The Procedural Is Political

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Neerja's heroism flows from 'farz', something we have lately forgotten how to honour, in cinema and in public life.

Neerja released in the middle of February. I avoided watching it for weeks. I was worried I'd go the cinema and get hit by more of the chest-thumping nationalism currently bombarding us off-screen. Or at least injected with a saccharine-sweet version of it. 

I was wrong. Neerja -- starring Sonam Kapoor as the late Neerja Bhanot, a Pan Am flight attendant who was killed by terrorists during a hijack in September 1986 -- is about heroism, not nationalism. It's about helping other human beings, not caring whether they belong to the same community/race/country as you. 

In Madhvani's vision, Neerja tries her level best to safeguard all passengers on her flight. If American passport-holders seem the most vulnerable at one point, she tries her best to shield them; when it is children who need her, she goes to their aid. 

In this regard, Neerja's impetus is different from another recent film about an unlikely Indian hero -- Airlift. The two films are premised on strikingly similar scenarios - a group of ordinary people placed in a precarious predicament while outside their country of citizenship, with one among them catapulted by circumstances to a position of leadership. 

But Airlift's protagonist takes the initiative to save these helpless people because they are his countrymen. In fact, Raja Menon makes Akshay Kumar's heroism turn on the emotional tug of something called 'the nation', while in fact mocking the procedural inefficiencies and powerlessness of that entity called 'the state'. 

Ram Madhvani's film, in contrast, makes its heroism flow from something very ordinary; something we have lately forgotten how to honour, both in our cinema and in our public life: duty. And duty in Neerja is not to an abstraction called the nation, but simply to the responsibilities of your job, to correct procedure. And beyond that, to all human life. 

Duty isn't too fashionable an idea these days. Unlike in the days when Hindi cinema was filled with stern-faced police officers doing their duty to their vardi by handcuffing their brothers, farz isn't a word we hear very often now. The law-abiding Nehruvian hero of a previous era had already been placed in a dilemma in the 70s and 80s, by pitting his duty to the law against his duty to family - that division lies, in some sense, at the core of most justifications for corruption. 

But in our post-liberalisation times, the idea of simply doing one's job has come to be associated with being boring, playing by the rules rather than thinking 'out of the box'. Perhaps it isn't entirely a coincidence that a film that seeks to recuperate the meaning of 'farz', to rescue it from its stodgy, stick-in-the-mud associations and turn it into something worthy of our greatest admiration, is about an event from the 1980s. 

Madhvani builds up his protagonist's believability carefully. Why would an up-and-coming model, already appearing not just on TV advertisements but also on big hoardings for bridal-wear and on the back covers of magazines, stick with a job with terrible timings and a rather fraught social standing? 

Shabana Azmi, in an outstanding turn as Neerja's pillar-of-support Punjabi housewife mother, often asks her daughter the same question. The only answer we hear Sonam Kapoor give in the film is the near-banal "I love my job". But by offering us brilliantly-timed glimpses of Bhanot's ugly (and thankfully short-lived) arranged marriage, the film's writers Saiwyn Qadras and Sanyukta Shaikh Chawla produce a powerful sense of what else might have driven this young woman. 

To take your work seriously, Neerja implies, is crucial to achieving independence and identity— no matter whether that work is seen as work by others. In one telling scene, we listen to a nasty letter from Neerja's husband, about how no "izzatdaar" (honourable) father would get his daughter to work as a model, and we are forced to think of how often female flight attendants deal with disrespectful male passengers, even today. 

But the stand-out dialogue about duty in Neerja comes when the 22-year-old flight attendant's insistence on serving water and a snack to the hungry, thirsty passengers on board earns her the wrath of the armed hijackers. As one of them tries to physically stop her, she looks straight into his eyes and says, "Sir, main sirf apna kaam kar rahi hoon. Apna farz nibha rahi hoon. Jaise aap nibha rahe ho. (Sir, I'm only doing my job. I'm doing my duty. Just like you are.)" 

Something truly remarkable happens in this scene. An act of dull, everyday labour is suddenly lit up with the radiance of something extraordinary — and simultaneously, the violent act of the terrorist-hijacker is, for one infinitesimal moment, charged with a sense of duty. However reprehensible his means might be, Neerja manages to suggest, the terrorist's ultimate goal is one he considers moral. 

In a film that otherwise displays little doubt about its heroes and villains, this is a rare moment of rupture, a chink in the wall. But dialogue can only take place across such a chink. It is only by insisting on humanising those who seek to dehumanise us that any war can ever truly be brought to an end.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.

Lifted Loosely from Life

My Mirror column today:

True heroes behind Airlift are more super than its star, but babus aren't really the stuff blockbusters are made of.

