Unlikely Heroes:
In the midst of a plethora of OTT shows on fights against terrorism, if anything, Anubhav Sinha’s new series (on Netflix) proves that heroes don’t have to be strapping six-packed dudes with guns.
The four men who are seen silhouetted against the sky in several shots of IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, are middle-aged, out of shape bureaucrats, given a chance to be a part of history, and also be judged harshly.
Sinha dives right into the highwire tension, as an intelligence operative in Kathmandu notices something fishy, and tries to stop the Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 from taking off to Delhi. But he hits a wall of lazy bureaucracy, and the flight is hijacked by five masked men.
The passengers and crew, expecting a normal journey, are rudely jolted by men with guns and grenades. The pilot Sharan Dev (Vijay Varma) is ordered to fly to Kabul, but the plane does not have fuel to reach that city. The initial episodes of the six-part series are spent in the panic of passengers, the calm of the cabin crew (Patralekhaa Paul, Additi Gupta Chopra), and the efforts to land the plane for fuel.
Sinha and his co-writer Trishant Srivastava do not rush the proceedings – it is an authentic recreation of what took place—and a lot of it must be in public memory, since in 1999, TV coverage was on (real footage is interspersed) and the media got news almost as fast as it took place. The hapless pilot and his team have to save the passengers, keep the hijackers from blowing up the plane or killing anyone.
Meanwhile, with no demands forthcoming, there is confusion in Delhi among the various government departments, and nobody willing to take a decision over what might be an explosive and lose-lose situation—these men are an array of acting talent, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur, Arvind Swamy, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Kanwaljit Singh.
It’s a coalition government, with PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the helm, when the demand is to release terrorists—including the body of a dead one—who would take the unpopular call?
The series is based on the pilot’s book Flight To Fear, and even though the outcome of the hijack was known—how a series of negotiations and calling in favours, finally landed the flight in Taliban-controlled Kandahar, how the only passenger killed was a newly-wed man, and how the media sensationalized everything, the series is still suspenseful and nerve-wracking.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)