Thirty four years ago to date, on 2 February, 1992, I took a flight out of Calicut's table-top runway on an Airbus A-320 aircraft to Abu Dhabi, with a select group of Indian aviation reporters.
The flight was arranged to demonstrate the fleet's airworthiness before its reinduction into commercial service. I represented the Business Standard where I was building my reputation as a transportation journalist, having already scooped the Airbus scam for my paper, courtesy a top aviation source then, now a Facebook friend.
Two years ago, on 19 February 1990, Prime Minister VP Singh had grounded the entire 'fly-by-wire' A320 fleet, in a fit of rage, following a tragic crash in Bangalore four days earlier that had claimed 92 lives, among them a Birla family scion. Provoked by my scoop, VP Singh accussed his predecessor Rajiv Gandhi of receiving kickbacks from Airbus.
Back in power, now, in 1992, the Congress government under PV Narasimha Rao was keen to reinduct the aircraft into full-service operations.
There were no commercial passengers on board our flight. We had the Director General of Civil Aviation MR Sivaraman, and his boss, Secretary A V Ganesan, for company on the 'nerve-racking' flight over the Arabian Sea that, for some unexplained reason, had been given the miss by Aviation Minister Madhavrao Scindia. For an equally inexplicable reason, the Indian delegation was headed by Railway Minister CK Jaffer Sharief, instead.
Sharief, once a driver to Congress President S Nijalingappa, had turned coat and leaked plans to Indira Gandhi about the party's impending split, in 1969. Eversince, he had sworn loyalty to the Gandhi parivar. Now, as Sonia Gandhi's "eyes and ears" in Narasimha Rao's Cabinet, Sharief warmed Seat 1A on our flight, IC 961.
Abu Dhabi then was not Abu Dhabi now. Neither was Dubai, still very much a backwater mofussil suburb of the UAE's capital city we had flown into that evening.
The Gulf was not a tourist destination yet, neither was it a commercial nerve-centre of the world. There was no entertainment hotspot, no real estate paradise, no uber luxury hotel, no shopping plaza, no luxury mall... nor the world's tallest high-rise Burj Khalifa... to bewilder travellers.
Indian Airlines, our national flag carrier, dwarfed the skies over the Middle East, flying cattle class. Eitihad would take wings only 12 years later. Emirates was a small regional operator, flying the Karachi and Mumbai routes, lugging labourers, drugs, and bullion. Which is why the shopping district of Dubai had one too many gold souks to buy dirty yellow metal duty free for smuggling back home to India, as some journos and airline staff actually did on our return flight a day later.
The Sheikhs of Dubai and 'Dhabi, ensconced within gated compounds at a distance from their cities, were nowhere to be seen in public. The world still largely looked down upon them as medieval Bedouin chieftains.
As journalists, we were kept out of whatever official engagement that might have been held between their Sheikh and our man Sharief who, we were informed, would be staying at a separate unidentified location at a distance from our hotel, being a 'guest of the state.' His engagements for the next 24 hours was none of our business.
Locked out from Sheikh and Sharief, with little to do other than filing the offical airworthiness handout for readers back home, our minders at IA made an interesting offer. We could drive down for a half-day trip to Dubai, made home by a very important Indian resident about town, his one arm controlling the narcotics traffic from Karachi and the other, gold supplies to Mumbai: the Arabian Sea 'trade' network firmly in his strangehold. They called him The Don.
Before long, our convoy reached a nondescript shoe shop on a Dubai high street, chauffered by Pakistani cabbies. Piles of Adidas and Reebok sneakers wearing discount price tags were carelessly stacked on metal tables.
"I will take that one for 50 (dirhams)," M, my colleague, hollered, pointing to the store owner, a young man in his mid-twenties, a pair, tagged AED 55.
"It's yours," said the owner. "No, 45?" M haggled.
"Take it as a gift," Anees replied, "you are my countryman. Be my guest. Don't pay."
M packed his rich pick in his backpack. I stood there, startled, before digging into my wallet. There was only enough cash to buy myself a carton of duty free Marlboro for friends back home. Sneaking past the mounds of sneakers, I grabbed Anees's hands.
"I too need a favour. Get me an interview with Bhai, will you? Here is my card," I said.
The Don's middle brother gave me a smile, picked up the green touch-tone phone on his counter, and mumbled a few words into the receiver. I believed I stood a chance.
"Bhai says you can be his guest tonight. He will talk to you tomorrow. You can fly back then."
