The Forgotten Army streaming on Amazon Prime, caught my interest as a promise for the lazy person’s guide to the INA.

The series didn’t give me much on what motivated Subhash Chandra Bose or even how the INA drove India’s politics, reminding me that there are no short cuts to reading up.

To be fair to the series, The Forgotten Army is a ground zero perspective of the INA soldiers, not a history lesson, though we do get quite a bit of moralising on nationalism and politics from its characters.

I had two interesting takeaways. One was that INA’s Lakshmi Bai Regiment was the first woman’s regiment ever, and the second was that the Japanese didn’t know what milk was. And that they were still committing hara kiri in the 1940s.

It’s okay if fact checks make these claims spurious, Kabir Khan still gets away because of the poetic license of the fiction format.

But Kabir Khan does not get away with platitudes on gender discrimination, or subtextual moral science lessons, or Hollywood  lift offs or CGI goof ups.

The story begins with a perfectly editable and arbitrary rape of no relevance to the sequence of events.

Then as the series progresses a feisty soldier objects to her compatriot’s obscenely sexist gesture and soon after she is found in rapt attention to his flute playing. Kinky.

It seems that the Lakshmi Bai Regiment’s purpose is to provide love interest to the soldiers and the most heroic contribution the female protagonist made was to take her secret lover’s pictures. And in her later life she keeps his photograph prominently placed in her house for everyone to see, especially her grand daughter. She openly declares that ‘this is the man I love.’

Who does that? Imagine a house party where a guest asks the granddaughter ‘whose picture is that?’

‘O that’s dadi’s ex boyfriend, only man she loved.’

While scripting it seems Kabir Khan wanted to equate the INA with the current student protests. But since the plot demanded that the INA footprint be retraced through history the timeline was shifted to Burma’s 1996 student protests.

But still the underlying message of Azaadi is clearly intended and clearly given, lest you miss the real purpose of the INA. And the real purpose of student protests. Azaadi. Same to same.

Also, Burma’s river lands are a picturesque setting for the lovers to meet in a cave right out of Jon Snow and Ygritte’s cave in Game of Thrones, in exactly the same way.

The final battle encounter is cringingly ‘Saving Private Ryan’. Only the French bell tower has been replaced with a Burmese pagoda. The same abandoned village, the same bridge, the same battle tank, the same sniper, the same tank gun veering to aim at the tower, the same sniper dying, the same tank mowing down the dazed soldier, one almost expects Edith Piaf to start playing in the background. But no, instead we get this loud ‘zarra zarra’ patriotic song interspersed with the exact same smoke monster sound effect from the ‘Lost’ series for the approaching battle tank.

And when the male protagonist dies we are back to the ‘Gladiator’ death sequence, when his outstretched hand reaches out into the afterlife for his dead beloved.

More than once the dead soldier does the same somersault in different battle scenes. Totally reminded me of Ekta Kapoor’s serials where a slap across the face is replayed three times for effect.

And then there’s the good friend (sidekick) who drops a grenade into the battle tank hatch and instead of jumping off to safety, smiles whimsically before blasting into smithereens. A last salute to the ‘hero.’

Like I said, Ekta Kapoor on testosterone.