Airlift – The Reel Story v/s the Real Story (narrated by an actual survivor)

Airlift – Movie Poster

Last night, I watched the movie ‘Airlift’ and I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The movie is gripping, the performances and direction were definitely above the average ‘Bollywood’ standard and Akshay Kumar gives one of the best performances of his career as Ranjit Katyal – the man who led 170,000 Indians stranded in Kuwait, to their homeland.

Now if you are movie buff, that’s all you should know to enjoy the movie. A movie is meant to entertain and if entertainment is what you want, go get hold of a ticket now and enjoy the poignant story of the fictional Ranjit Katyal.

Fictional? Oops! Now, you really didn’t think Ranjit Katyal was a real person . Hate to bust your bubble mate; he is absolutely fictional, as fictional as John Snow or Ned Stark, and so were a lot of his exploits (some of the deeds portrayed were however carried out by some inspired individuals; their collective efforts were shown as part of Ranjit’s work- but this is certainly not a biopic).

See, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind a good movie, but unfortunately, the movie’s story was a bit different from the actual happenings of 1990. Well, a bit more than ‘a bit’.

I was there as a 9-year-old and despite the years, I remember those days so well. So do you want to hear the real story? Here’s how I remember it.

The invasion happened on the 2^nd of August 1990, we woke up after our dad had left for work (around 6am) and it was a day we didn’t have school. We head some booming noises but had no clue what was happening. Soon after the drama of guns, tanks and firings unfolded. My father returned halfway from his way to work. My mom didn’t go to work in the morning as she had finished a shift from the previous night (she was a nurse).

Now of course, as civilians, we were scared, confused and absolutely clueless on what was going to happen next. My father worked in a steel factory and he didn’t have to go to work after the war started. Many factories and companies were forced to shut down immediately but healthcare units had to function and my mother was forced to work for some more time.

The movie showed how the Iraqi army prowled the street everywhere. That’s quite true, though in our residential locality (it was far from Kuwait City) there weren’t that many. We did however see and hear of arson, looting and burglary everywhere. Think about a place where law and order ceases to exist. When you take out the fear of committing a crime, there are few limits people wouldn’t cross.  Anarchy! And it was not just the army, there were even a lot of civilians (Palestinians, from what we were told then) who were culprits. I’m not getting into details of whether soldiers misbehaved with women. We heard stories and you could only guess the things that could’ve taken place. There were the occasional stories of people putting up a brave show in times of adversity also.

The TV stations were out in a day and instead of Kuwaiti channels, we started seeing the Iraqi channel (Remember that this was a time before cable television). Iraq was obviously celebrating the taking over of Kuwait and there was nothing much we knew from TV. Some Radio stations functioned, not for long though. Most of the news we heard were from people who went outside homes to see BBC at the apartments of friends who had dish antennas installed.

Now the movie somehow gives the impression that all civilians were huddled in a school or an office which wasn’t really true. We were caged in our own homes. The telephone lines were out in a couple of days and water supply stopped too in our building – there was one tanker truck driver who used  to take his tanker truck, to the large water tank and get water for our building.

Things were pretty bad. And this situation went on for weeks. Food was getting scarcer but it was available and the grownups would go out and get it. People obviously stocked up food on the first week anticipating scarcity. Shops couldn’t function normally – that was because of the indiscriminate looting, but they sometimes opened for short durations.ATMs were empty or had been looted and no banks functioned. So a lot of people were short on money.

Now about the Iraqi soldiers – I saw only a few at close range (didn’t have the nerve to go anywhere close), but some of them were indeed very young and from we got to know, a large faction of them were not real soldiers, just civilians who were given guns, and a uniform and marching orders in Iraq.

It was a state of anarchy. So far, I guess we haven’t deviated much from the movie.

The evacuations started a few weeks after the war started. The Indian government had successfully negotiated a safe passage for Indians (there was no hero involved here but just some commoners who took initiative and co-ordinated with the government and some keen involvement from the ministers of that time like I.K Gujral). The Indian government did step up to the occasion.

There were some people who paid up a hefty sum in US Dollars, got out of the country and left via foreign flights (we had cousins who took that route), but the vast majority couldn’t afford that anyway and had to wait for the Indian government to execute its plan for evacuation.

Now in complete contrast to what was depicted in the movie, the mass evacuations didn’t happen with dozens of cars and buses traversing the desert in a single trip following a heroic leader who bashed up soldiers who tried to take-away women under his protection. The actual evacuation happened over a period of almost 2 months in a far less thrilling fashion.

A few days before we boarded the bus, we sold a lot of our household stuff for practically nothing to Iraqi dealers who appeared out of nowhere. The money obtained was probably just spare change.  We also left a lot of things at home, in the hope that we would return there one day.

