Be it the authentic depiction of the uniforms, ranks, operation procedures or avoiding over-the-top dialogues, Lakshya remains that rare Bollywood war film that manages to escape stereotypes and create a subtle yet impactful war narrative. “Lakshya is not loud, it doesn’t have jingoism. All the details are accurate, be it the uniform or the operations procedure.It also explored the impact of war on a soldier and the people around him,” said Brigadier (retd) Gautam Ganguly in an earlier interview

As Lakshya completes 20 years, we reflect on this film on Kargil war and how it has stayed relevant over the years.

Soon after Dil Chahta Hai, Farhan Akhtar was deliberating about what to do next and had a discussion with his father Javed Akhtar about some of his ideas. Javed shared that he was working on a story about a young boy who joins the army, not just professionally, but in an attempt to find his true calling and understand who he is through that process.

Farhan says, “This was just a story idea, but the core of it really spoke to me. In a large way, that’s what filmmaking did for me. Until I started making movies, I didn’t really know that it is what I wanted to do. I started it when I realized that my love for filmmaking is tremendous. So the germ of that idea was something that I could connect to. Of course, he sat down and wrote the screenplay, which is there for everyone to see. But it really started with a conversation.”

“We were scouting for locations, and I had expressed how I’d like to do the shoot. After Humayun’s Tomb, we moved to Hauz Khas and then to Tughlaqabad Fort. Since these were tombs and forts, we could not play the song out loud. The actors had to lip-sync. In the morning, nobody knew we were shooting, but by evening, the crowd arrived, knowing that Hrithik and Preity Zinta were shooting. We wanted to take a shot of Hrithik dancing in the sunset, but it was not possible due to the crowd. To this day, people come to me and say, Oh! You did Agar Main Kahoon,” says Vaibhavi Merchant who choreographed the song.

“Films or any pieces of creative work are created at a particular time in a person’s life, within a specific societal context, and (according to) the cinematic environment of that period. To gauge anything by the standards of 20 years later is always, I think, a mistake. Having said that, I look back at it with the fondest memories. It was extremely challenging and difficult to put that film together. We had some kind of youthful exuberance inside us as filmmakers, and Hrithik and Preity as actors. None of us had done this kind of film before, and that energy translated on screen.” — Farhan Akhtar

- Hrithik asked gentlemen cadets to teach him how to execute training shots and what to look out for.

- While the hairstylists were not on board with the Hrithik’s haircut initially, Farhan insisted that he wanted Hrithik’s hair cut same as the other cadets. Farhan wanted Hrithik to look like one of the cadets from the IMA.

- A major chunk of the film was shot in Ladakh at 13,000 feet altitude.

- All the actors attended a boot camp in Ladakh and the movie was filmed for five months in Ladakh.

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