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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.

Hell on Earth, Filmed on Earth: Revisiting ‘Sorcerer’

By the mid-1970s, the audacious William Friedkin had already made two signature American films of the decade - The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). The former pushed the envelope in the crime genre with its gritty urban realism, while the latter set a new standard for dread-etched occult menace.


With ‘Sorcerer’ (1977) Friedkin - a prominent knight of the ‘American New Wave’ of the 1970s (others included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby) - pushed even further into the void. On its surface, ‘Sorcerer’ was a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic ‘Le Salaire de la Peur’ (The Wages of Fear), itself an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel.


But Friedkin’s version was to be rawer and more visceral, and a (criminally underrated) posthumous masterpiece in its own right. The film opens with four vignettes, detailing the violent underhand activities of the movie’s four ‘protagonists’ scattered across the globe - from Mexico to France to Jerusalem to New Jersey.


All four, who are on the lam from some outfit (police, government or mafia), end up marooned in a seedy and decrepit Latin American village, doomed to eternal damnation. It’s a globetrotting preamble worthy of Graham Greene.


When a nearby oil rig explodes, the American conglomerate that owns it needs to transport crates of nitroglycerine - unstable and ready to detonate at the slightest jolt - through 200 miles of treacherous jungle and perilous mountain roads. Our four desperate protagonists agree to take up this ultimate assignment from hell in order to secure the money with which they hope to escape their South American hellhole.


Beneath ‘Sorcerer’s’ blistering tension is an unflinching critique of capitalism’s cruelty. The film is saturated with the logic of exploitation as our anti-heroes are thrown into a jungle purgatory.


Friedkin, never a director to shy away from logistical madness, made sure the hell his protagonists endured, was real. There are action sequences in Sorcerer (filmed in the Dominican Republic) that defy logic and sanity. The most infamous involves the two trucks, named ‘Sorcerer’ and ‘Lazaro, crossing a rickety rope bridge in a torrential downpour.


In this jaw-dropping scene, the rusty trucks, weighed down with dynamite, sway perilously above the chasm, tires slipping on soaked wood as the wind lashes ropes and water crashes below. It is a scene of such excruciating tension that it borders on the surreal. No CGI, no safety net, no score - just rain, torque and the groan of collapsing faith.


Flushed with the success of his last two films, Friedkin had carte blanche on casting. Friedkin had hoped for Steve McQueen in the lead, alongside Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura. When this dream cast collapsed, he finally cast Roy Scheider - the only big name in ‘Sorcerer.’


Fresh off the success of Jaws (1975), Scheider gives the most intense, haunted performance of his career in ‘Sorcerer.’ Tangerine Dream’s electronic score gives Sorcerer its otherworldly pulse, humming, throbbing, radiating dread. It lingers like a fever dream.


The most remarkable thing about ‘Sorcerer’ is how thoroughly it resists escapism. This is an adventure film where the adventure is a death march, where the destination is not salvation but obliteration. Even ‘Apocalypse Now’ (where Francis Ford Coppola nearly lost his sanity filming in the Philippines) with which Sorcerer shares a spiritual kinship, offers the catharsis of madness. Friedkin offers no such relief.


When ‘Sorcerer’ was finally released, it collided headfirst with ‘Star Wars.’ Audiences didn’t want grit. They wanted galaxies. Critics dismissed it. The title only added to the confusion. Was it a horror film? A fantasy?


The failure of Sorcerer at the box office sapped Friedkin creatively. Like Coppola, who barely survived the making of Apocalypse, Friedkin would never again scale the heights he reached in the 1970s.


But time has a way of rewarding the cursed. Today, Sorcerer is recognized as a criminally underrated masterpiece of the ‘American New Wave.’


For my money, it is Friedkin's finest work: a fevered portrait of men with no past and no future, grinding across a landscape that actively wants to kill them.


Watching it today feels like a message in a bottle from a vanished era of personal, risk-laden filmmaking. One where danger was not just part of the story - it was the story.

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