Posted:
yesterday's episode...dont enjoy watching online...
yesterday's episode...dont enjoy watching online...
btw khushi any guesses why mahima committed suicide and what she has to do with akash or maybe she was with some gang???..m confused!
It was such a delight to read your analysis, how you have analysed the strength, weakness and the depth of both Akash & Ananya... You have said it all... Looking forward for reading your take on future episodes...
Originally posted by: sashashyam
Airlines 1-5: Flying high
Khushi my poppet,
What a neat idea! Here is my take on the show, as usual longer than I had intended it to be!😉
Akash Saluja: altogether admirable: I loved your very neat line, Khushi, that Akash and Ananya are now in a comfort zone and should soon be moving into the discomfort zone.But you, like all young folks, can see only the romance in the offing, and in the meantime, you do not highlight what is already there. Not just the comfort zone, but something rarer and more important, the genuine respect that even an impatient high flyer like Akash Saluja gives to a strong, capable professional woman whom he has, at the beginning, no reason to like, in fact quite the opposite.
That says more about him than it does about her. I loved it, for it is not because she is a gorgeous looker, but because she is a very sound pilot, and he does not let his irritation at her curt behaviour distort that perception. Such men are all too rare even today, so a round of applause for Akash. 👏
Akash Saluja is a man apparently used to women fawning over him.
One wonders why😉, as he is neither tall - at least 3 inches more would be a major plus, as it is, Ananya looks taller though she is really the same height - nor handsome (the girls in his college must have been very generous with their adjectives!) though he has a mobile and very interesting face. But I should not be talking, for my crush in days long gone by was the rough and tough Humphrey Bogart, whom not even his mother would have called goodlooking!😉
So, for starters, it must have been a new experience for Akash to run into a female who does not display the slightest interest in him.
He is also initially put off, and justifiably so, by Ananya's uncalled for rudeness while rejecting his offer to do that difficult landing for her. She could easily have achieved the same result by being diplomatic and fobbing him off smoothly, but then our young lady is gauche and abrupt when pushed to the wall, plus she is under extra tension because of the sudden crisis on her first flight.
But even so, apart from respect for a fellow professional, Akash also has an innate sense of fairness that is admirable. Very few men in his position would have bailed Ananya out at the enquiry, and that too without letting her know of it.
The scene after the enquiry has been dropped, when she runs after him, all puffed up, to point out, a tad sanctimoniously, that the Committee had decided that she was right and so, by inference, that he was in the wrong, was delightful. Akash quirks one eyebrow in hidden, roguish amusement, wishes her a good day, and pushes off, leaving her to soak in her self-congratulatory mood, soon to be punctured by the Airport Manager's revelations.
As for Akash's dalliance with the pushy and demanding Natasha, I think that must have something to do with his real assignment, of which more below. I would not credit him with such bad taste in girlfriends😉, so there has to be some other reason. But he is very good at fobbing off her importunate demands, and that too with a light, non-abrasive touch, a hunar that Ananya would do well to acquire, and fast!
He has a terrific sense of humour that is always bubbling inside him - the crack he makes when Ananya closes the door of her hotel room after he has entered was side-splitting. As was his teasing her about her laughter and about the incipient fit of poetry that he thinks she is going to indulge in.
A take charge guy: But what I like best of all about this leading man, with his tongue perennially in his cheek and a wink quivering in his eye, is that he never panics in a crisis, and takes charge of the situation without the least hesitation and without any fuss and bother. And crisp efficiency too, whether he has to deal with a diamond smuggler or with a consignment of drugs.
His intelligence training obviously stands him in good stead, but he has clearly always been a man who can make swift decisions and then push them thru with aplomb and charm, as when he decides to back Ananya and fly despite the pilots' strike. ATC to strike par nahin hai na.. Mein management ke saath sab sambhal loonga.. it is my responsibility..
