Salaam alaikum, Lyari

I watched Dhurandhar unfashionably late, long after the hashtags had peaked, and walked out with the distinct feeling that I had just attended a classified briefing conducted via Ranveer Singh’s eyelashes and Akshaye Khanna’s footwork. Somewhere between Lyari’s alleys and the Baloch desert, it stopped feeling like a film and started feeling like a PowerPoint the deep state accidentally sent to PVR instead of South Block.I come from Mirpur stock in what is now Pakistan occupied Kashmir, with a family archive full of Partition scars, border rumours and “udhar kya ho raha hai” debriefs that began before Colors TV and long before Arnab discovered the volume button. Mirpur roots and an ear trained on fault lines meant Dhurandhar was never going to be “just a movie”; it was always going to be an entry in an ongoing survey of how the subcontinent does its collective therapy in Dolby surround.Lazy “research cinema” is easy to spot: Karachi looks like Goregaon after lunch, Urdu sounds like a wounded translation app and the underworld follows daily soap physics. Dhurandhar is the unnerving opposite — a Karachi and Lyari that feel visited rather than imagined.Rehman, the Dakait-Baloch-politico mashup, is written with the intimacy of a man who has seen more FIRs than birthday parties, while SP Alam Choudhary is the human embodiment of that locked steel cupboard in North Block labelled “Do Not Open Until Regime Change.” Admiration sours into anxiety; the question becomes not “Is this realistic?” but “Who opened their mouth, and how many NDAs fainted?”Akshaye Khanna’s lethal “Salaam alaikum, Lyari” has already escaped the film and started an independent life. It is not a greeting but a land acquisition notice with better diction, a don kissing a city on the forehead before slapping it.The real fun begins when Lyari talks back.Pakistani reporters and YouTubers walked into the same alleys, phones raised, asking what residents made of this Bollywood MRI of their mohalla: some laughing that India made a film but “humse poochte toh asli galiyaan dikha dete” and others bristling at a Marvelised SP Aslam.While Indian liberals accuse Bollywood of manufacturing consent for Delhi, Lyari’s residents are using the same film to manufacture dissent in Karachi, asking why Mumbai can spend crores rebuilding their lanes in Bangkok when local studios will not.On a calmer subcontinent, all this would still be “just cinema.” But Dhurandhar has arrived when Balochistan is on fire-insurgent attacks and militarisation, just as India unveils Operation Sindoor. In that climate, a multiplex epic about Baloch hurt, Pakistan Army brutality, fake currency and a glowing Indian spy looks like narrative air support.Balochistan burns hotter, Pakistan staggers, India flexes, and a spy thriller arrives on cue speaking fluent dossier.Rehman’s Baloch identity is not a cosmetic flourish. The film circles his people’s wounds: resources sucked out, dignity drip fed back in. When he dances in the Baloch heartland, dust and dhol, he moves like a man auditioning to be both messiah and mafia boss.Then Hamza needles him on loyalties. Clan or state, who gets your neck; Rehman’s answer is painfully familiar: “What has my own ever done for me?” Identity is emotional; patronage is practical, and the film nails the price in one image: children in shrouds, dead from drinking poisoned water while Rehman rides in a state supplied convoy, the same system that gives him a chair refusing to keep poison out of their taps.Under the gunfire and glamour, Dhurandhar offers demonetisation a flattering redemption arc. Its fake currency pipeline, Pakistani press, cross border smugglers, obliging middlemen, mirrors the 2016 bedtime story: Indian notes as national security hazard, recast as wartime surgery.The film simply lines up forged 500s, terror pipelines, corrupt “then” and decisive “now,” inviting the audience to do the emotional math. The only correct answer is: it hurt, but it had to be done.There is another, quieter rewiring at work: the upgrade of Indian spies from “disposable asset” to multiplex deity. Earlier generations were chosen as much for expendability as for courage; Ravindra Kaushik, the “Black Tiger,” reportedly rose to the rank of a Major in Pakistan, passed vital intelligence and then died of tuberculosis in jail, abandoned by the republic he served.Ranveer Singh’s Hamza is the anti-Kaushik. He is not a file number in a basement; he is the state’s favorite son, the gravitational centre of the fantasy, suffering beautifully and somehow finding time for salon quality hair. We no longer abandon our best men in foreign cells; we give them opening weekends and trending hashtags. Reality may disagree; the fantasy sells popcorn.If the censor boards are the villains in this story, piracy is the accidental freedom fighter. Officially, Dhurandhar is persona non grata in Pakistan; unofficially, it is the subcontinent’s most successful underground film club. Dodgy streaming links ensure that Indians in multiplexes and Pakistanis on cracked screens are consuming the same images, then arguing online with more nuance than the most primetime panels, turning cinema into a crowdsourced fact checking tool with popcorn in one hand and download links in the other.Nothing captures the absurdity better than Flipperachi’s track. The Bahraini hip hop song that powers Rehman’s desert strut is an undeniable hit. Picture the irony — Bilawal Bhutto walks into an event with the banned film’s anthem that Indian audiences hear as the background score for covert ops in his own backyard.The announced sequel title, The Revenge, hangs like a tipsy policy brief: on the surface, just franchise logic; underneath, a memo that the era of purely defensive India is over and the new script is permanent undercover offence.There will be no cheque with “psy-op” in the subject line, but a privately funded film can align so perfectly with the state’s fantasies that it functions as psychological warfare without an official stamp. Pakistan appears as torturer in chief of Indian men and Baloch dreams, Indian covert power as surgically precise, demonetisation as heroic amputation.The danger is not that viewers mistake fiction for fact but that they stop caring where one ends and the other begins. “Salaam alaikum, Lyari,” Hamza’s long haired surgeon’s gaze, Baloch children at the poisoned tap and the desert dance of allegiance will no longer feel like cinema; they will feel like common sense.Once common sense has been colonised, no one needs spies or dossiers to win; they just need people in Karachi and Kanpur alike to keep buying tickets, and to keep hitting download.

Salaam alaikum, Lyari

Once common sense has been colonised, no one needs spies or dossiers to win; they just need people in Karachi and Kanpur alike to keep buying tickets.

Sonali Gupta

Salaam alaikum, Lyari

Once common sense has been colonised, no one needs spies or dossiers to win; they just need people in Karachi and Kanpur alike to keep buying tickets.

Sonali Gupta

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