When we started our bus journey, we were told to carry only clothes and no valuables (some took chances, others didn’t). We carried mostly old clothes, some buckets and some food and water for the road like the other hundreds of other families like us. Buses moved in a file and our hot bus trip lasted days. The bus journey took us into Iraq via a place called Basra (from what I remember) and we then travelled via Bagdad (where we made an overnight stop before resuming) to eventually reach a place called No-Man’s Land between the Iraq-Jordan border. This was a desert in the middle of nowhere with just sand and sand-dunes all around. The Indian government and the Red Cross had put up canvas tents in the desert for us to stay in that place. Each tent was numbered and there were different camps A,B,C etc in that place. There were 3 other families sharing our tent and the Red-Cross had provided blankets for the night (it’s pretty darn cold at night in a desert despite the scorching heat in the day).

Every day the Red-Cross Food trucks came and we lined up to get our rations. A pack of Kuboos, milk, cucumber, tomato and canned sardines. It was practically the same thing daily. But hey, at-least we were getting food.

There were some water pipes for which we had to walk a fair distance and we could get drinking water and bathing water there. There were some makeshift toilets (holes in the ground covered by tin-sheets that stopped the sand-storms (again a long walk). But on the positive side, we didn’t have to poop in the open.

We lived in the camp for about 3 weeks and there were reporters from newspapers who came to check on the new arrivals and the ones who were leaving. The Malayalam daily – Malayala Manorama, published the names of all those who made it to the camp, back in India (a large faction of refugees were from Kerala).

Periodically, the camp co-ordinators would publish a list of people who were ready to head to Amman (Jordan’s capital), from where Air-India did the ‘airlift’ of the refugees. There were other carriers also though Air-India was the one that ferried the maximum number. When our turns came, we packed up all we had and boarded another bus to Amman, Jordan and eventually boarded a flight to Mumbai (then called Bombay). The whole journey took around 4 weeks.

On landing at the Bombay airport, the government had also arranged for trains (free tickets) to transport the refugees to various parts of the country (mostly the south). And on top of that, we were given Rs 500 per person (I remember standing in a queue in the airport for that) – a good number of us were penniless by the time we reached and Rs 500 was a big deal. Oh and one last thing, it was at the Bombay airport that I first saw and ate at a Sikh Langar (community kitchen). They did such an admirable job feeding all those who landed.

Ok so that was the real story! May be not as romantic as Akshay Kumar made it out to be, but it was one hell of a life time experience.  There was no Ranjit Katyal, but there were many people who stepped up to the occasion.  I remember the man nicknamed “Toyota Sunny”  (real name Mathunny Mathews)– he was the MD at Toyota Corporation, whose name kept coming up all the time. Coincidentally, he was from my hometown of Tiruvalla (in Kerala too). He was the guy everybody seemed to know and he played a big role in assisting with the evacuation. But it was not a one-man show at all. I just simply don’t know the names of the many others who stepped up.

The Kuwait war had unsettled the trajectory of the lives of many hundreds of thousands. People more than their belongings when they left. They left the comfort of their middle class lives, their jobs and every penny they owned. Probably as a child I didn’t realise the gravity of that situation then, but as a parent one can only guess the turmoil they went through; having to start from scratch with nothing in hand.  Their lives would have come the full circle in the past 26 years.

So back to the movie.

‘Airlift’ is an entertaining movie, an edge of your seat thriller and it did bring back a lot of memories (Do you remember that scene in font of the Al-Adan hospital? I was admitted in the Al-Adan hospital for a month, a year before the war). But if you ask me whether was it the real story? Not really. It was just a romanticized, movie-friendly version of the story.

What you read now, was how it really happened for most of those hundreds of thousands who experienced the Gulf War of 1990.

What you read now was the real story…

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PS: Somebody asked me if a character like George existed? Trust me, you find all kinds of Georges in such situations. An annoying class of unproductive human-being who you feel like punching when they open their mouths? It was a long arduous journey and there were just so many people….I’m certain there were enough Georges in our midst too. 🙂

PS 2: There is so much more to tell about that war and I can probably fill a book writing all the experiences down, but I’ll stop for now. If one day, I do write down that book, do read it 🙂

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Afterword (30/01/16): A lot of people love to point out in response to my post, about Mr. Mathews and Mr. Vedi (because their names are mentioned in the movie end-credits). I definitely was aware of the former even back then but I’d like to clarify again that while these gentlemen (with others) played a big role in helping out and carried out deeds such as going to Iraq for negotiations (as shown in the movie), arranging accomodation in schools (again show in the movie), and helping set-up camps (not part of movie), Ranjit Katyal is not one of these two persons and this movie isn’t a biopic. Many of the achievements of Katyal were the things accomplished by these gentlemen but a lot of what is shown is cinematic-fiction too, as stated.

There were also other uncredited individuals in the India government back then – including the then Telecoms Minister K P Unnikrishnan, who played a big role in overseeing the activity, and the then foreign minister (and later prime-minister) I K Gujaral).   The India Government itself showed excellent involvement and resolution (which was not the impression given in the movie). Since there wasn’t much media attention given to them, nobody probably remembers them, which is doing them discredit.The enormous evacuation wasn’t a one man or two person effort but the coordinated effort of many people both among within the govt. and civilians.