This is how Akshay Kumar's Airlift was made!

Back in the age of no-internet, sharing information wasn’t so swift and easy. Well, we are saying this in the context of Akshay Kumar starrer Airlift, which has been doing wonders at the box office! Raja Krishna Menon could have never made this blockbuster, had the evacuation not been there in the coveted Guinness World Records.

So how did Air India manage to get into the Guinness Book of World Records?

“Since it wasn't the era of Google which enables one to source information easily, I walked from my office in Air India building to the book store in Eros cinema complex near Churchgate in Mumbai; picked up a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records to access the address of the editor or the publisher of Guinness book. Armed with the address, I posted (email did not exist then!) a letter to Guinness Editor enquiring if any record of evacuation by a civil airliner existed?” says Jitendra Bhargava, retired executive director of Air India, who was heading the Public Relations Department of the carrier back in the 1990.

A fortnight later, he received a reply from the office of Guinness Book of World Records that they had no such record in their book. “In the meantime, evacuation continued at a brisk pace with Air India deploying as many aircraft as possible and Indian Airlines and Indian Air Force extending a helping hand with their aircraft to bolster capacity to meet the growing demand. After the evacuation operation was completed, I sent a comprehensive letter to Guinness providing details of total number of passengers carried, flights operated, duration of the entire exercise along with other details,” he recalls.

A few days later, Guinness accepted the record and informed the airline about its decision to list Air India through a letter. “It was only after a few months that the new edition of the Guinness Book of World Records was published with Air India's achievement duly listed,” he says.

But how did the airline keep a record of the number evacuated from Kuwait? Bhargava recollected that as the head of the PR department of the airline, he had been busy sharing press releases with the media on the number of people evacuated, flights operated on a daily basis to the flights operation schedule among other information. “It struck me after about 20 odd days, by which time only about a third of the total had been evacuated, whether we had in the process created a record,” he says.

After the new edition of the Guinness World Records hit the stands a few weeks later, Bhargava walked down to the same book store to buy a copy of the book for the airline’s archives.

Well, we are glad that he got in touch with Guinness and helped the airline make history. Lest, we mere mortals would have never know how our now cash-strapped national carrier was a true blue hero in one of the biggest crisis that shaped the present-day India!

Image Credit: Indiatimes.com