An Appraisal Of The Film GUNJAN SAXENA
By
Air Commodore T K Chatterjee, Retd
After reading so much in the media about the movie Gunjan Saxena, I finally built up the courage to see it for myself. And I understood why IAF did not like it. Having served the organisation for 33 years, I did not like it too, especially since I was involved in the training of the first batch of pilot trainees at the AF Academy, Dundigul, Hyderabad.
To start with I like Shekhar Gupta’s analysis…..what kind of idiot will take 5 years to get the entry qualifications to get into the flying school right! Poor Gunjan Saxena…did she really do that? Or is it pure fiction?
The lack of research by the makers of the movie is glaringly evident all throughout the movie. But then when did we ever make a war movie right? Bollywood must stick to their core strength….song and dance love stories and family melodramas.
Coming to the misogyny part that has been depicted so painfully in the movie. My experience as the Chief Flying Instructor of the first batch of IAF pilot trainees was quite to the contrary.
Agreed the experience of having women in our workplace was new but honest to God, it was a pleasant one. At AF Academy, infrastructure like residential accommodation, toilets, and changing rooms at the workplace was made ready well BEFORE their arrival. It was a very planned induction process and not an afterthought. They started featuring in the media soon after their arrival and started getting so much attention that I had to plead with my superiors not to treat them differently. They had chosen to become soldiers, for heaven’s sake!
Flying is not a natural phenomenon for humans. So the training is tough for everyone. The rejection rate at AF Academy during training at that time was about 30-35%. The performance of the girls were no different from the men trainees, a perfectly Gaussian distribution – some good, mostly average, some very slow learners. While we were ruthless with the men trainees, for the women we were forced to be different. An unwritten instruction came down that ALL the girls had to pass out. Quite naturally I and my staff did not like the idea at all. But we were overruled, and concessions had to be given to them, till one girl broke the spine of an HJT-16 on landing!!!! She was pulled out of a broken aeroplane and was lucky to survive. Thereafter the hierarchy listened to me. The point is that the system was being over accommodative in case of the female trainees and the consequence was there for all to see! Quite the contrary to the movie storyline.
I remember one more incident. I was taking a test for one girl trainee. She was not doing too well and she realised she was not going to pass. The next I saw….she left the controls, took out a kerchief from her overall pocket, lifted her helmet visor, and started dabbing the tears from her eyes!!!! I lost my cool. I screamed, whacked her on her helmet, took over the controls, brought her down, told her to pack her bags and go right back home because she was just not fit to be a military pilot. That girl later passed out first in her course. She, with her mother, came down to visit me at my new place of posting, after she was commissioned, to thank me for whacking her in the cockpit that day! They were simple and sincere people who did not think crookedly and probably did not know the meaning of ‘misogyny’. Some of those girl pilots are senior people in commercial aviation today. By the way, for the uninitiated let me clarify, men military trainee pilots get regularly beaten up, all over the world, in side by side seated cockpits. We were not spared even in the tandem-seat cockpit of the HT-2.
Later on, I have worked with IAS and IFS gents and lady officers. I did not see any more gender divide in the forces than what exists in all the other places. But when it comes to women’s potential in the combat arms, it is a different ball game altogether. I have interacted with Israeli AF and USAF where they have lady fighter pilots. I have asked their Commanding Officers how they actually use them when they are deployed in combat zones, and their answers are no different from what I would do in their place. Use them in such a way that there are reduced chances of lady pilots becoming prisoners of hostile forces. If you call this gender bias….well, you are your best judge.
The movie Gunjan Saxena has opened up a national debate. Maybe Karan Johar is going through testing times, hence his production is more under scrutiny. Shekhar Gupta calls it a ‘national embarrassment’. As a retired IAF person, I did not like the way IAF has been projected. Aspiring female aviators, who desire to join the IAF, need not fear….what is shown in the movie is just not true. A so-called Flight Commander may be a boss in a flying unit, but there are many levels of supervision and no Flight Commander will get away by making a lady officer arm wrestle with her male counterparts to prove her mettle. Such a Flight Commander will be looking for another job in no time.
Lastly, I feel bad for the real Gunjan Saxena. What was probably intended to make her famous has produced quite the opposite results, fundamentally because of bad movie-making. The story that they tried to project does not make sense, and no IAF person will take it kindly. They should have involved the IAF while making the movie. Creative or cinematic licenses notwithstanding, these kinds of exaggerations must be avoided when it involves an existing institution of the stature of the IAF.
