While We Watched: Tragic Ravish Kumar documentary is the best war movie of the year

Essentially a profile of former NDTV journalist Ravish Kumar, While We Watched is a white-knuckle 94-minute film that also functions as a dystopian thriller, a character study about loneliness, and a drama about a newsroom in crisis. But more than anything else, it plays like the best war movie of the year so far. The country’s future is at stake, but the battle has been concentrated to the corridors of power in New Delhi. The resistance is battening down the hatches, preparing for an enemy assault from all sides. But one soldier is still fighting to prevent a defeat whose impact would take decades to rectify. This is the last stand.

And we’re thrown in the trenches with him. Tracking shots of Kumar walking down the aisles of the NDTV newsroom are straight out of Paths of Glory. He doesn’t really meet anybody’s eye as he glides toward his cabin, which actually looks like a cramped underground bunker. The sea of humanity seems to part as he passes by. It’s a gloomy place, this newsroom; there’s no euphoria, and little excitement. People don’t celebrate small victories here, although they certainly gasp when news of a setback reaches their ears. But if Kumar’s cabin is his bunker, the studio is his battlefield. This is where he perches at his daily vantage point, takes aim directly at the camera, and fires away.

The film was shot over the course of two years, during which Kumar ‘lost’ many of his cohorts; some were literally murdered by the enemy, others revealed themselves to be turncoats. Every day begins with an inescapable sense of uncertainty about who’ll make it out on the other side. Kumar can’t hold back his tears — this is the only time in the movie that he appears to break — when his closest lieutenant, a producer who’d worked with him for over a decade, quits abruptly one day. He eulogises her on camera. 

The troop bids farewell to old brothers-in-arms with cake, a bittersweet motif in a movie that always seems to be shrouded by an ominous pall. While We Watched is a tense and sombre experience that accurately captures the disillusionment that many in the media industry — at least those who haven’t rolled over yet — can currently feel. While foreign audiences might not understand the full context of events, it’s disheartening to watch an institution like NDTV come across as a fringe outfit on the verge of collapse, and, for that matter, to not get a true sense of Kumar’s influence.

In several scenes, we are given updates about what is happening outside his personal battles, updates about the greater war. Because the movie unfolds entirely through Kumar’s perspective — the camera never abandons him, almost as if it is a subordinate, sworn to support its commander — the story of our nation is presented through news footage that is intercut with the vérité-style drama. He gets bombarded by abusive phone calls, death threats are handed out to him as if they’re a ‘good morning’ message on WhatsApp. The tone could not have been more different from Shukla’s previous film, An Insignificant Man, which captured the idealism of the early days of the Aam Aadmi Party, without realising, of course, that the anti-corruption movement would prove to be the single-most pivotal moment in our country’s recent political history.

Incidentally, both Kejriwal and Kumar have more than one thing in common; besides being the subjects of documentaries directed by Shukla, they’ve both been honoured with the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. It’s fitting that Kumar makes a reference to war in his acceptance speech while receiving the award. “Not all battles are fought for victory,” he said. “Some are fought simply to tell the world that someone was there on the battlefield.” The event is covered in the film as well, providing it with what is intended to be a surprisingly hopeful ending. But is it, though? By Kumar’s own admission, the odds are against him. Defeat is unavoidable; the question isn’t if, but when it’ll happen. And as important as it is to honour those lost on the battlefield, one mustn’t lose sight of an uncomfortable fact: the battle was lost.