Ram is an advertising professional who debuted in Bollywood with the decidedly offbeat feature Let’s Talk in 2002. The recent Akshay Kumar-starrer Airlift went several steps further on this front, completely twisting the truth about a real-life evacuation of Indians from Kuwait, no doubt to create a fictional character deemed worthy of Akshay Kumar’s star stature.ĭirector Ram Madhvani and writer Saiwyn Quadras will have none of that.
The Ben Affleck-starrer Argo diminished many heroes to over-state the US’ role in a real-life escape of potential American hostages from Iran. Neerja is the kind of project that a conventional Bollywood (or for that matter Hollywood) filmmaker would have been tempted to over-dramatise with voluble dialogues and music, while giving short shrift to facts in a bid to needlessly lionise the central character. The question here is how it is served by this telling. Her sacrifice could move an iceberg to tears. Neerja was posthumously awarded the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest civilian honour for peacetime bravery, Pakistan’s Tamgha-e-Insaaniyat and several awards in the United States, headquarters of the now-defunct Pan Am. Her 23rd birthday was just two days away. Neerja is said to have alerted the cockpit as soon as gun-wielding men boarded at Karachi airport, thus ensuring that the pilot and co-pilot deplaned immediately and nixed the intruders’ original plan to get the aircraft flown to another country.Īs a result of her continued presence of mind under highly stressful circumstances, she subsequently managed to save most of the people in her charge and died shielding children from bullets.
If you were around in that decade, you would remember her - a young woman who is now part of contemporary India’s folklore of courage. Neerja is a biopic of the airline purser who lost her life saving passengers on the US-bound Pan Am Flight 73 hijacked by Palestinian terrorists in Karachi in September 1986. Sonam Kapoor in a youtube screen grab from Neerja.
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