War, what is it good for?

There are three wars on right now.

- RAJA SEN

A still from 'Ikkis'; kids who should be laughing and flirting are thrust into the horrors of the battlefield and expected to keep a cool head.

Maybe four. By the time you read this, more might have broken out. Allegiances are being declared, dictators are backing dictators, human rights are being trampled on by oppressive regimes. Yet even this bleak state of affairs has begun to sound business-as-usual. Maybe it is, in fact, always wartime, but in order to cope, we try to forget that. Ignoring war has become our line of defence. We shake our heads and scroll past it.Moving on is harder for the young people in uniform, much as they'd also like to make reels to trending audio and laugh at memes. The rah-rah jingoistic cheerleading and political grandstanding does not help a soldier in a foxhole. How many foxholes? How many soldiers? It’s precisely because the numbers of corpses and casualties become so large, so hard to wrap our brains around, that we (conveniently) tune out. It is around such a concern that Sriram Raghavan weaves his beautiful antiwar film Ikkis, now streaming on Amazon Prime. Raghavan focuses on the story of one brave young man—on his story as well as his legacy—but the number he hones in on is the 21 of the title. An overachieving hero is killed at a blackjack age, most of his cards remaining undealt.