Saare Jahan Se Accha: Old-School Spies, Not so-Old-school ways

There are 2 types of spy movies. One is where you get all the chic looks, all the swagger, all the adrenaline of background music and lots of beaches, private jets, skydiving shots and stylish action sprinkled in every frame. The other is where you get a visceral sense of how boring, intimidating, history-changing and slow the life of an intelligence agent can be. Where does ‘Family Man’ come in- well, don’t ask that! We are still figuring that out.

But if you are done watching Khufiya, Bard of Blood, Special Ops, Raazi, The Night Manager etc. from India and The Spy, The Night Agent and The Recruit from everywhere else- and still itching for more, there’s a new one starring maestros like Pratik Gandhi, Sunny Hinduja and Rajat Kapoor.

It’s set many years back when nations were trying to assert, and also hide, their nuclear power ambitions in a maze of international treaties, global politics, and intelligence warfare.

This series takes you through events that might have shaped our own strengths. It unfolds the value of pre-empting and extinguishing advances of rivals on our own path of nuclear supremacy. Well, there are enough movies and series on that. What’s fascinating and fresh in this one, though, is the throwback nostalgia on how our brave and sharp agents worked without today’s technology.

Nope, they did not have today’s AI-laden bugs, real-time satellite comms, infra-red vision, smart cars, smarter suits and all-seeing goggles. All they had were soaps, apples, that cob-webbed fax machine and lots of intelligence to make it all work.

It’s both fun and quaint to watch how information was passed in public bathrooms in a simple theatre. Passports being supplied through flush tanks, latest enemy movements communicated in a strip rolled inside an apple, assignments conveyed through messages hidden in soap bars (again in a public washroom), high-stake meetings held in open-air cafes so as not to invite attention, mission-critical information extracted from an enemy source at the very last minute and conveyed through fax, and of course, lots and lots of Morse-plus-poetry code wherever possible. Perhaps, they were better off than with today’s tools which are vulnerable to hacks, interception and detection at the click of a button. The more digitised we get, the less we rely on human spontaneity and intelligence, and the more fragile information becomes.

Who knows if some of today’s smart agents still lean towards the analogue world not on account of nostalgia or habits but because that’s more secure compared to modern encryption-polished and AI-decked devices.

This series gives us a taste of what intelligence actually means- and it’s a big reminder in the AI-hypnotised era we are walking towards. Real intelligence is about ingenuity, spontaneity, the ability to filter diamonds from coal, the eyesight to find that needle in a pile of needles, the hard-to-imagine courage in the most nail-biting situations, the instinct to know who to trust and who to not, the nose of finding the right people, the exhausting-but-critical effort of not leaving any tracks behind, the hard work of walking that extra mile instead of depending on that thing called smartphone and yes- lots and lots and lots of patience.

We may not be spies when we get up, work, read, work-out, eat and sleep. But in an age drowned with what we call ‘information’; it might help to remind ourselves what is worth our eyes and what’s worth the trash-bin.

For every other day, there’s always the fun of watching Hrithik Roshan playing the dancing, flying, swag-walking, bomb-detonating, globe-trotting and katana-brandishing spy. As to whether Kabir and Srikant Tiwari will ever cross roads somewhere- Still spying!