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Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

AI’s Maharaja smiles joyfully

All 30 grounded aircrafts now fly Mumbai : Air India’s Maharaja is all pleased as punch at 80. After years of huge costs and efforts, the last of the grounded 30 aircraft – inherited by the Tata Group during the privatization in Jan. 2022 – is now resurrected fully and took to the skies gracefully on Monday.   The aircraft is the gleaming VT-ALL, a Boeing 777-300ER, that was gathering grime since February 2020, and becomes the final among the two-and-half dozen aircraft that have been revved...

AI’s Maharaja smiles joyfully

All 30 grounded aircrafts now fly Mumbai : Air India’s Maharaja is all pleased as punch at 80. After years of huge costs and efforts, the last of the grounded 30 aircraft – inherited by the Tata Group during the privatization in Jan. 2022 – is now resurrected fully and took to the skies gracefully on Monday.   The aircraft is the gleaming VT-ALL, a Boeing 777-300ER, that was gathering grime since February 2020, and becomes the final among the two-and-half dozen aircraft that have been revved up and revived in the past few years, AI official sources said.   It marked a symbolic milestone for Air India itself - founded in 1932 by the legendary Bharat Ratna J. R. R. Tata - which once ruled the roost and was India’s pride in the global skies.   Once renowned for its royal service with the iconic Maharaja welcoming fliers on board, in 1953 it was taken over by the government of India. After years of piling losses, ageing aircraft, decline in operations and standards – almost like a Maharaja turning a pauper - it returned to the Tata Group four years ago.   This time it was not just the aircraft, the brand and the deflated Maharaja coming into the large-hearted Tata Group stables, but a formidable challenge to ensure that the airline could regain its old glory and glitter. Of the total around 190 aircraft in its fleet were 30 – or 15 pc – that had been grounded and neglected for years.   At that time, the late Ratan N. Tata had directed that all these valuable aircraft must be revived as far as possible and join the fleet. Accordingly, the VT-ALL, languishing at Nagpur for nearly five years, was ‘hospitalized’ at the Air India Engineering Service Ltd., its MRO facility in May 2025.   New Avatar Then started a thorough, painstaking nose-to-tail restoration of an unprecedented scale, in which over 3000 critical components were replaced, over 4,000 maintenance tasks executed, besides key structural upgrades like the longeron modification, engines, auxiliary power units, avionics, hydraulics, landing gears and almost every vital system was rebuilt or replaced.   After the repairs, the old aircraft was reborn, under the gaze of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and technical assistance from Boeing, and the new ‘avatar’ jetliner emerged with the highest global safety standards.   The aircraft cleared all the rigorous checks, a successful test flight, earned the mandatory Airworthiness Review Certificate and then made its maiden commercial flight from Monday, March 16 – after a wait of six years.   Sturdy Fliers Created in 1946 to become an instant global icon, the Air India’s mascot Maharaja now sports a youthful and chic look, a welcome with folded hands, closed eyes, featuring a bejewelled turban, stylish jootis, and a textured kurta in Air India’s new colours. He is prominently visible at various touch-points in a flyer’s journey, such as First Class, exclusive lounges, and luxury products.   Today, he commands a mix fleet of around 190 narrow and wide-body Airbus and Boeing aircraft like : A319, A320, A320neo, A321, A321neo, A350-900 and B787-8, B787-9, B7770200LR, B-777-300ER. With the merger of Vistara and agreements signed for 10 A350 and 90 A320 aircraft, the Maharaja’s fleet is slated to soar to some 570 in the near future.

Black Warrant: Right Answer to A Crucial Question

Updated: Jan 23, 2025

Tihar Jail

Tihar Jail is a prison complex which is one of the largest complexes of prisons in India located in Tihar within Delhi. Black Warrant, helmed by the talented filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, takes us on a journey inside this prison to show what exactly goes on behind the walls. Black Warrant, a seven-part OTT series released on Netflix is based on Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer co-authored by jailer Sunil Kumar Gupta and journalist Sunetra Chowdhary.


