sub ends up sinking the Pak sub. In real combat, the only confirmed incidence where a sub sank its enemy counterpart happened on Feb 9, 1945 when British sub HMS Venturer sank German sub U-864, off the coast of Bergen, Norway.

Now, it’s a remote possibility that the director/script writer wasn’t aware of this event, but nevertheless, it shows poor research on the part of Bollywood reviewers.

Coming back to where I started. Man, if this movie was a human being, its catchphrase would be “मेरी रगों में खून नहीं देशप्रेम दौड़ता हैI” Neglecting the remote possibility expressed above, the very basis for this film is a lie inflicted on an uninformed public to draw them to the theatres. It doesn’t end there. The movie plays the national anthem and “saare jahan se acha…”, and copiously brandishes the Tricolour at regular intervals. Poor audience had to stand up more than once. Not me, though.

Besides the (ab)use of nationalism, there are two other aspects of the movie worth pondering over – its disclaimer at the very beginning, and the liberal use of creative licence by the director.

The disclaimer in this movie is the longest, the most slowly read (take a lesson, guy who speaks “mutual funds are subject to…”), and the most elaborate I have seen on screen. It reassures the audience that “all people associated with this film are law-abiding citizens”, and that “its intention is not to outrage or offend anybody, that it doesn’t in any manner support the expressions used by its characters, and that it makes no claim to historical accuracy.” Man, these are not encouraging signs for a country going into 21^st century.

The use of creative licence is hard to dispute, and by no means do I advocate banning/regulating anything. The replacement of a destroyer in the real battle by a submarine in the movie could also be attributed to creative licence. The problem is that most people would walk away from the movie believing this is close to what actually happened, when that’s not even remotely true. Worse, people might assume destroyers and submarines are the same thing. The depiction of how a submarine works, while quite realistic in parts, is wildly off the mark when it’s shown to lift off from the ocean bed after being struck by a landmine laid down by the enemy sub. In another bizarre scene, the reciting of the national anthem by Indian sailors is picked up by the enemy on its sonar-detecting device. A lot of what’s shown in the movie is simply impossible, and this isn’t the first movie to go down that path. There is no issue when the movie is fantasy fiction (Matrix, Iron Man) but a movie which claims to be inspired by real events ought to be more careful in its depiction. It’s commendable that the movie didn’t name the submarine INS Rajput (maybe it didn’t get the permission?), though the enemy sub is deceptively named after the real boat. 

In the same vein, would it be just to make a movie in 2080, purportedly inspired by Narendra Modi’s life, where the protagonist is shown to fall from grace after a Watergate-like scandal? Note that this is different from works such as 'The man in the high castle', which are based on an alternative version of history. Here the audience has no chance of assuming what's shown/written to be the truth. In the former case, where the truth is buried under the weight of history, no amount of disclaimers will stop a handful of people, especially foreigners, from believing that the movie depicts the truth. But as I said, by no stretch of imagination should this call for a ban. Self-regulation is the best form of regulation.

Talking of self-regulation, I made a mistake by watching a Hindi movie that wasn’t directed by Anurag Kashyap. Gotta be more disciplined now.