Operation Safed Sagar now streaming on Netflix, garnered nearly three million views worldwide within days of its release and figured at rank eight in popularity. Made at cost of $21 million or over Rs 200 crore, it marked a giant leap of faith not just for Netflix but for the armed forces, the film’s producers, directors and story tellers.
As Gp. Capt. Tarun Singha (Retd), a MiG fighter pilot and later public relations officer for the Indian Air Force told StratNews Global on The Gist, it began innocuously enough.
“Just short of my retirement that was in 2018, December, Kushal Srivastav assistant to Mr. JP Datta who made the film Border and similar movies, approached me saying, sir, that I want to make a film on the Indian Air Force, and he came out with a story on women fighter pilots.”
But Singha knew that the IAF’s women pilots were recent entrants, and a proposal of this kind would not pass muster. So he steered Srivastava in the direction of the Golden Arrows of No 17 Squadron that had earned the maximum laurels during the Kargil War.
The proposal went to Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa, who had commanded the Golden Arrows during Kargil, and he cleared it.
“This story is told through the lens and prism of the boys of 17 Squadron, the Golden Arrows,” says Singha. “So they were just happy go lucky youngsters who were just thrust into the operations without really actually knowing what is happening in the initial stages. And then their flight commander Ajay Ahuja gets killed”
“The Indian Air Force was skeptical because of misrepresentation of the past that had dented the image of the Air Force. But we were very sure because, as I said it, it was conceived and conceptualized by someone who has lived it all.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Gp. Capt. Tarun Singha (Retd), former PRO IAF on the Netflix streamer Safed Sagar.