Just the kind of man one wants at hand when disaster looms ahead! Plus, one can be sure that Akash Saluja does not weep at the drop of a hat, which is , for me, the most important virtue of all!!😉
His real mission: He is clearly an intelligence officer, folks, belonging to the Defence Intelligence Bureau, not a commercial spy (and what would he be spying on in Inde Air, who are hardly likely to have any valuable technical secrets? ).
He is a fully trained professional, and the way in which he makes the first contact with his immediate superior in the jogging park was perfect. Even John Le Carre would have approved! No counterspy watching them could have made out even the slightest connection. And it was not till the repeat viewing that I spotted the newspaper ad in the very first sequence in Episode 1, which gives the number of the park bench!
It is not drugs that they are after, but something more serious, very likely a major terrorist attack, whence the boss's reference to 26/11 and the huge deal for 25 new planes that Inde Air has concluded in Chicago. And the reason why his immediate superior was so upset with him at episode end was very likely because this latest strike-breaking caper could have led to his having to leave Inde Air, and it would not suit the DIB - who have already lost his colleague Mahima - at all to lose such a perfectly placed and very capable asset for their operation.
Pitfalls ahead: Akash knows this, and while so far he has managed to juggle things neatly between his job and his real mission, it will not always be feasible. The feelings he is already developing for Ananya, and his consequent desire to shield her from the consequences of her periodic fits of generous rashness, as in the donor heart case, will sooner or later clash headlong with the demands of his far more important assignment, which is meant to protect the lives of thousands, if not lakhs, of human beings.
There can then be only one choice, of the public good, not of the personal relationship. What then? This is likely to be the far more serious discomfort zone, Khushi dear.
Ananya Rawat: an open book: With her, unlike the case with Akash, what you see is what you get. And it is a very appealing package. She is tall and elegant and a extremely goodlooking. She moves more like a catwalk queen than like a female pilot, however, and that exaggerated glide needs to be toned down a bit.
She must be a Friday's child, for she is loving and giving. Warm hearted and kind to a fault, and to top that, with a reckless generosity of spirit that makes her go out on a limb, without a second thought, to help someone she thinks is in need, be it the diamond smuggler or the desperate wife of the heart patient. Unfortunately, this admirable courage and generosity are not coupled with a sound judgment of others, and the discernment that can sift bad from good, the frauds from the genuine cases. If she does not shed her naivete soon and learn how to do this, she will one day land in bad trouble, and perhaps drag Akash too in with her.
But I loved that scene when Akash, faced with this obstinate young woman who is ready, like a filly who is bolting with the bit between her teeth, to fly the plane out solo if need be and the strike be damned, shelves all his logical reservations and decides to play along, if only to prevent her from committing professional hara-kiri.
I did wish, however, that at the end, when he shakes hands with her and congratulates her, she had thanked him warmly in return. For without him and his backing, she would have got precisely nowhere.
She is also very comical at times. There they are, running desperately to escape from a pair of gun-wielding drug dealers and all that she can think of to say, when Akash produces a gun and saves their lives, is Aapke pas gun hai! in a high pitched near scream, and then, Gun chalana kahan se seekha? No wonder Akash looks at her as if to say You are one of a kind! I was in stitches, laughing so much that I could hardly see the screen!
Acting honours: I was very pleased to know that the poor, harried, desperate wife was played by a noted Bengali actress. She was so superb in her controlled despair, and even more so as she finally broke down into terrible, gasping, gut wrenching sobs of pure misery when all seemed lost, that I was sure she could not be from the TV industry's stable of "junior artistes". I also loved the ferocity with which she seized the mobile from that harpy of a sister in law to tell her jeth that all was well and the donor heart would arrive in time after all.
