Shershaah 2021

Captain Vikram Batra’s saga is as fresh in the public imagination as if 1999 was yesterday. The memory of this young soldier who died that year fighting the Pakistan Army in Kargil will forever be associated with his pop-culture-referencing victory signal, “Yeh dil maange more” (This heart asks for more), borrowing Pepsi’s iconic advertising slogan. Batra was posthumously awarded India’s highest military honour for war-time valour, the Param Vir Chakra.

Director Vishnu Varadhan and writer Sandeep Shrivastava have chosen to chronicle the late Captain’s remarkable life on screen at a time when India is overrun by elements demanding strident proclamations of patriotism from all Indians including artists. Far from echoing the shrillness some others in Bollywood have supplied in response, Varadhan and Shrivastava have created a film that is unexpectedly restrained despite being set largely on a battlefield.