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By:

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.

Centenary Tribute to Raj Kapoor: An Ode to Awaara (1924 – 1988)

Raj Kapoor

The centenary of Raj Kapoor is celebrated with great pomp and glory through the collaboration of several organizations like R.K. Films, Film Heritage Foundation, NFDC-National Film Archive of India in association with PVR-Inox and Cinepolis that have organized the public screenings across many theatres in India on the 13 th , 14 th and 15 th of December through tickets sold at a flat rate of Rs.100.00. The films screened were – Aag, Sangam, Barsaat, Awara, Mera Naam Joker, Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, Jagte Raho, and Bobby. The films were screened in every corner of the country from Kerala to Assam, Odisha to Punjab.


The grand launch of the festival took place on December 13, 2024 in Mumbai in the presence of the entire RK family. Though Raj Kapoor turned producer at a very young age with Aag in 1948 when he was just 24, he tasted the obsessive drink called cinema and was obsessed with this creative form of art right till he passed away nearly four decades later soon after he had been bestowed the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for his rich contribution to cinema in May, 1980.


He was so critically ill at that time that he had to step into the award venue wearing an oxygen mask and the President of India walked down from the dias and presented him with the award, the certificate and the cheque personally which was unique in the history of the National Awards till then. Though he is now dubbed as the “King of Entertainment” in Indian cinema, it would be right to remember that in his earlier films, he espoused the cause of the marginal, downtrodden man in the street exploited, neglected, misguided by the capitalists in power. One may recall that Awaara was released in 1951 soon after Independence when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India focused on a socialist, democratic republic announced on 26 th January the same year. This ideology is said to have inspired Raj Kapoor to create the tramp Raju who is inducted into a life of crime by the criminal (K.N. Singh) who brought him up to become a thief.


The process through which Raju evolved from a life of crime to a life minus crime with the help of his lady love Rita (Nargis) a modern, sophisticated and practicing lawyer brought up by a judge (Prithviraj Kapoor) yet falls helplessly in love with this hopeless tramp. Raju is actually the legitimate son of the judge who had thrown out his pregnant wife accusing her of being ‘used’ by the criminal who abducted her and held her prisoner for some days. The script was by the noted K.A. Abbas whose story formed the very foundation of many RK films in the beginning of his career. The publicity brochure brought out by the sponsors and organizers of the centenary tribute, write, “Awaara, garnered unprecedented success in the former Soviet Union. To commemorate 100 years of world cinema in 1990, the then Soviet Union honoured Raj Kapoor alongside eminent global film personalities like Ingrid Bergman, Jean Gabin, Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe.


In post-World War II, post-Partition India, when the entire socio-political system was under strain and thousands of migrants were pouring into the cities, millions identified with Raj Kapoor’s dispossessed heroes. The tramp of ‘Awaara’ reappeared in ‘Shree 420’, but with a difference and was rediscovered as a circus clown in ‘Mera Naam Joker’. The vision that Kapoor staged and sang was recognizably Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s India, featuring an urbanizing, modernizing milieu and the rural-urban and the class divide, the challenges of the common man and the moral ambivalence of a changing society.” The exploitation of the marginal man by a capitalist society defined the hero in early Raj Kapoor films and the best example is Awaara. If one were to define it as a film with a Leftist slant, the credit perhaps goes to K.A. Abbas who began his working life as a political journalist and earned great fame for his weekly column, The Last Page in Blitz, a weekly tabloid newspaper which became popular mainly.


for his column. Abbas has reportedly gone on to say, “Raj Kapoor evolved into the cultural ambassador and global messenger of post-colonial Indian cinema.” According to Abbas, Raj Kapoor through his films, had inspired the war-torn victims of war to learn to dream and also to believe in those dreams. Actually, there were two Raj Kapoors. One was the private person devoted to his mother and ever desirous of beautiful women and the other is the pillar of Hindi cinema he shaped up to become and ruled the film industry for four long decades. Yet, he is the most outstanding entertainer born within the more than 100 years of Indian cinema. Awaara was filled with beautiful song sequences, a very long dream scene where one song telescopes into another imaginatively choreographed and cinematographed with chorus dancers as if stepping down from heaven alongwith a beautiful princess who is actually Rita in a surrealistic image.


It is one of the most imaginative and aesthetic song-and-dance sequences in the annals of Hindi cinema and perhaps set the trend of dream sequences in films. The film is so immortal in the annals of history of Indian cinema that its music keeps playing endlessly on music videos and reels across the screen monitors beginning with the wonderful title song Awaara Hoon through Dam Bhar Jo Dam Bhar Jo Udhar Moon Phere, to Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi, all set to tune by his favourite duo Shankar-Jaikishen. The lyrics were by Shailendra and all songs lip-synced by Raj Kapoor were sung by Mukesh. He would say that he wanted his epitaph to read: “Here is a man who only wished to love.” He would also keep repeating that when he died, his dead body be brought to the RK Studios before being carted away to the crematorium. We have no idea if this really took shape.


(The author is a film scholar. Views personal)

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