How AI landed in Guinness

A just-released Hindi movie, Airlift, has brought the evacuation of over 117,000 Indians from Kuwait in the wake of the Gulf War back in focus after more than 25 years. Incidentally, the whole episode got listed in the Guinness World Records (GWR, then known as The Guinness Book of Records), thanks to the efforts of Jitender Bhargava, who headed the public relations department of Air India back then. After 20-odd days of issuing daily media updates about the operation, he wrote to the editor of GWR one day to find out if any record of evacuation by a civil airliner existed. The editor replied in the negative. So after the operation was over, Bhargava sent GWR a detailed letter on the evacuation and Guinness accepted it as a record. A few months later, a new edition of the GWR was published with Air India's achievement duly listed.