The Railway Men – Salutes Working-Class Heroes & a Surprise Thug
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“What does someone responsible for taking 15,000 lives get? As punishment, he gets a government-plane, with VIP service. A royal ride back home with champagne & caviar.”
The 2023 Netflix series “The Railway Men” starts with a journalist lamenting how those accountable for the 1984 Bhopal gas leak tragedy, the world’s worst industrial disaster, escaped justice too easily. Directed by Shiv Rawail, the four-part series is a fictional account of the real-life catastrophe and has been written by Aayush Gupta. It focuses on the efforts of courageous railway workers who risked their lives to save and rescue civilians on the fateful night when poisonous gas leaked from Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal.
Divided into four parts, “The Railway Men” doesn’t unfold chronologically, but each scene deviating from a given timeline is marked with a small time-stamp graphic, while doesn’t just make it easier for viewers understand ‘when’ the event is taking place, but also adds a sense of emergency to the proceedings. Warm-toned, with a predominantly bleak color palette, the series recreates the Bhopal of the 1980s—crowded, dusty, and slowly choking to its death under the grip of the poisonous gas leak.
The first episode opens with a prologue scene summarizing the aftermath of the disaster. It then takes viewers to 2nd December 1984, sixteen hours before the gas leak, introducing one of the primary protagonists – Iftekaar Siddiqui (Kay Kay Menon), the sincere station master of Bhopal Junction railway station. The rest of the major characters and players are smoothly introduced through clever story tosses. For example, as Iftekaar leaves for work, his son informs him about having a job interview at Union Carbide the next day and the scene shifts to a panic-stricken environment at the plant. Union Carbide workers are in a tizzy over fears of a potential leak, an emergency alarm is sounded and the manager Kamruddin (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) tries to take stock of the situation. Meanwhile, not too far from the plant, Jagmohan Kumawat (Sunny Hinduja), a journalist, is interviewing a former Union Carbide worker, Imad Riaz (Babil Khan) over the blatant lack of safety measures at the plant. Fired for asking questions, Riaz gets a job at the Bhopal Railway station as a loco pilot, but vows to help the journalist expose Union Carbide.
The only character who doesn’t have anything to do with Bhopal city or the railways is Balwant Yadav (Divyendu Sharma), a bandit from Delhi who plans to loot railway funds from Bhopal station in the guise of cop on the unfortunate night of the gas leak. The Balwant Yadav sub-plot is kind of contrived, where a gruesome killer/dacoit is given a redemptive arc of a villain turned savior in times of crisis, although it adds some element of surprise & suspense in the tale. R. Madhavan is introduced in the second episode, he plays Rati Pandey, the general manager of the West Central Railway zone, who rebels against higher-ups to lead a rescue train to Bhopal. Juhi Chawla makes a brief cameo as his senior, symbolizing a detached class of officials stationed in New Delhi, making crucial decisions for the rest of the country based on what would garner good PR rather than what’s in the best interest of civilian lives.
Kay Kay Menon and Babil Khan deliver measured yet standout performances as the titular railway men, their characters displaying heroic grit and wit to save as many lives as possible when the poisonous gas envelops Bhopal railway stations, steadily killing people or rendering them unconscious. The cinematography vividly portrays the horrors of dying from an unknown source, with people gasping for breath, and you can feel their suffocation as a viewer. However, it did feel slightly strange to watch it in a post-Covid era where masks had become an obvious protective measure. One wonders, with slight frustration, why nobody was covering their faces, but it’s a hindsight-like wisdom they weren’t armed with.
Except for some unnecessary slow dramatic pauses, like a scene where Rati Pandey goes into mute shock for a few seconds after being informed about the Bhopal gas leak, which was quite unlike a professional response, “The Railway Men” is well-paced and retells a tragedy that would hit a nerve with viewers. It’s both a tragic reminder of how corporate greed can reduce human lives to a mere statistic on paper and a celebration of working-class heroes who go the extra mile even when don’t have to.
Rating: 7.5 on 10. Stream “The Railway Men” on Netflix.
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