Very little of Aashish Mall’s Shatak looks real. I’m not talking just historical authenticity here, or the conspicuous name-dropping of ‘leftist’ freedom fighters (all of them, obviously in awe of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS). Most of Mall’s film looks enhanced like the tacky green-screens on primetime news. Most characters wander around like AI slop, speaking with pauses – without showing the slightest bits of humanity. Walking out of Mall’s film, one of my thoughts was if the film was an exhibit for the India AI Impact Summit held in Delhi. If that was the case, what fresh hell it would mean for the nation already grappling with a dozen controversies brewing because of the event. Would Sam Altman have felt pressured to give it a standing ovation, seeing the Indian Prime Minister sitting adjacent to him, if the film screened there? Mall’s film feels like a 112-minute reel created using AI, chronicling the good/better/best anecdotes of the far-right organisation – without the slightest hint of curiosity. The aim is not to find out about how the RSS came into being, as much as kissing the feet of its founding fathers.In a genre where the bar might already be subterranean, Shatak might still count among the laziest pieces of propaganda ever made. Actors look like AI-avatars, characters are outlines, most of the secondary cast are a part of the film’s furniture – meant to listen to monologues by the film’s two primary characters: Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Mahadev Golwalkar, performing their awe in reaction-shots. The only women I spotted in the film were Hedgewar’s mother, who perishes during the bubonic plague of 1896, the character of Laxmibai Kelkar – when she requests a women’s wing under the RSS, and an AI-version of a young Lata Mangeshkar, who held apparently performed in a concert to raise money for the Sangh. The seeming fractional lag in the dubbed audio track and the apparent lip movement in the visuals, evoked my inner J.K.Simmons, as I muttered, “not quite my tempo” at the screen.A still from ‘Shatak.’The film’s screenplay mimics a ball rolling down an infinite staircase, without any real purpose. Things simply happen here – the film sincerely chronicles Hedgewar’s childhood, adolescence, youth, middle-age and then moves on with similar beats for Golwalkar’s rise within the RSS. They’re both shown to be “visionaries” – studious, devout Hindus, troubled by the colonial rule of the time, too ‘principled’ for the power-hungry ways of the Congress. However, I also found it funny how the film is not subtle about its eagerness for the validation of the more-famous players of the freedom struggle – so the film witnesses many ‘cameos’ by the likes of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru. Most of them are either giddy with admiration for Hedgewar and Golwalkar or afraid of them. No other reaction exists in the Sangh’s fantasy land. I was amused by the film’s need for validation and legitimacy.Speaking of fantasies, the depiction of Muslims is laughable even by WhatsApp standards. The one teacher depicted in the film, is a School Inspector Khan – who forces the students to say ‘Long Live the Queen’ in the early 1900s. It felt like a perverse, diametrically opposite version of a scene in Dhurandhar – when R. Madhavan’s character chants ‘Bharat Mata ki..” Two scenes in films of varying competence and skill, but with the same thought. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about Gandhi’s secular values, his support for the Khilafat movement (which worked in tandem with the Non-Cooperation Movement around the same time). The scenes here imagine Muslim crowds outnumbering the Hindus, and using any excuse for a procession to pillage and rape Hindu women. My favourite bit of the revisionism though was the RSS’s overwhelming role in foiling a terror attack in a newly-independent India because of their undercover cadres, how they fought Pakistani military and helped Kashmir remain a part of India, their role in the Indo-China war in 1962 and their Baahubali-esque role in Goa’s liberation. I might not be an expert on the subject, but I realised there’s no limit to the Sangh’s inflated sense of self.A still from ‘Shatak.’There are some obvious delusions of grandeur – like overstating the significance of the RSS in 1947, where Congress (and Nehru) appear to be shaking in their boots about the possibility of Sangh entering politics. And how it eventually did found Bharatiya Jan Sangh in 1951, which eventually became the Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP in 1980, which is in power now. The Hindutva commentary: where the film insists India only belongs to Hindus, is surprisingly staid. It’s nowhere close to as rabid as some of the election PSAs we’ve seen in the last 12 months.I assume one of the main purposes of Shatak is to play at the RSS museum in Nagpur – given how dutifully it chronicles the 100 years of the Sangh with the help of picturesque AI landscapes in the background. It represents the ‘i’ in irony and the ‘OG’ in hagiography. However, I grinned during one deliberate turn of event, where someone screams ‘kisi ne Gandhiji ki hatya kar di (someone killed Gandhiji).’ Nathuram Godse isn’t named, and the Sangh’s involvement with the assassination is dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ of the Congress out of jealousy for the RSS’s popularity (which is debatable, even in the best case scenario). It told me one can tell all the lies, beat one’s chest about any number of things – but they still can’t openly celebrate their most famous ‘martyr’. And that’s what lays bare the RSS’s politics of deception and cowardice.*Shatak is playing in theatres.