Able support: It is the mark of a really good production that even the bit players stand out. On this Sunday, it was the businessman who was firing his unfortunate staffer for getting him stranded in Bhopal (it was clearly not the fault of the poor wretch, who could hardly have anticipated the pilots union strike, but such is life!). He is so distressed at the sight of the despairing wife's breaking down that he immediately decides to try for a plane charter. It would have been for himself too, of course, but he really means it for her, since he does not think of the idea till he sees her sobbing uncontrollably. That was a very nice, heartwarming cameo.Diplomatic bloomers: The harried Russian diplomat in the drug smuggling episode was also very convincing. I wonder what his Ambassador did to him when the whole thing came out! Packed him back to Moscow by the next flight, very likely😉.
But the way in which the narcotics cops in Goa were handling him was not credible; one cannot search a diplomat's luggage without his permission, and one cannot threaten him with any punitive measures either. He/she cannot be arrested without the permission of the Ministry of External Affairs, and he/she cannot be tried unless his government waives his/her diplomatic immunity.
Manifold virtues:There are many things to be thankful for in Airlines. It will have only 26 episodes, but if it does well, there is sure to be a season 2. That it is only on Sundays, and one has to wait for it, only heightens the pleasure of eventually watching it. It has enough repeats during the week - unlike the exasperating, single show Yudh - to help those whose Sunday evenings might be otherwise busy.
As Khushi has noted, it is intelligent - happily without being pretentious - well scripted and competently acted. But not super-gorgeous please, my dear, one should not devalue adjectives!😉 Akash and Ananya make a delightful pair, however, and they are situated far away from family squabbles and plottings, which is a huge plus. Their blossoming relationship is sure to be very well scripted, and it will be set not against the standard background of most serials, but against a thriller track that will gain traction as we move ahead.
I, for one, am supremely content!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Originally posted by: ---Khushi---
🤣...too good Mandy...🤣...just too good...Thank God Airlines is not like that...😆
shyamala, was missing you! hope you are feeling better!
Airlines 6: Of happenings celestial and terrestrial
Folks,
First of all, I send you my warmest good wishes for Vijayadashami today. May it bring you and your families nothing but good during the year ahead.
Now for last Sunday's episode, which fell neatly into two parts - one celestial, in the skies, and the other determinedly and mysteriously terrestrial. Each of these was sliced, salami fashion, into bits that were interspersed with each other as the narrative proceeded, and it is to the credit of the script writers that at no point did the proceeding become confusing. The Airlines CVs are clearly smart!👏
The plot thickens: Let us take the second part first. Here, the plot slowly thickens, as Inde Air air hostess Mahima Singh is shown assuring an unknown contact over the phone that nothing is going right at her end, but still she was not afraid and was willing to take the risk, was confident of being able to manage it, and would go to Bangalore. Rookie pilot Karan Rana turns up at the wrong moment, and is clearly trying to take over the role of her boyfriend, but it is evident that Mahima is playing along for some reason of her own.
Question No. 1: Is Karan what he seems or is he part of the bad guys? It is unclear as yet, especially given the strange expression on his face later when Captain Rathore says that Mahima would have been far more useful on board instead of Ananya. It looks almost as if he knows that Mahima is dead, though of course he does not say anything to Rathore. On the balance, however, I feel that Karan is a red herring, if only because he is too obvious a choice!
Next, in fact right at the beginning and again at this point, Mahima is shown climbing unsteadily to the terrace of the Bangalore hotel where she was staying. She teeters on the parapet - though she is not shown climbing it - and then, after a moment of standing there with arms akimbo, pitches forward to her death.
I rewatched this segment carefully to see if there was even a hint of someone crouching below the parapet, grabbing her ankles, and pushing her over. I could not spot any such shot. So it seems that she was drugged, perhaps with a hallucinatory drug like PDP (angel dust) which produces daytime nightmares, and triggers suicidal impulses to escape from these horrors.
Question No. 2: A curious point: when Mahima crashes to the ground face down, her Inde Air ID, complete with the ribbon, is shown lying neatly there next to her body. But she was NOT wearing that round her neck when she was on the terrace; that is absolutely clear from the shots of her just before she falls. So where did this ID come from? It was clearly placed there by someone just as she was falling, for if it had been dropped earlier it might not have been so neatly near the body.
