We all love movies? Don’t we?
And if it is a war movie, we the defence aspirants are one of the firsts to catch the spine-chilling action and the motivational quotes from the show.
But, not every task in the military is action; neither action in the military is what portrayed in desi movies.
The military is complex and there are a lot of tiny details to be kept in mind. When movie producers attempt to capture these details, it often results in mistakes that are really obvious to people in the military.
Here are some of these mistakes that soldiers hate which the desi movies portray:
- Dressing Sense of Uniform: No officer looks like what many drama+war movies makes them to *cough* Jab Tak Hai Jaan *cough*. Dress uniforms are so precise and detailed that real soldiers occasionally get things wrong. They do not have shabby long hair and stubble and do not even wear low waist uniform trousers. Every soldier knows that formation signs are not worn with combats and a soldier simply does not roam around with unbuttoned shirt as portrayed in here. What decorations an actor wears in a movie makes little difference to the majority of the audience, but to a military man, it really sticks out.
- Exaggeration of Actions: Doesn’t it seem easy to take out enemy soldiers or kill terrorists when our own soldiers do it? It’s like some spy or hero sneaks on base, a few kicks and action, and boom, the enemy is down. Also, one shot takes out an enemy when the hero gets wounded with a dozen bullets and still has the strength to defuse the fakest looking bomb ever or take down the enemy with him. That’s clearly not the case. Even our soldiers can die in a single bullet!
- It is not always “Over and Out”: Real military radio etiquette is not something that you watch in movies. “Over” and “Out” are mutually exclusive from each other (means if one happens, other doesn’t). “Over” means that the person has finished transmitting and is awaiting a response, whereas “out” means that a person has finished his transmission and no response is necessary, so the two words would never appear in a single transmission together. “Over and Out” is just a myth.
- The story revolves mostly around an officer: In movies like LOC Kargil, they always focus on the officers as heroes, never the Non-Commissioned ranks that most officers give credit for getting the job done (read Akshay Kumar’s Holiday). No doubt officers are the leaders and nothing is possible without their leadership. But the movies fail to portray the importance of a common soldier and instead rotate the story around an officer most of the times.
- Endless ammo: Again, does it even seem that our heroes are running out of ammo. The ammo magically gets refilled, like whoosh and here you get your ammo back. In real, it’s hell broken when they run out of ammo and they have to manage it accordingly. One example I can give is when Lt Saurabh Kalia was captured, he ran out of his ammunition, otherwise he would have taken those SOBs with him.
- Impacts of Explosion: Consider this: There is a convoy of soldiers marching for a war when the heroes get shelled. What do they do next? Brush off the dirt from the massive explosion just next to them and continue fighting? In movies explosions always seems like a minor annoyance instead of mass killing unless they explode on enemies’ side, during which, the whole base is shattered.
- Talking back to commanding officers in unrealistic jargon: Unless in desi movies, the soldiers do not use dialogues like “mitti ka karz chukana” or like “Lahoo ki aakhiri boond tak” while chatting. Army is all about hierarchy and following orders. In Bollywood movies, there seems to be no system of rank. Patriotic as they are, people in the army are normal who speak normally.
Do you know something that Bollywood portrays wrong about the military? Comment below.
