Every year we visit my nani’s in Chandigarh for Diwali. Ever since I was five, I remember her handing me a warm, perfectly round roti, and saying, “Go feed the cow.” Feeding stray cows was more ritual than chore. I’d wander to the nearest park, find a placid cow chewing on discarded plastic bags, and offer my roti like a prayer. The cow’s slow, patient chewing felt like a blessing. But even as a child, I didn’t miss the irony of these “holy” cows grazing in piles of garbage, picking out bits of plastic. Reverence is selective. Some things are sacred, but only until they get in the way.

Today, that irony has exploded into a terrifying reality, one captured with brutal clarity in Varun Chopra’s documentary, 'Holy Cowboys'. In a rural town in Gujarat, a group of teenage boys, led by the charismatic Gopal, drift from casual cow-feeding to the toxic world of cow vigilantism. What begins as an innocent act of compassion — saving a stray calf from the streets — soon spirals into something far more dangerous. The cow, long considered sacred in India, has become a weapon of nationalism, and the boys are its newest recruits.

But make no mistake: Holy Cowboys is not about cows. It is about the slow but deliberate radicalization of youth, about how compassion, when politicized, can transform into violence. The film is a striking indictment of how sacred symbols are manipulated, twisted, and turned into tools of oppression.

The cow, once a symbol of nourishment and life, is now the battlefield on which India’s identity war is being fought. For centuries, the cow has held a sacred place in the Hindu imagination — nurturer, mother, protector. But in the hands of right-wing nationalists, this symbol of purity has been hijacked, transformed into a divisive force to further their own agenda. This is no longer about reverence, it’s about control. The cow has become the rallying cry for those who seek to purify India’s identity; to drive out the other'.

Gopal and his friends don’t start out as zealots. Like many boys their age, they are restless, searching for purpose. The local cow protection group gives them exactly what they crave — identity, community, a sense of belonging. They begin by rescuing cows, feeling like heroes in their small town. But soon, the rhetoric of compassion curdles into something much more sinister. Under the influence of older, more radical leaders, the boys are swept into a movement that uses fear and violence to assert its dominance. It’s a chilling transformation — a slow descent into extremism masked as moral righteousness.

Chopra’s hybrid approach — blending documentary footage with scripted scenes — doesn’t just show this descent; it makes you feel it. The camera lingers on Gopal and his friends as they wrestle with the contradictions in their lives. They feed cows and save calves, all while working in a plastic factory that churns out the very bags that are killing these sacred animals. The cows are left to graze in the trash heaps of a rapidly modernizing India. Their bloated stomachs, filled with kilos of plastic, are cut open in front of our eyes: a stark metaphor for a society that claims to worship life but is slowly suffocating it.

But Holy Cowboys doesn’t stop there. It forces us to confront a deeper question: how does something as benign as compassion become a tool of violence? The cow, in its role as a sacred symbol, has been politicized, weaponized. This is no longer about protecting animals. It’s about protecting an idea — an idea that aims to homogenize India and dictates that anyone who challenges that must be eliminated. The boys are not driven by cruelty, but by a twisted sense of justice; a belief that they are defending something pure. They are not monsters, they are the product of a system that has learned to manipulate their emotions, to turn their empathy into hatred.

This is the genius of Chopra’s film. He doesn’t demonize the boys. Instead, he shows us how easily good intentions can be corrupted. Compassion, when co-opted by ideology, becomes one of the most powerful weapons in the human arsenal. And the cow, once a symbol of life and sustenance, becomes the focal point of a violent struggle for identity and power. And yet, as Holy Cowboys shows, this violence is not random. It is deliberate, calculated, and systematic. The cow becomes a convenient excuse for larger political aims. 

There is a striking moment in the film when Gopal, after rescuing a calf, listens as a cow vigilante leader brags about lynching a man. The camera pulls away, zooming in on a mask hanging nearby. The mask is a traditional Hindu symbol, meant to ward off evil spirits. But in this context, it takes on a darker meaning. It hides the face of the movement, disguising its true intentions. Compassion becomes cruelty. Reverence becomes repression. The boys, once innocent, are now instruments of a larger, more insidious force.

In a world where compassion has been politicized, the cow stands at the crossroads of India’s future. What happens when a society’s most sacred symbols are weaponized? What happens when empathy is twisted into hate? Holy Cowboys doesn’t offer easy answers, but it forces us to confront these questions. In doing so, it reveals a chilling truth: that the greatest threat to any society is not violence itself, but the moral righteousness that justifies it.

As the credits roll, I’m reminded of that roti I used to feed the cows as a child. Back then, it felt like a simple act of kindness. Today, I wonder how something so pure could have become so corrupted. Perhaps that’s the tragedy of Holy Cowboys — that in a world where compassion has been politicized, even the simplest acts can have unintended consequences.

You can watch the film here.

You can follow Holy Cowboys here.

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