Departmental blues: Just an hour before Mahima falls from the hotel terrace (which is at 9 am on September 28), a Defence Intelligence Bureau (DIB henceforth) official is shown ordering a subordinate to "extricate our asset from the field" at once. The urgency in his voice is unmistakeable; he clearly knows that the DIB agent is in mortal danger. Equally clearly, he is referring to Mahima, but his peremptory order, unfortunately, comes too late.
The seriousness with which the DIB takes this loss is evident from the crisply professional (apart from the unduly open location) scene between Akash Saluja and the DIB honcho, who advises him to "Lie low".
The shock that Akash feels when he learns of this tragedy is brought out very well, as is the depression that can be seen from his hunched shoulders as he sits down on the steps to recover. Even in an intelligence service, where such losses are far from uncommon, and agents are taught not to emotional about such events, human feelings, towards a colleague who has lost her life in the line of duty, cannot be entirely suppressed.
But Akash is above all a hard core professional, and he bounces back quickly. Instead of lying low as advised/ordered by his boss, he proceeds with his investigations. When he photographs the pages of a file lying on Inde Air Manager Sen's desk, my guess was that it was the file about Mahima's death, perhaps with the post mortem report. I can think of nothing else that would be at all relevant, and for which Akash would run such a risk, for Sen could have returned suddenly any moment.
He also searches Mahima's room at the air hostesses' hostel for clues, once more at considerable risk, for he escapes Sen again by a whisker. The document that he pulls out of a plain blue envelope, though one could see it only from the back as it was held up against the light, seems to a medical prescription. Another mystery, for he takes it away, so it is clearly a vital clue.
Question No. 3: Akash remarks, after noting Sen's strictures to the hostel security guard about allowing no one into Mahima's room, What are they - ie the Inde Air management - hiding? What could that mean? With the preliminary police report, surely Inde Air should have informed the parents and then gone public with the suicide explanation? One can understand the DIB's secretiveness about the sudden death of one of their agents. But why would a civilian airline try to keep the matter under wraps?
The only possible explanation is that Mahima was a double agent of the DIB in the enemy, ie Inde Air, camp, and the Inde Air top management, which too saw her as an asset, did not want to reveal her death before they had covered all their bases.
A startling revelation: Right at the end, as a brooding and distant Akash suddenly abandons Ananya, who is full of her adventure on board, to rush off to talk to Natasha, one has no idea what lies ahead. But as Akash, his face tense with worry and strain, blurts out the news of Mahima's death, it is not so much what he is saying but how he is saying it that hits the viewer.
For Akash is informing one asset about the death of another, and the resultant shock , which is quite different from that at the sudden death of an airline colleague, shows up plainly in Natasha's face. The fear and worry in her face mirror those in his, as the implications of Mahima's killing sink into their minds.
So Natasha, whether she is really in love with Akash or is pretending to be so in order to have a perfect excuse for being close to him whenever she needs to, is apparently also part of Akash's DIB team investigating Inde Air.
The plot becomes more and more like a Le Carre novel, which is usually like a hall full of distorting mirrors!
Ananya's blues: Poor Ananya, in the meantime, is left high and dry, and clearly very disappointed at this turn of events. She cannot see Akash and Natasha or make out what they are talking, for Akash has dragged Natasha aside and out of sight. So her only conclusion can be that Akash is serious about Natasha, whereas the fact is that it is his mission that he is serious about.
This is the first of what bids fair to be a long list of misunderstandings between our lead pair because of the demands of Akash's mission.
It is also exactly what I had foreseen, and predicted in the Pitfalls ahead section of my last post on page 1 of this thread. It is good to be right for a change!😉
Excitement in the air: Now that is a neat pun, is it not?
