IC 815 The Kandahar Hijack Defines The Edge-of-the-Seat Experience

For  six  gripping and flab-free episodes of Anubhav Sinha’s  revisitation to 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 airhostesses, 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 flagwaving 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.