Anand Patwardhan toils with 'War and Peace'

The second day of the DigitAll Movement (DAM) began with the screening of an edited version of reputed activist and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s award-winning documentary War and Peace. The film War and Peace unveils the reality behind the façade created by common concepts of democracy and nuclear nationalism. It goes on to delve deeper into the Arms’ race that has been steadily gaining pace since India and Pakistan conducted their first nuclear tests back-to-back in 1998. War and Peace considers how the pseudo arms race is a front for a strong military-industrial complex.

The movie containing exclusive footage from nuclear power States that include India, Pakistan, Japan and the United States of America is an impressive and successful attempt to showcase the aftermath and repercussions of war, proliferation of weaponry and the dangers involving abuse of nuclear energy. The controversy that arose from the blatant accusations leveled against the government, political parties and the people in power caused the film to go through tedious rounds of court appeals and cases so that it could receive permission to be broadcasted on Doordarshan.

Discussing the film in an interactive session after the screening of the film, Mr. Anand Patwardhan said, “The film is extremely complex; not by any conscious attempt, but because of the sheer nature of the subject. Covering reality requires the movie to be complex”. Mr. Patwardhan believes that the development paradigm among people in our coutry keeps shifting according to their ideologies. Some believe that science and technological development are the ultimate yardsticks of a country’s progress and its citizens’ standards of living. But it is alarming to note that the part of our populace that considers nuclear strength and armaments as the only note-worthy sign of a progressive and powerful country is slowly but steadily on the rise.

- Vinaya Gopaal