The whole baby arrival segment was pure human interest, and of course it had to be our heroine who spots the emergency, bamboozles the crabby Rathore into letting her assist in the birth, and finally pulls the breech baby around using her "disaster management" training (I had no idea this included midwifery!😉).
Ananya lives up to the Friday's child* billing I had given her, with her instinctive empathy and her looking out for others , her readiness to sup with the devil - in this case Captain Rathore, to persuade him to let he assist in the birth - if need be in a good cause, and her bedrock guts and willingness to take a risk when there is no other go, as when Mrs. Bhalla gives up and cannot handle a breech baby. She is also appealingly modest and unassuming when well deserved praise arrives, in this cases from the baby's mother.
For a change, she shows the mostly suppressed girlish side of her personality when she is giggling merrily with the other 2 air hostesses, and by episode end, it appeared that even the hostile Natasha, mellowed by their joint crisis management, was moving towards reluctant acceptance of Ananya and her plus points.
However, Ananya has a hard time of it registering all the varied emotions called for during the crisis, for her range is limited. At one point, as Mrs. Bhalla, the doughty, take charge Punjabi matron, is trying to divert Rachna Gupta's mind with talk of baby names, Ananya looks as cheerful and relaxed as if she was watching a comedy show! Natasha, and the other air hostess who drives Rathore up the wall with her presaging disaster - Her water broke, Captain! -seem to do much better than our Ananya in the expressions department. No wonder the MYKSH reviews were so negative!
Excellent cameos: As seems to be the rule in Airlines, the cameos - whether of Mrs. Bhalla, of her paunchy husband, of the weedy guy who gets upgraded and is then sent packing back to the Economy section, or of the agonized Rachna who yells that she will not spare her husband for landing her in this mess - are very good. Top honours of course go to Mrs. Bhalla, who oozes empathy and compassion for the suffering mother to be, and whose face, when she confesses that she has never delivered a breech baby, is eloquent in its shamefaced despair.
Father perfect!: Captain Rathore's role is of course not a cameo, but here they have fleshed out his character and taken it beyond that of an egotistic, arrogant, vain and touchy martinet. A man who held his wife's hand for fully 14 hours of her labour for their first child, and did it again the second time, deserves a solid round of applause. Most would be fathers who ventured into the delivery room would have either fainted at the sight of the blood, or run away unable to stand their wives' prolonged agony.
His joyous announcement about the new arrival, and his evident pleasure in producing the baby's Inde Air birth certificate on arrival in Delhi, were also delightful to behold.
Sister perfect: Ananya's sister is as delightful as ever, with her nail polish capers. I only wish we get to see more of her, but as she seems all set to go to London, the prospects of this happening seem dim, alas!
Advt for the airline industry: The whole process of the Inde Air crew - from Captain Rathore to Ananya and Natasha - deprived of any onboard medical assistance, getting thru to a gynaecologist and engaging in what Rathore calls "Chinese whispers" to handle a premature delivery with complications, and do it successfully, was very reassuring.
It was also a perfect inhouse advertisement for the airline industry, but one that had far more of truth in it than your average shampoo ad! Plus, the various exchanges between Rathore and Natasha as they line up the medical support were extremely funny.
Question No. 4: How is it that a 2 months premature baby is trotted out in Delhi airport in its mother's arms? It would normally have been rushed into an incubator from the airport emergency medical room. But here they are all as casual about it as could be, and the mother seems to be as right as rain in her wheelchair, whereas a stretcher and an ambulance would be more what the doctor ordered!
Ok folks, that is it. Just 2 days to go, and then we shall see what happens when the auto pilot goes on the blink in mid flight!
Shyamala B. Cowsik
*NB: For those puzzled by the Friday's child reference, it is taken from an old English jingle that goes as follows:
Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace, Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go, Friday's child is loving and giving, Saturday's child works hard for its living, But the child that is born on the Sabbath day, Is bright and bonny and happy and gay!
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