For six gripping and flab-free episodes of Anubhav Sinha’s revisitation of the Kandahar hijacking, I forgot to breathe. Yes, it is that engaging. So for those who may want to ask, ‘Why another series on the oft-visited Kandahar hijack episode?’ the answer is elementary: no matter how many times you visit a shameful chapter of history, for example the holocaust, you come up with a new perspective on what precipitates a historic mess up of this magnitude.
In this case, the hijacked plane had landed for emergency fuelling in Amritsar. The hijackers could have been nabbed at this point in the crisis. Redtapism blew our chances. As it often does.
Anubhav Sinha doesn’t make the same mistake. He reconstructs the entire episode with a vigour that repudiates any technical error. Sinha is in his element here, mixing the authenticity of documentation with the rigours of fictionalization. The end-result is steady ….and heady.
The actors take care of the rest. What a formidable cast Anubhav has assembled! Although Naseeruddin Shah, Arvind Swami, Aditya Shrivastava, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Pankaj Kapoor (go ahead, whistle), individually have little screes space, together they form a formidable fleet of actors/politicians (or rather politicians as actors defusing a crisis) activating a tenable plan to end the crisis.
Some of the closed-door politics is amusing: when during a break, Pahwa asks his South Indian colleague Arvind Swamy (mysteriously named ‘DRS’) why he prefers bad tea to bad coffee Swamy wants to know what ‘chatta batta’ means.
It is a cute fleeting moment of diversion, humanizing the politicians.
Up in the air, the show belongs unconditionally and unquestionably to Vijay Varma as Captain Sharan Dev. Varma spotlights the quietly heroic dimensions of the character without fuss or fanfare. If the real-life pilot’s resilience and valour helped tide over the crisis, Vijay Varma’s quiet projection of Sharan Dev’s silent spunk goes a long way into making this show the triumph that it is.
There is a moment at the end when Varma weeps out of camera range. Assuredly the tears that we don’t see are for real.
A similar mood of restrain tempers the trauma, makes the hijacking drama look real without diminishing the drama, we had earlier seen this in Neerja.
I also liked the two air-hostesses, played with feeling by Patralekha Chatterjee and Aditya Gupta Paul. And there is a cabin-crew member with a bust nose who tells the hijackers when offered to get off the plane, “Is there no exchange offer? I would rather stay on board and send someone else.”
That’s where I cheered as though in a movie theatre (a thought: how would this series look on the big screen?).
It is amazing how Anubhav Sinha celebrates the heroic moments without any flag waving bravado. Not that it is all understated. But even the underlined moments are done without hysteria. This a terrific series, authentic yet dramatic, therapeutic and escapist.
