Currently in Yemen, The Government of India (as a part of Operation Raahat) has managed to evacuate an estimated 4000 Indians safely from the war zone. This reminds one of the big scale operation that had taken place in 1990 when 1,70,000 Indians were brought home from Kuwait by the largest and the most successful evacuation ever attempted by any country, in the history of the world. Back then, over 59 days, the Indian government systematically flew over 488 Air India commercial flights into a war zone to evacuate all 1,70,000 Indians and safely bring them back home.
Now as the film Airlift is being made on this operation with Akshay Kumar in the lead, it is pretty much the case of history being repeated 25 years down the line.
Says producer Nikhil Advani,
It is of course uncanny when something like this happens. Today, India is celebrating what our army is doing for us. We have a similar stage and setting for our film Airlift. When we conceptualized it, none of us could ever imagine that the tale would be repeated in Yemen, even as we were shooting for the film.
In fact Airlift has been shot for around 30 days already and another small schedule would take place later this month. Post that, the shoot would resume on a large scale after the monsoon period. This is when Akshay Kumar, along with rest of the cast and crew, will accompany director Raja Menon to Bhuj where a huge set of outdoor camp is being put together.
According to Menon, he says,
Our film celebrates patriotism of a different kind. Even though there is no action in the movie, Akshay is doing it because he finds the whole drama very interesting.
However, there is still quite some time before one gets to see how reality unfolds on screen all over again, since Airlift would be releasing on 22 January 2016.