Oni Sen’s period war drama Operation Safed Sagar, streaming on Netflix, has been earning rave reviews from critics and audience alike. The appreciation isn’t limited to only the accurate depiction of the contribution of the Indian Air Force during the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan, but also extends to its characters, based on real-life war heroes. The chief among them is Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, played by Siddharth.Why Ajay Ahuja wasn’t depicted as larger than lifeHowever, Operation Safed Sagar creators chose to not glorify Ahuja, but instead depict him as an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. “We knew the audience already knew where his story was heading historically. So, making him larger than life would actually have made him less interesting to me,” co-creator Abhijeet Singh Parmar reasoned in a recent interview.“The extraordinary thing about Ajay sir is that he was a dutiful man who found himself in an extraordinary circumstance. That is what makes his story powerful,” he told ET Now.The ‘man behind the martyr’Before Operation Safed Sagar, Abhijeet Singh Parmar worked as a Creative Producer on popular slice-of-life shows created by The Viral Fever (TVF) — Gullak and Panchayat, which served as his training ground in writing relatable characters. “Although I was not the creator of Gullak or Panchayat, working so closely with those shows taught me something I carry with me. A character doesn’t have to be extraordinary for their story to be extraordinary,” he argued.That’s exactly why he wanted to know the “man behind the martyr”, when it came to Ajay Ahuja — “What did he eat? How did he talk to his wife? What irritated him? What did he worry about? What did his friends tease him about?” Consulting Ajay’s wife Alka Ahuja before depicting her husband in the show also helped in shaping their refreshing perspective.“When we met Alka ma’am, we realised very quickly that Ajay sir could not simply be a war hero in our story. He was her husband. He was someone’s father, someone’s friend, someone’s colleague and mentor to young fighter pilots. The personal stories gave us a glimpse of the man behind the uniform,” added Parmar, who wanted the audience to “mourn a person they’ve come to know, love, and respect.”No foreshadowing of Ajay Ahuja’s deathAlthough Ajay Ahuja’s fate is well documented, the makers chose not to burden every scene of his before that with foreshadowing. “We were very conscious of not making it sentimental. The danger was that because the audience knows what is going to happen to Ajay sir, every ordinary moment could start feeling like a goodbye. We didn’t want that,” reasoned Parmar.Story continues below this ad“We wanted the scene to feel like two people who don’t know they are living through their last ordinary moments together. The smallest details were more important to us than the big romantic gestures. We wanted the relationship to feel like a real marriage rather than a cinematic love story,” he added, claiming that had he failed in doing that, he’d have failed Alka Ahuja.“The audience knows what is coming. The characters don’t. So, the writing had to respect that reality. That is also why those scenes are not written as memories of a man who is going to die. They are written as moments in the life of a man who believes he is coming home,” argued the creator, describing Operation Safed Sagar as a “character-driven drama set against the backdrop of Kargil War” instead of a conventional war drama itself.Also Read — ‘We hate it’: IAF pilots told Operation Safed Sagar team to drop slow-mo walks, match VijetaOperation Safed Sagar also stars Jimmy Shergill, Dia Mirza, Amrita Bagchi, Abhay Verma, Mihir Ahuja, Prajakta Koli, Taaruk Raina, Adil Hussain, Barun Sobti, Rishi Chadha, Aanjjan Srivastav, Vinay Pathak and Sanjay Suri, among others.