Dia Mirza, promoting Operation Safed Sagar, stresses the need for nuanced portrayals of women in armed forces narratives. She praises the series for placing women at the forefront, highlighting their emotional and physical realities, sisterhood, and community. Mirza argues that such stories help explore and revive women’s identities, especially as they navigate marriage and new life environments.
Dia Mirza sees the telling of a story with a certain depth.
As an actor who has acquired a layered identity for herself, not only in the space of acting, but also as an advocate and an activist, Mirza's way of viewing the stories she gets to bring to life and the spaces she inhabits within them, comes with the understanding that no perspectives should be left out — especially those of women who are so central to the narrative.
In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India during the promotion of her upcoming series Operation Safed Sagar, where Mirza is set to star alongside an entourage cast including Jimmy Shergill, Siddharth, Amrita Bagchi and others, she talks about the absence of the female perspective in movies that center the armed forces and settings alike.
Mirza claims that when she read the script for Operation Safed Sagar, she could sense that it truly put women at the forefront and as the anchors of the story. "I felt like there was something truthful in the emotion," she said.
She explains that one of the aspects of the Air Force that has never been explored is "not just the emotional but also the physical makeup of these [women's] lived realities. Their sisterhood, their sense of community and what it means for them to be who they are in the lives that they have chosen or has been in many cases even chosen for them."
Mirza also explains how such stories should not only be a progress towards the exploration of a woman's identity, but also the revival of it.
"Marriage for a woman is about rediscovering identity because you are shaping a whole new life, a whole new identity based on the environment that you're living in." she says.
"There's a newness to everything, and it's a very different level of reality."