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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.

Tribute to Shyam Benegal: Looking back at his Cinematic Milestones

Shyam Benegal, basically a filmmaker who will be remembered as a milestone in Indian cinema, taught me through many interviews how to create in-depth articles on film personalities. He had said, “When you are writing about a filmmaker, you need to contextualize his background, the influences during his growth and then his graduation to filmmaking.” I didn't quite understand what he meant. But when I recalled the several interviews I had done with the filmmaker, I remembered that each time, he remembered how his boyhood with a camera and his close association with an uncle who was directly under the leadership of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose had decided for him the course of his life.


His greatest contribution to Indian cinema is his discovery of some of the most outstanding actors of the century. Among them are – Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Rajeshwari Sachdev and brought out the latent talents of Shabana Azmi, Amrish Puri, Girish Karnad, Mohan Agashe, and many more, thus vesting them with the immortality in performance they dreamt of.


His feature film in Hindi, Ankur (The Seedling, 1973), tells the story of an arrogant urban village zamindar’s son (Anant Nag) who returns to his ancestral home in feudal Andhra Pradesh. His subsequent affair with the wife (Shabana Azmi) of one of his labourers and her final resistance against the feudal system when her deaf-mute husband is beaten black-and-blue, brought him criticism for using a purportedly "un-Indian" approach and for "victimizing" women. The film brought the problem of feudal and patriarchal structures to the fore.


Nishant (Night's End, 1975), starring Shabhana Azmi, is in some sense a continuation of Ankur. Again sexual exploitation of women is used to bring out the evils of feudal oppression. Manthan (The Churning, 1976), was financed in the most unusual manner. 500,000 members of the milk co-operatives in Gujarat each donated Rs. 2 towards the production of the film. This was a people's enterprise. Shyam Benegal introduces a westernized doctor to a village who sparks off an uprising of the local untouchables. The doctor is also attracted to a local woman, and consequently explores the nexus of sex and power. In Bhumika (The Role, 1976), he reveals the ambivalent attitudes of Indian society when a woman tries to live life on her own terms. The film is based on the autobiography of the Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, essayed brilliantly by Smita Patil.


In Manthan, Benegal’s interest in power relations comes to the fore. The four-cornered struggle – between the untouchables, the traditional middle-class, the rising rural capitalists and the new cooperatives led by middle-class agents of change – is traced with a degree of political consciousness evident in later films like Aarohan and Mandi.


Samar is a scathing attack on filmmaking pointing how filmmaking can become a pretentious exercise even when it seemingly begins with a cause. It offers interesting insights into how the caste conflict that forms the base of the storyline, unwittingly infiltrates and influences the cast and crew of the film unit that has come to make a film on the oppression of Dalits in the village. Over time, the caste schisms have widened rather than narrowed down. Benegal shows how the film unit is as prejudiced about caste as the rural people are. We discover that we are hardly as caste-neutral as we think we are. Benegal makes a perceptive statement through a dialogue by a member of the film unit. “Nobody will see the film anyway, except for some highbrow critics. It will win a few prizes at film festivals abroad. That’s all.” And that is precisely what happened to Samar,. It won some prestigious awards but the film did not reach a mass audience.


The film that most critics consider to be Benegal’s masterpiece is Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda. Based on a novel by the Hindi littérateur Dharamvir Bharati, the complex structure which revolves around oral story-telling, it was felt, would not lend itself to the film medium. Benegal disproved this as if with a vengeance and delivered a film that still brings a lump to one’s throat. He beautifully weaves the literary qualities of a novel in print and the art of oral story-telling through word-pictures to place them aesthetically forming a cohesive and harmonized whole in another medium and another language – film. He went on picking awards left, right and centre but he took them in his stride quite naturally in his usual, grounded manner. Asked to react when he won the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, he said, “"Winning an award is one aspect of film-making. But you don't make films only to win awards. Rather, you want it to be seen and enjoyed by the people. And the sense you can provide them through your films.”


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

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