"I can't do that," I lamented. I was the airline's guest on an official junket, and had no permission, and no money, to hang out an extra day on my own. We lived in an age when insta WhatsApp messaging was unheard of. And a 'nod' from boss could only be telexed. "My flight takes off tonight,'" I excused myself before heading back home to Delhi, puffing one Marlboro after another in my stash.
Three weeks after that listless flight, February 28 triggered a magnificent celebration across the country. India's first scheduled private sector carrier took to the skies that morning, flying high on Manmohan Singh's economic reforms, announced barely nine months earlier, the time it takes to birth a baby. Thakiyudeen Abdul Wahid, a labour recruitment and ticketing agent for the Gulf, based in Mumbai, had launched the East West Airlines.
The skies over India were finally open after hitting unanticipated air pockets. Air Marshall SS Ramdass had resigned as the IA boss barely a couple of months ago, on the Christmas-eve of 1991, rocked by an 'engineered' strike under Scindia's watch that, on hindsight, seemed to facilitate the East West take wings, bringing competition home to domestic aviation.
We flew into the pervasive hope of reforms, occasionally sinking into the drudgery of daily chores. Soon enough, destination Dubai became distant memory, and Dawood an elusive journalistic desire. But only so.
One spring evening, a year later, Sovan Kanungo, the new Aviation Secretary, dropped a forbidden fruit on my lap. He is no longer around. God bless his soul!
Our Don in Dubai had made legit his entry into Corporate India; East West was his flagship enterprise; Thakiyudeen Wahid, as D-Company's frontman, was merely a faceless mascot of Manohan Singh's reforms. Kanungo leaked the story.
My headline grabbing scoop in Vinod Mehta’s Pioneer fetched us rave reviews, and inquisitive stares, and some nasty threats on the landline. A legal notice folllowed, but never quite reached the court of law. I sat cosy with 'official' evidence.
But then came 12 March, 1993, and Mumbai rocked to loud blasts, maiming 1400 innocent citizens, and leaving another 257 dead. As it turned out, the blasts were remotely triggered by The Don in Dubai.
Three years still later, East West crashed. Chhota Rajan, a one-time Dawood henchman, pulled the trigger on Wahid, avenging the Mumbai massacre. And with that one shot, Dawood, The Don, was 'lost' to India forever.
Fast forward three decades later. On the weekend of 20 March, 2026, The Regal at Rockville, MD, was running housefull, with back to back screenings. Here, I finally got to meet The Don. Sprawled, up close, on a bed, in his lavish Karachi mansion, Dawood was dying a slow and humliating death, his demonic brain brought alive by Bollywood that he once financed and bombed.
Dhurandhar 2 had come to town with a bang as big as one can bet, and ironically, with a stellar role for Sanjay Dutt, once framed for secreting a D.Co. gun home during the deadly blasts of Mumbai, now playing the Don's reel-life henchman, Chaudhury Aslam.
Dhurandhar 2 The REVENGE and Dhurandhar (reviewed here earlier: check the comments box in this post) took a long time in the making, a day not too late, giving the world Bollywood’s greatest Blockbuster ever.
If its storytelling and director's cut are to be a benchmark of great film-making, then Bollywood has finally made its tryst with Hollywood, notwithstanding its seven-hour non-stop mega action drama, counting for the two back-to-back episodes with never a dull moment in between. It is scriptwriting at its best. It is big screen debut at its biggest. In the 100th year of The Talkie (Warner Bros' 1927 flick, The Jazz Singer, directed by Aland Crosland, starring Al Jonson, was the world's first sound cinema) nothing has hit the silver screen with such a BANG as Dhurandhar. Neither in east nor west.
For those who have watched this magnum opus, as well for those who never will, Dhurandhar is an epic retelling of India's Islamist mafia's nexus with Pakistan's ISI, played out in the ghettos of Karachi and Mumbai, after rising out of the boondocks. It busts a transnational network of deceit and bluster, compromising power brokers and power grabbers from both sides of the 'line of control.'
In scale, depth and reach, it beats Narcos, the adrenaline-pumping adventures of Pablo Escobar that had Netflix junkies hooked on for three seasons running, between 2015 and 2017. It also beats, hands down, the five seasons of Money Heist between 2017 and 2021, in sheer intellectual prowess and physical power. In fact, it even outclasses two seasons of Squid Games between 2021 and 2024 in the scale of violence.
Team Dhurandhar deserves the plaudits for calling out a nation gone rogue.
Pakistan's atrocities against India are well-documented. Nothing attests that awareness and appreciation as loud and clear as Dhurandhar's global box-office collections on the opening weekend. Even in Pakistan, that Dhurandhar reviles, movie lovers are queueing up at underground pirate theatres. I would not be surprised if The Don, at the centre of it all, lying on bed, wasting away, has been watching... and waiting... for his The End to arrive.