The story unfolds from the point of view of Sunil Kumar Gupta (Zahan Kapoor) from the point he steps in for the face-to-face interview for the job of ASP in Tihar Jail. He is taunted right through the interview because he lacks the physique expected of a jailor, appears timid, diffident and nervous. He does not get selected. The other two candidates, portrayed brilliantly by Paramveer Cheema as the Sardar and Anurag Thakur as the Harianvi bring across the multiple shades in their characters extremely well. The disappointed Sunil is both surprised and happy when a tall, handsome and very charismatic man (Siddhant Gupta) helps him get reinstated. When a curious Sunil asks around who that English-speaking, suave man is, he learns it is Charles Sobhraj. The film ends when Charles Sobhraj escapes his five-star cell just after the assassination of the then PM Indira Gandhi in 1984.


The story begins with the preparations for the hanging of Billa and Ranga for the killing of Sanjay and his sister Geeta Chopra in August 1978. The flashbacks of the brutal killings and rape are cinematographed in grainy Black-and-white which gives it a texture of a past and also softens the brutality. The hanging takes place in January 1982 and the series begins a little before.


Black Warrant is a journey about the toughening up of the soft-natured, tender and shy Sunil Gupta, a staunch vegetarian who could not utter a single maa-behen gaali and is taunted by his two colleagues for this. For such a soft-natured young man, it is a big challenge to stand and watch the hanging of the two killers, never mind the brutality of their crime. But he begins to train himself to gain a strong physique, practices swear words and cuss words in secret followed by practicing it on the prisoners. By the end of the series, Sunil Kumar Gupta has grown in confidence, in stature and in strategy which pushes him to open a Legal Aid cell for prisoners who do not have the funds to appoint lawyers to fight their cases.


As the aged Saini (Rajender Gupta), the jail accountant says, “most of the prisoners are under-trials behind bars for years with their cases not having reached the courts. Many of them are suspected of being innocent but have no means to fight their cases.” Sadly, the same Saini is falsely accused of corruption in order to save the actually guilty Head Jailor Rajesh Tomar (Rahul Bhatt) and his boss (Joy Sengupta) who have cut down on the number of blankets to be given to each prisoner and pocketed the difference themselves. The jail librarian is a doctor who hired two killers to have his wife killed for a meager sum of Rs.500. The two killers are hanged but the doctor gets to meet his lover secretly in the prison every week in exchange for a handsome agreement with the jail staff and the two killers.


Tomar is corrupt, true, but he also takes care of his staff each one of who is open to violent attacks by the prisoners. He has created a small garden in the jail complex and handles it himself. He does not quite like it when Sunil begins to question him but does not make any attempt to undermine or punish him.


Each of them is quite unhappy in their personal lives. Tomar’s wife has walked out of with the growing daughter. Mukhopadhyay, the Jail Super (Tota Roychoudhury is brilliant) has a very unhappy married life. Cheema becomes an alcoholic because his brother has become a rebel back home and the happy-go-lucky Harianvi guy was having a torrid affair with Mukhopadhyay’s wife. Sunil Gupta’s girlfriend Priya leaves him in the end.


The entire series is strongly character-driven and the incidents naturally emerge out of the characters and their interactions, revealing layer by layer, the toughening up of Sunil Kumar Gupta with Zahan Kapoor bringing off the most outstanding debut-performance in recent times. The tragic struggles of the prisoners where there are already three gangs at war with each other, one involved in alchohol smuggling, one pushing drugs through the prison and a Sardar gang as well, all with the connivance of the top prison brass who take their cuts from these behind-bars dealings. Sunil, however, brings radical changes in the prison environment by the time the series ends on an open note without being judgmental about anything or anyone.


The production design is wonderful, beginning with Tomar’s well-furnished office, through Charles Sobhraj’s three-star room with posters and cut-outs of his crimes, down to the lower middle class home of Sunil and his parents and the prison cells with their dirt, the simmering anger among the prisoners and their desperation to get out.


The music and the sound design are excellent and so is the razor-sharp editing which cuts through the scenes like a sharp knife but softens in the scenes within Sunil’s middle-class home with the neighbor who begs for some “prison food”.


Why does the judge break the nib of his fountain pen after signing the death warrant of a prisoner? Black Warrant might just give you the right answer!!!


(The author is a film scholar. Views personal.)

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