I am reminded of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech in Parliament two years ago when he thundered: “Ek akela kitnon ko bhaari pad raha hai (how just one man has proven to be more powerful than many others)."

That line is an apt description of Dhurandhar, which released last week and became an instant blockbuster. It not only continues to overwhelm the box office but has scorched an entrenched ecosystem that battles haplessly to douse this fire.

Dhurandhar’s success transcends both money and cinema. It is an unwitting, unintentional phenomenon unfolding before us in the present continuous tense.

Six Gulf countries have unanimously banned it: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE. This is perhaps the most unambiguous admission that their true loyalty lies with the ummah, and that they’ve always been a fair-weather friend to India. That a mere film truthfully depicting a slice of the nightmare called Pakistan should rattle them so much makes this admission starker.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has expectedly filed a defamation suit against the makers of Dhurandhar in the International Court of Justice. This is a classic case of bad news and worse luck to hit the world’s jihadi HQ.

If this is the global scenario, the screenplay at home is macabre, shameful and shameless.

Barely minutes after Dhurandhar’s trailer went viral, the familiar cabal of “movie reviewers", “influencers" and “opinion-makers" descended on it like a dusty swarm of locusts. They correctly assessed that the trailer was the glimpse of an ensuing tsunami and when the tsunami came, it consumed their fondest fantasies of ‘Aman ki Asha’, the benevolence of Pakistan’s ISI and the perfidy that Bajrang Bali was actually Bhaijaan in a different avatar.

Their “reviews" of Dhurandhar are beneath contempt and remind me of Leon Uris’ memorable quote describing this tribe: “There is a whole school of American Jewish writers who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born. This isn’t art or literature. It’s psychiatry. These writers are professional apologists… Their work is obnoxious and makes me........

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