Tango Charlie

Day before yesterday we saw Tango Charlie — one of the very few genuine movies made on the lives of terribly under-appreciated Indian soldiers. Although there is no dearth of soldier-centric movies but most of them indulge in rhetoric and jingoism and portray soldiers as either viciously evil or inimitable martyrs. They are never portrayed as normal human beings living normal lives.

This movie is about a young soldier (played by Bobby Deol) with the code name Tango Charlie. The entire movie is in sort of a flashback, through the diary of Tango Charlie that is mischievously read by the two rescue pilots (played by stiff Sanjay Dutt and Sunil Shetty) who extract him from the snow, badly injured.

The movie begins with the posting of Tango Charlie in the dangerously treacherous wilderness of the far eastern Indian states where the Bodo militia have waged a war against the Indian government. This is a ruthless terrain where every mistake can cost you your life, and death can be so terrible that you begin to dread your next breath. The Bodos are shown as ruthless killers who don’t think twice before killing even their own people. Here he meets his officer (played by Ajay Devgan) and they both develop a long-lasting bond.

They show some disturbing graphics: the Bodo leader disembowels the captured soldier (who is in his teens), blasts both the knees with bullets and leaves him tied to the trunk of the tree. The soldier wails in pain, but the other soldiers cannot ease him because they know the Bodos are waiting to ambush them. It was heart-wrenching. In fact they were so realistic that at one point we wanted to stop the movie and see some other movie. But this is what an average soldier faces, and this is why I detest nationalistic violence. The character of Ajay Devgan very rightly says that when soldiers die during such combats, there is short news in some remote column of the newspaper — people read the news and then move on to other stuff. Our soldiers have to walk on a two-edged sword — they not only have to deal with a ruthless enemy, they are also targeted by the human rights activists. I remember an incident that was narrated to us by our fauji uncle. He had been posted in Nagaland. Once they found bodiless heads of three Sikh soldiers hanging from the tree branches. The long hair of their heads had been tied to the branches by the Naga militants. The entire platoon went mad with rage. At that point it would have been insane to tell them to practice discretion and not orchestrate a retributive bloodbath.

Fortunately the movie is neither Pakistan-centric nor China centric, although in the end there is a Fidayeen attack. There is no soldier dying while trying to hoist a flag chanting Bharat Mata ki jai!. Most of the time they are dealing with the internal strife like the Godhra riots, the Naxalite problem in West Bengal and some south Indian terrorists. The dialogues are very simple and down to earth. The village life of Tango Charlie seems clichéd with his jocular friends and a comedian future father-in-lay but all in all, the romantic scenes are unpretentious as well as cute. I’m not aware of how the movie did in theatres but we really liked it.