For Airlift , the silent lull of the ‘Wow! Kya picture bana di boss’ was soon shattered by the storm of ‘Bakwas! Sab bakwas!’ We left in AC super deluxe luxury coaches with reclining seats, all in a tizzy, pulling out files, ‘asli evacuation ye hai, Minister sahib ka mark idhar hai’.
What man, millenials, forgotten your history so quickly? Across Wagah, my generation that had been reared on an equal dose of ‘The Russians Are Coming’ and ‘Dubai Chalo!’. Gulf War (I) was an interesting case of when love and hate collide. Love for the gravy train of washing machines, TV, VCR, double stereo deck — often, in villages where they were paraded with plastic cover still on. For, their wish list was here but not the electricity connectivity. And hate, for depending on the Americans to get them out of the mess they found themselves in. (The Russians never came, but they had won us over with their cheap air conditioners, tins of sardines, chocolate covered raisins, notebooks and vodka. The other day, someone asked me if I had ever thought if the Russian foodstuff was courtesy the toxic larders of Chernobyl. I am not glowing in the dark.... yet...so I think not).
Airlift ended with the evacuated Indians finally onboard a plane that would take them to what was once ‘home’. I wonder whether the Indian diaspora had to deal with the bewilderment that Pakistani expats did, escaping the nightmare that Saddam had created, arriving in (home) communities where Saddam was all of a sudden the David that had taken on a mighty Arab-US Goliath. And, the practical questions of all those big petrol-guzzling cars and the trickling fuel supplies that were then threatened.
In the film, the Kuwaiti-Indian diaspora despairs for the US to finally intervene; the Americans had dithered until one day, the American news weekly had images of the US troops arriving on Arab shores. The Quran says, “And if two parties of the believers quarrel, make peace between them.” The puritans amongst us worried whether American troops in the Holy Land also meant pigs arriving for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner. And, how the matter of female troops with no chaperone in sight, would go down with our moral custodians.
The not-so-charitable gossiped whether the wily Nawaz Sharif was hedging his bets by concentrating on securing the war scrap for Ittefaq Foundries; all the while our political and military administration was debating which horse to back. General Beg had allegedly roared in private about a coup, lest his man Saddam be left high and dry, even while his troops readied to proceed to Tabuk, and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s Ayat ul Kursi (Quranic verse for protection) to save her chair was failing miserably.
Years later, while teaching global politics in Melbourne, I had a bewildered student asking me, “So you say there was a Gulf War before too and the Americans were there in Afghanistan when you were a kid too.” They haven’t grown up South Asian so I can’t give them parallels of how complacent one becomes after the gas wallahs have dug up your roads and levelled them for the water works department to move in, followed by the cable.
The brilliance of Airlift lies in the depiction of the Indian abroad. That it’s not just about the Yash Raichands from NRI land that flank continents with their “Keh diya toh keh diya” and the smarmy “You are not only genius, you are indigenous”; but that it also acknowledges the cantankerous uncle ji who thinks the world owes him something, the paperless Indian at his agent’s mercy, and the jugaadu Indian, who always manages to rustle up something. Airlift exists too in the little moments, and memories of that other move in the middle of the night. Some Pakistani/Partition product endorsement is also zaroori here. The film lives in the children of a generation that still pines for home, a home with shifting definitions; it is these children who will recognise the pain of the diaspora depicted in Airlift . Am I nervous that so many of Airlift’s beautiful moments may be hijacked by the bhakts — considering it ends on a note that may very well have been sponsored by the ‘Jindal Fight to Free the Tiranga movement’. I hope not. I hope it acts as a kindly reminder to a certain quarter, that here we have an instance when Indian bureaucrats, corporates and a beleaguered political system got together — and isn’t that what good governance is about? Making their citizens feel safe and that Indian voices, no matter how small, how far away, are heard.
Aneela Z Babar grew up in Pakistan watching Hindi films. She works on popular culture, gender and the religio-military nexus