Luckily for him, for now, our Dhurandhar has exited Pakistan, reminiscing that one unfinished task: Dawood, Dead or Alive!
Yet, sadly, for movie makers and buffs alike, a section of the Indian audience, tainted by its own community prejudices, has been crying foul about film maker Aditya Dhar painting Pakistan devilish red. This, incidentally, is the same audience that revelled in Ram Gopal Varma's Company, a remake of the real life Dawood aura, 24 years ago.
Playing the victim card forever is an unquestioned 'entitlement' that the community unfailingly misrepresents as their constitutional privilege. If Dawood, his henchman Atif Ahmad, and their Pakistani minders, are the mascots of such a society, then Whataboutery not Freedom of Expression and Speech must necessarily be their Fundamental Right.
That, when the founding story of Pakistan itself is a violent history of blood and gore perpetrated by a handful of privileged monsters on the unprivileged underdogs among their own. No Pakistani has ever denied that fact.
The chronology of a Failed State as documented by its scholarly Islamic chroniclers follows:
712 CE: After conquering Sindh, Muhammad bin Qasim, the Arab invader invited the jealousy of his Ummayad Caliph al Walid, over raping the daughters of the vanquished king, Raja Dahir. Doubting that his general had passed on the princesses to him only after ravaging them, the Caliph got enraged, and ordered Qasim to be sewn into a raw cowhide and sent over to Damascus. Qasim's hide-wrapped carcass arrived roasted at court, after a months-long trudge across deserts.
1206 CE: Muʿizz al-Din Muhammad of Ghor, the conqueror of Delhi, assassinated on the Indus by Dhamyak, a Khokhar Punjabi convert from Dera Ghazi Khan, and possibly an ancestor of the four-star Palistan Army general Aziz Khan Khokhar, who served as Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) from 2001 to 2005.
1951: Liaquat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, assassinated by Sayyid Akbar in Rawalpindi who, in turn, was immediately shot dead by police, preventing invetigation.
1948: Iskander Mirza, descendant of Mir Jafar, as first Governor-General and later President of Pakistan, deposed by Field Marshall Ayub Khan. Died in exile in the United Kingdom, in obscurity and under financial stress.
1979: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan, executed by Genral Zia ul Haq, who himself was assassinated nine years later.
1966: Murtaza Bhutto, son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, assasinated in Karachi in a shootout between police and his personal guards, reportedly at the behest of his sister Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, the present President of Pakistan.
2007: Benazir Bhutto. Prime Minister of Pakistan, assassinated after addressing a political rally in Rawalpindi by a suicide bomber at the behest of the Army.
2023: Prime Minister and national heartthrob, Imran Khan Niazi, incarcerated at Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail, going blind in the darkness of solitary confinement.
There are hundreds more bloody tales of could-be rulers unseating installed monarchs between then and now.
2025-26: Dhurandhar is only a short episode in a long running saga of state-managed torture, rape, maiming and murder spanning a millennium. But Dhurandhar is not just another story. It is an inspiring tale of a small-town Indian patriot turning the tables on a cruel, murderous and self-annihilating dispensation of a nation during a small time-window in a large timespan. It is a story of an under the radar Indian spy, giving India's tormentors a look and feel of their own flesh-scorching, bone-grinding, eye-blinding, head-chopping, blood-letting treatment, loud and clear on a global canvas.
The plot serves an Agenda: Vociferous and Unabashed Patriotism.
Q: What, then, are the consequences of Dhurandhar for Pakistan?
A: Suddenly, everyone who is anyone in Pakistan, from the lowly slumdog, to the local mayor, to every politician, every senator, every minister, every chief minister, every prime minister, every spy, every general has become a suspect, a deal maker, an Indian agent, to their own people. And that's the ultimate consequence. Long denied the dignity of basic livelihood by a self-aggrandising establishment, the establishment itself is under threat from here on.
It is Black Lie, then, for Pakistan sympathisers among Indian Muslims to tout that Dhurandhar unleashes an unadulterated state-directed propaganda of violence against their community. Unless, of course, they believe their body, heart, mind and soul belong to Pakistan first... and forever. That's unfiltered, unalloyed and unvarnished fundamentalist indoctrination. And that, in fact, is the reach of the Pakistani deep state we have been coping with since Partition.
That, then, calls for another story, another screenplay.
Calling Lyari, any takers?
(c) Shubhrangshu Roy
25 March, 2026
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