There was a time when cinema held up a mirror to society. It observed. It reflected. It made us uncomfortable enough to think.
Films like Dhurandhar
do not just tell stories. They edit reality, distort it, and at times weaponize
it. Violence in storytelling is not new. From Deewar
to Satya, cinema has explored anger,
crime, and rebellion. But those films carried weight. They left behind
discomfort. They forced reflection.
Dhurandhar
does something else.
It packages violence as spectacle and sells it
as pride.
What are we really watching?
Throats being slit in the background. Bodies
thrown into boiling oil. Men tied, dragged behind motorcycles, hung, and
tortured with chilling precision. These are not fleeting images. They are
prolonged and detailed, almost instructional.
We are no longer just watching violence.
We are absorbing it. We are rehearsing it.
And what we rehearse often enough, we begin to
normalize.
This is not storytelling. This is
demonstration of hate, of inhumanity, of killing in the name of nationalism.
The convenient defense follows. It is fiction.
But fiction does not erase intent.
When narratives are repeatedly designed to
dull sensitivity, distort history, and make cruelty appear justified, the
impact is not imaginary. It is psychological.
Why I am saying this
Many critics have already reviewed Dhurandhar. They have discussed its
performances, scale, and craft. That is not my concern.
My concern lies beyond cinema.
When violence becomes so stylized and
acceptable that it no longer unsettles us, something deeper shifts. When hatred
is framed as justification and cruelty as strength, we must ask whether we are
still watching stories or slowly internalizing them.
Some may call it nationalism. Some may call it
propaganda. Some may defend it as entertainment.
But as a viewer and as a human being, I cannot
ignore the possibility that something in our moral fabric is being altered.
When Cinema Enters Society
This concern is not abstract.
I witnessed a real incident near my
surroundings. A young man was brutally tortured by a group of boys in the name
of cow protection. He begged for water for hours. Instead, he was humiliated
further. He died.
He left behind a family. A wife, young children,
and a paralysed father.
This was not just a crime. It was learned
cruelty.
Where does such calculated brutality come
from? What replaces empathy so completely? We grew up with ideas like Aham Brahmasmi, the belief that the divine
exists in every being. What happens when those values fade?
More disturbing than the act itself was the
silence around it.
People watched. No one intervened.
There were no weapons. No real threat. Only
indifference.
Because somewhere, the act had already been
justified.
Labels were ready. Muslim. Outsider. Enemy.
Once a human being is reduced to a label, cruelty becomes easier. And once it
becomes easier, it begins to feel justified.
A Thought That Should Disturb
You
Imagine this.
You are in an unfamiliar place. A
misunderstanding occurs. Someone labels you wrongly as the other.
What happens next?
This is not fear. This is possibility.
Humanity does not disappear overnight. It is
edited out, scene by scene.
Narratives like Dhurandhar may be contributing to that process.
Violence as a Market
If brutality sells, it will be produced.
That is the new grammar of cinema.
We have seen traces of it before. It grew
louder with films like Gangs of Wasseypur
and Haider. It intensified with Animal. With Dhurandhar, it feels systematized.
I could not watch Animal fully. Even Dhurandhar
required pauses.
Because this is not just entertainment.
Drugs damage the body. This kind of cinema
engineers the mind.
It normalizes dehumanization, something
history has shown us before.
Nationalism, Rewritten
Earlier films like Border built nationalism on sacrifice and collective
courage.
But Dhurandhar
rewrites that idea.
Here, violence becomes duty. Criminality
becomes patriotism. Nationalism is no longer rooted in one’s own land. It is
performed in the enemy’s territory, through a world of arms dealers, drugs, and
lawlessness.
Such portrayals do not exist in isolation.
If other nations adopt the same logic and
depict India through distortion under the label of fiction, the cycle will
repeat. Hatred will not remain one-sided. It will multiply.
This is not accidental. This is design.
Last Word
Dhurandhar
is not just a film.
It is a signal.
A signal of what we are willing to watch.
A signal of what we are willing to accept.
And perhaps of what we are becoming.
Because the most dangerous change is not what
shocks us.
It is what stops shocking us.
And that is what should disturb us the most.
Email: debasar11@yahoo.co.in
