4 min readKochiAug 16, 2026 07:58 PM IST
Director Oni Sen’s streaming series Operation Safed Sagar has opened to widely favourable reviews and become a hot topic among audiences. Recently, the cast and crew of the Netflix series appeared on The Great Indian Kapil Show, during which they spoke in detail about the adverse conditions in which they shot Operation Safed Sagar.
Opening up about his experience working on Operation Safed Sagar, actor Abhay Verma, who plays Flying Officer Rajpal Singh Dhaliwal a.k.a. Dhali in the show, admitted that the job gave him the opportunity to see facets of India that he had never witnessed before. “What I saw while shooting for the show, I had never seen anything like it before. I didn’t know our country was so beautiful. This was the first time I saw snow. I also experienced extreme heat for the first time,” he shared.
“We shot in Bikaner, Rajasthan, and it gets extremely hot there. We filmed at an Air Force base. So, I experienced extreme heat and cold, saw snowfall, and also saw people fall (faint). It was a very different experience. Since we didn’t have our phones with us, those memories still live with us. It was a golden time; had we had our phones with us, the journey wouldn’t have been as memorable,” Abhay added.
‘We were the last ones to sit in a MiG-21’: Abhay Verma recalls filming Operation Safed Sagar
He also admitted feeling sad when filming wrapped. “That world was so different. But all of us can proudly say that we were the last ones to sit in a MiG-21 (Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21, a supersonic jet fighter and interceptor aircraft).”
Revealing that they had to commute for over two hours to reach certain sets atop mountains on some occasions, actor Jimmy Shergill, who plays Wing Commander BS ‘Tony’ Dhanoa, shared that at one point his makeup artist quit because he could no longer withstand the weather.
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‘I have had enough!’: Why Jimmy Shergill’s veteran makeup artist quit
“We shot in the mountains at altitudes of 16,000-17,000 feet. It took us two to two and a half hours to drive to where our set was located. One day, my makeup artist came to my vanity van, saying, ‘I have had enough! Enough with all the respect, I am leaving! Stop me if you can.’ Now, you can imagine how exhausted that man must have been. He had been with me for 30 years, since Maachis (1996). And he left, just like that,” Shergill shared.
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Arnav Bhasin, who plays Flying Officer Amit Gupta a.k.a. Goofy in Operation Safed Sagar, meanwhile, called the Netflix series his “biggest project” to date. “I learned so much from it. Everyone here taught me so wholeheartedly. Every question that I had, they answered. I knew nothing about Operation Safed Sagar because I was just born during the war (Kargil War). I am just 27 now, and that’s pretty much how long it’s been since Operation Safed Sagar. So, through this show, I learned a lot,” he noted.