Raja Krishna Menon's Airlift, which depicts the evacuation of 1,76,000 Indians from Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, is a rare film to emerge from the Hindi film industry. For one, it is a period film about an event that took place quite recently - 25 years ago is not long in historical time - and yet has been almost completely forgotten. Second, it is a film that tugs at patriotic heartstrings without having to unite us against an enemy: its best bits depict the panic of a population stuck in another country's war. And third, despite its narrative celebration of one man's heroism (backed by casting a major Bollywood star like Akshay Kumar), the screenplay crafted by Raja Menon, Suresh Nair, Ritesh Shah and Rahul Nangia is never bombastic. This in itself, in these times of fist-pumping jingoism, is something to be thankful for.

But Airlift plays fast and loose with the facts. In a detailed 2011 interview with the Indian Foreign Affairs Journal (IFAJ), K.P. Fabian, who was head of the Gulf Division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) during the First Gulf War, has described the complicated logistics of the actual evacuation, demanding multi-level cooperation between Indian ministries, diplomats in Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan, and the governments of these countries. He talks of how a Cabinet Sub-Committee was formed, consisting of representatives of External Affairs, Civil Aviation, Finance and Defence Ministries, and headed by IK Gujral, then India's Minister of External Affairs. "[T]hanks to the excellent rapport between the MEA and Civil Aviation Ministry, we did not waste time in routine writing of notes," Fabian has said. "For example, if there was a message from our Embassy in Amman that there were four thousand evacuees, all that I had to do was to make a call to the Secretary or the Joint Secretary concerned in the Civil Aviation Ministry. I could be sure that the necessary number of planes would leave in hours."

This account could not be more at odds with the film's version of events, in which the Indian government's efforts are minimal, and spearheaded by a lone bureaucrat who isn't even in the Gulf Division. The mild-mannered Sanjeev Kohli (nicely played by Kumud Mishra) just happens to pick up the phone when Ranjit Katyal calls the MEA.

Of course, an interview in the Foreign Affairs Journal is likely to credit the bureaucracy over other agencies. But KP Fabian's extraordinarily fine-grained account of an operation that took place 21 years before the interview suggests that he and other bureaucrats did have a much greater role to play in getting those hundreds of Air India flights off the ground than the film would have us believe. Gujral, too, took a strong interest, his Kuwait visit 12 days after the invasion even becoming a way for some Indian citizens to return. It seems rather grudging, then, for Airlift to depict the relevant minister as stalling for days, the whole MEA taking no interest in what has mysteriously become Kohli's cause.

The film does not entirely deny its fictiveness. It states, for instance, that the character of Ranjit Katyal (played by Akshay Kumar) is an amalgam of two real-life businessmen in Kuwait who were part of the effort: Mathunny Mathews and Harbhajan Vedi. Director Raja Menon has gone on record to explain why he did not make the much-better known Mathews, locally legendary by the name 'Toyota Sunny', the primary model for his character.

"As I have not lived in Kerala, I can't make a Malayalam film. From the first draft it was a Hindi film and for that I picked the North Indian character." Unsurprising though this choice may appear at first glance, it also seems a pity, because recent interviews with Mathews' family members (in the wake of Airlift's release) make it clear that the film's narrative draws a great deal on Mathews' real-life efforts. Setting up a camp for Indians in the premises of a school, for instance, or planning for the movement from Kuwait to Jordan: these were real things Mathews did.

But the film loses out on the specificity of Mathews' experience. The communication Mathews kept up with the Indian authorities, for instance, was not on landline phones but on HAM radio. The hundreds of private buses used to ferry people to Amman - seen many times in the film without explanation - could only be organised by Mathews' effective negotiating, in which his auto industry experience was crucial. The cinematic need for a heroic figure is understandable, but why flatten real details to create a generic one?

The film also makes it seem that the Indian Mission in Kuwait upped and left to save themselves. In fact, Saddam Hussein had made it a condition of safe Indian evacuation that all high-ranking diplomats should first leave Kuwait. The only senior bureaucrat left was the head of the Tea Board, Ashoke Kumar Sengupta. Made Officer-in-Charge of the Indian Mission from August 20 to November 7, 1990, Sengupta became an unlikely hero. His task was to handle the paperwork and selection of candidates to go to Amman, dealing with everything from requests to store personal gold to women faking pregnancies to get priority. Sengupta is another real-life hero whose story the film ignores.

The makers of Airlift have been unapologetic, saying that a fiction feature cannot be tied to facts. Menon has said that the film for him is about "[Katyal's] journey and his realization that finally it (India) is home". But given how little "India" does to help him and his fellow-refugees, the film's rousing patriotic climax seems truly fictitious.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 Jan 2016.