The first thing that Raja Menon tells you about Airlift is Ranjit Katiyal is a fictitious character. Perhaps, it has something to do with his grooming in independent cinema that it is hard for him to understand what PR machinery can do while promoting a film. The Akshay Kumar-starrer about the evacuation of 1,70,000 Indians from Kuwait when Iraq invaded the city nation in August 1990 has opened to rave reviews but many in the audience still don’t know where facts blur into fiction. “I keep on getting messages that this can’t be true or that looks fictitious. Ranjit Katiyal existed only in my head and now he is on screen. He is based on two-three people who helped the people in the difficult circumstances,” says Raja who emerged on the scene with the critically-acclaimed Barah Aana .
With Akshay at the helm, it seems he was forced to turn it into a one man army kind of story. Raja denies the charge. “He is not one man army. It is definitely not that kind of film. Of course, this is the story of one man. This is his journey of a person who almost believes that he is a Kuwaiti. He thinks what India has done for him. He came here, broke his bones and made his millions. When he is put in a war-like situation he goes through the realisation what does it mean to be an Indian. The evacuation is the backdrop. It is the big picture in which he is operating.”
Raja comes from Kerala and recalls out of three people one was a Malayali and the second was a Punjabi “The third, I believe, was a Sindhi. 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. When I wrote the film I was sure no star will talk to me. I didn’t write with a star in mind and mind you I wrote it 10 years back.” But it would have been obvious that the film will require a big budget to be mounted? “I always believed the story is big enough. I also make films very cheap. This is a very small-budget film considering the kind of evacuation process we have shown. It looks big because the kind of effort we had put in before shooting the film. It is a deeply planned film. This is why I was allowed to make the film.” Raja shot the film in 50 days on location at Ras-al-Khaimah, outside Dubai. “It is a city on water like Kuwait and is stuck in the 1990s for some reason. It looks fantastically close to what Kuwait looked like. We spent eight months in just planning the details.”
When Akshay decided to back it, Raja told him his point of view. “I told him this is the script and this is how it is going to look like and I am not going to change anything. I know he hardly plays characters but I told him for this film he has to become Ranjit Katyal. He said that is why he has picked the script. Throughout the shooting he kept on asking, ‘is it authentic, Raja’ and finally I had to say, yaar! trust me,” Raja bursts into laughter. With his earnest approach, Akshay is perfect for the role. “He is honest and comes from a space where he understands hardship. He has the gravitas to look like a leader. In real life you may not need these things but cinematically you do. Audience should look at the guy and feel that this guy could lead me. The good and bad of cinema is that we need stereotypes for some things. I should not spend time in convincing you that look this guy is a leader. You should look at him and feel that way.” Raja says a “Dedi” song kind of situation was always there in the script and has nothing to do with the fact that T-series happens to be one of the producers. “I wanted to capture the opulence of the place through a song. The kind of song may be a questioned but you can’t dispute is a quick way to make people understand the kind of life Kuwait had.”
The discussion moves to geopolitics of the time. Iraq had been a friend. So things should not have come to this pass and the success story should have been publicised by the government. The answers emerge from Raja’s research. “The problem is Kuwait as a city-state produces absolutely nothing except for oil. So these people were stuck in Kuwait and they had nothing to eat. Secondly, 80 per cent of these people were uneducated. Thirdly, nobody had proper documentation because passports are kept by sponsors. At 2 a.m. Saddam Hussain’s forces attacked and by 6 a.m. they had taken over the country. The soldiers who attacked were 16-year-old teenagers. They could not distinguish between an Kuwati and an Indian. They were born in war and they had not seen such opulence. Kuwait was the second richest country in the world. They went mad. These are some of the fears that we have delved upon.”
He agrees the 59-day evacuation process is largely undocumented. “I am from Kerala so I knew people. But we should not forget that 1990 was the Mandal period. I was myself involved in student politics. Ten-15 years later I chanced upon an article talking about 170,000 people evacuated by 488 flights and said wow! At that time there was no internet or mobile. The satellite television started only during operation Desert Storm in 1991. . The V.P.Singh government lasted eight months, Chandra Shekhar’s lasted four. So there was political turmoil.” And nobody to take credit! “There is no file. There are some reports written by bureaucrats. There are some internet articles which are from international sources. I had conversations with over 100 people who returned. Each of the stories was myopic as it only talked about what they saw. I had to collate them and find the truth inside them,” says Raja.
On the layers that the film explores, Raja, who has been an advertising professional, says he has travelled extensively across the country and feels problems like religious intolerance are very miniscule. “If you go to the interiors people need food and better future for the kids. These are intellectual problems of free time. When it comes to basic survival, religion and caste doesn’t matter and this is what the film shows. It comes to a point when you say I don’t care. You could be from Mars the thing is how do we survive.”
In times when the youth is getting increasingly cynical over social media, Raja says it is time we tell tales of patriotism. “I think we have become a cynical nation. The problem with cynicism is it makes us hide under a cover. Many young people feel nothing is going to happen and keep waiting to say, I told you, naa. We need to see success stories of our country and be the change that we want to see.”
