Mar 17, 2016 09:20 PM
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Neerja: 23, divorced, dead.
On 5 Sep 1986, as a Pan Am 73 flight with 360 passengers on board idles on Karachi Airport tarmac, four Palestinians, belonging to the Abu Nidal organization, commandeer the plane. Their stated aim is to free Palestinians imprisoned in Israel; some feel it is to crash the plane in Israel in a 9/11 style. Neerja Bhanot, flight purser, has the presence of mind to alert the cockpit crew who escape through an overhead hatch, thus preventing the plane from leaving the ground, and leaving her, as the senior most crewmember, to deal with the hijackers.
Throughout the 17-hour incarceration, as negotiations fail, she rises like a Florence Nightingale of the raging battlefield, caring for and feeding the hapless passengers, and sheltering them from the madness and violence of the terrorists who have begun to lose their mind. Hers is the calming, sane voice that permeates even the deaf inhuman barricades around the terrorists, keeping the cauldron only simmering and not exploding. After the standoff, when the APU of the aircraft finally collapses, leaving it in darkness, the hijackers lose their nerve and begin to fire and throw grenades indiscriminately, killing 20 innocent passengers and injuring nearly a hundred.
Neerja manages to save the 41 Americans on board, whom the terrorists are seeking out, by hiding their passports and thus preventing their identification. Once the firing starts, though hit in the arm, she manages to yank open the emergency door, and though could have been the first one to jump out, like a good captain of the ship, lets others dive to safety, and finally succumbs to a hail of fire while shielding three kids. One of them, only seven then, later became the captain of an airline and said Neerja had been his lifetime inspiration.
Neerja Bhanot was posthumously awarded the highest Indian peacetime civilian award for bravery, the Ashok Chakra, in 2010, nearly a quarter century after the act, when the US Govt. had already awarded her at least four bravery awards and set up a trust in her name, and after the Pakistan Govt. had also awarded her the Tamgha-e-Insaniyat for “kindness” to humans.
It’s a different matter that President Musharraf, within a week of 9/11, released from prison the worst offender among the hijackers, Al Safarini, who’d shot at and killed many passengers. The FBI later nabbed Al Safarini from Bangkok while trying to sneak into Jordan, and now he cools his heels for 160 years in a prison in Colorado. The remaining hijackers, whose death sentence was commuted to a life term, after serving time in a Pakistani jail, were quietly put on a flight to Dubai in 2008. One of them was later allegedly killed in drone attacks in Waziristan, but no proof exists.
That was the incident, now the movie.
Technically, not a brilliant movie: the camera is shaky, the cinematography uninspiring, the music, missing. The summing up speech by Shabana Azmi is terribly scripted, and ruins everything. The movie clumsily tries to capture the trauma and grief of parents and family as they relive tender memories, but other than the father clutching his head or the mother raving incoherently, or wanly flipping through worn pictures, the emotional yoking doesn’t quite play out. One realizes, other than the total dependence of the script on the crutch of facts; the writer has hardly any fiction to offer.
How are leaders made? Some are born leaders. Some are made leaders. Others, like Neerja, have leadership thrust upon them. Frequent flashbacks show Neerja a victim of domestic violence and dowry abuse in an arranged marriage gone sour in just two months – her parents constantly goading her to be brave. Was it the depression, the rebound of a failed marriage, or a sense of having nothing to lose, or the pride of uniform, or faith, or a negative experience that prodded one to rebel in the face of certain death, or allegiance to the color of our flag that prompted such exceptional courage beyond the call of duty from one of such tender years? The characterization of Neerja is unsteady – she starts off as a bubbly youngster, the life of parties, the impromptu songster; but as the gloom of incarceration descends, we see her more as an anguished, tortured soul; weary of suffering, with a lurking desperation that leans on death wish.
Catch the flick for the triumph of the human spirit, for that unwavering, inexplicable force that descends and takes hold of one soul to vanquish adversity and save innocent lives, and not for a tale brilliantly told.
