Who is Capt. Gopinath, the Air Deccan founder who inspired Akshay Kumar-starrer Sarfira, Suriya’s Soorarai Pottru?

Regarded as the father of Indian low-cost airlines, Capt. Gopinath was a ‘Sarfira’ indeed, who didn’t just dream to make planes affordable to everyone, but also made sure that tickets available for just Rs 1 for thousands of flyers who could otherwise never afford air travel.

At a time, when flying was a luxury, Capt. Gopinath’s low-cost airline brought a revolution in the aviation business in India. Capt. Gopinath, the founder of Deccan Airlines, was just a poor village boy, who went on to build India’s largest airline.

Born to a poor teacher in Karnataka’s Haasan district in 1951, Gopinath was home schooled by his father. He joined a Kannada medium school only in the fifth grade. In 1962, at the age of 11, Gopinath cleared the admission test and joined Sainik School, Bijpaur. The school and its training helped Gopinath clear the NDA entrance exams. Three years later, Gopinath graduated from the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. He spent eight years in the army, and fought in the 1971-72 Bangladesh Liberation War, earning the rank of captain. However, at 28, he took a retirement from the Indian Army as he felt tied down.

As Capt. Gopinath wrote in his biography, Simply Fly, “I was forever seeking and forever striving. I lived two lives, like a palimpsest–one imposed over the other–while life in the country intoxicated me and I roamed like a ‘musk deer mad with mirth and drunk on its own perfume’, I was also repeatedly brought back to earth, to try to earn a living, and feed a family and constantly, instinctively unbeknown to myself, found myself in venture after venture.”

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Capt. Gopinath reared cattle to sell milk, got in poultry farming, silkworm farming, then turned a motor cycle dealer, and Udupi hotel owner, a stock broker, irrigation equipment dealer, an agriculture consultant, a politician and finally an aviation entrepreneur. “Struggling, falling, rising, falling, rising again and taking off,” he sums up in his biography.

According to a foreword written by APJ Abdul Kalam for Capt. Gopinath’s biography, Simply Fly, Gopinath was inspired by the story of Vietnamese orphan girl who took to flying helicopters to help rebuild her country after the 1969-75 Vietnam war when it came to starting a low-cost airline.

In one of his interviews, Gopinath revealed his motto behind his airline venture and said, “It is not the elite that I consider as my customers. It is the humble cleaning women of my office, the auto-rickshaw driver and other such people that we would like to cater to. We want them to dream that they too can fly, and we want to make that dream happen.”

The journey was full of obstacles. However, Gopinath’s never-give-up attitude and consistent hard work made his dream come true. Gopinath launched his first airline operations on 25 August, 2003 with a flight from Bengaluru to Hubbali. The airlines appealed to middle-class travellers with its low fares and extensive network. It employed several innovative methods to ensure the profitability of its business model.

In 2007, it became India’s second largest carrier with a growth of 42% in passenger traffic. As it grew, other low-cost carriers emerged in the Indian market–SpiceJet, GoAir, IndiGo, and JetLite–between 2005 to 2007.

These events, and the book, inspired filmmaker Sudha Kongara to make a film in Tamil titled Soorarai Pottru. The film, despite having a direct-to-OTT release due to the COVID-19 pandemic, received critical acclaim and seven National Film Awards. Now, the same director is gearing up for the theatrical release of the film’s Hindi version, Sarfira, starring Akshay Kumar, Radhika Madan, Seema Biswas, and Paresh Rawal in the lead roles. Paresh Rawal was also the part of film’s Tamil version.

Talking about why she chose to make a film on Capt. Gopinath, Sudha Kongara in a recent interview with Galatta Plus said, “Here is this man who never gives up. For 10 years straight the man keeps going to get his license. Everybody is telling him, ‘all you need to do is bribe,’ he said, ‘I can’t look at my face, I won’t bribe’. His wife was sponsoring him. When I heard his story, I was like ‘I love this guy, he is just fabulous’. He gets angry, he is short-tempered and because he is intelligent, he has little patience with people who are not moving at the same speed as him. All these qualities of Gopinath really intrigued and interested me.”

Sarfira is scheduled to release on 12 July.