To many, Madhavi Reddy could come across as a red flag. It’s the opposite of Farhan Akhtar’s 2004 war drama Lakshya, where Preity Zinta’s journalist character pushes her boyfriend, Hrithik Roshan’s directionless character, to join the Indian Army and fight in Kargil War. Madhavi, having no inkling about what a soldier’s life entails, is obsessively and blindly in love. “I actually didn’t see Madhavi as a red flag at all. It was a very human, common emotion that anybody feels, when you want to spend your life with somebody you’re hopelessly in love with,” Prajakta tells SCREEN in an exclusive interview.
She reminds those who would argue otherwise that the characters she and Mihir play in Operation Safed Sagar aren’t just “characters written on paper”, but living, breathing people with flesh and blood. “And there are so many colours a person has. While he’s fighting for our country, he’s also a man in love. While she’s supportive of her dream, she’s also someone who wants a life with him,” says Prajakta. She feels in her realm of reality, Madhavi also took a “very brave step” of “leaving everything for the man she loves”. In her capacity, Madhavi is somewhere as brave as how a soldier like Baldy is on the battlefield.
Prajakta is thus glad that war dramas like Operation Safed Sagar have come a long way from back when soldiers’ wives were reduced to weeping women waiting eagerly with open doors for their husbands to return from war. “Operation Safed Sagar deals with so much more of what happens with a soldier than what happens at the frontlines. I love how it humanizes them to have these complex building blocks of life. The fact that I get to play one of them is such an honour for me,” says the actor, who shares that mantle with Amrita Bagchi and Dia Mirza, who play Alka Ahuja and Kamalpreet Kaur, the wives of Kargil War hero Ajay Ahuja and Golden Arrows Commanding Officer BS Dhanoa respectively.
Madhavi’s role in the show goes beyond a flying officer’s love interest, as she almost becomes the eyes through which the audience explores a air force camp. “With Madhavi, what’s the most beautiful is she’s very, very ordinary. She doesn’t come from that world. She somehow finds herself there. And then her journey goes from not understanding what this life is to eventually, evolving into this person who accepts responsibility of how Baldy’s life does get affected by her. That’s beautiful,” says Prajakta. Which is why it didn’t matter to her if Madhavi was projected as just a woman in love, and not a woman driven by ambition. Thus, she never got into Madhavi’s backstory of whether she had a job or wanted to be a working woman at all.
“That’s not a discussion I ended up having with them. I liked that she was a woman so in love she was ready to leave everything behind for someone she saw a life with. I find that very romantic,” confesses Prajakta. “Of course, in no way do I come from a place of not caring about the ambitions she might have had or what she might want to do, but this part of her story deals with her life with Baldy and doing whatever she can to achieve that. So, that’s what we focused on more,” she argues. A turning point in her arc comes when Alka explains to her why wives don’t discuss grave personal issues with IAF officers on the day of a sortie.
Has that strategy and ability to compartmentalize her emotions and her husband’s priorities also helped Prajakta in her own personal life? “I don’t think both are comparable at all. I can’t even fathom to understand how the people and the families in our forces deal with this compartmentalization because it’s so much more complex than what us civilians can imagine. The most I could do was to get close to an idea of what Madhavi would be in real life. Obviously, in no way would I ever know that as a civilian. But I’ve tried to interpret what I thought could be done in that case,” says Prajakta.
She acknowledges that while she relates with Madhavi woman to woman, she can’t place both their personal lives on the same pedestal. “Our lives are so much easier and safer because of the people who are guarding us at the borders. For me to ever say if they can compartmentalize, so can I, it’s just silly. I honestly don’t even know the pressures they must be going through to have that kind of a mental balance,” adds the actor. Another moving scene that offers a peek into the sisterhood between the pilot wives at the camp is the one where Madhavi reveals she’s pregnant after concealing it for weeks after Ajay Ahuja’s death. “It’s just the amount of emotions that’s common between them — courage, strength, grit, grief sometimes, and hope! There’s no way this sisterhood can thrive unless they all collectively feel the same things and be there for each other when needed. I think that’s so beautiful,” says Prajakta.
