 "'Dhurandhar': The 6-7-ing of spectacular jingoism flooding social media")
Too many Indian spies are getting caught in Pakistan — at least on social media. If you have spent some time scrolling through reels over the year-end, you would be familiar with the popular trend of Indian spies in Pakistan. These short videos depict an Indian spy on their first day on the job. As part of their cover, the character wears a skull cap and kohl, which are common markers of Muslim characters in Indian cinema. They speak in a stylised Urdu and stick, at first, to their cover. However, a slip of tongue or action reveals their Indian identity to their Pakistani interlocutors.
One says their favourite cricketer is Babar Azam (instead of Virat Kohli), and another is caught when they instinctively evoke a Hindu god in the middle of a conversation. My favourite one was about a Bengali spy who gets into a fatal debate about the superiority of the Calcutta biryani over its Karachi counterpart. As reels by Indian influencers and content creators started going viral, Pakistani influencers also joined the trend, creating videos with the narrative conceit of being a spy in India, with equally ridiculous outcomes. The reels are, of course, spawned by the recent Bollywood blockbuster ‘Dhurandhar’.
Written and directed by Aditya Dhar, the first instalment of the two-part film, which released on 5 December 2025, has already earned over Rs 1,000 crore at the box office. Loosely based on the life of Indian army officer Major Mohit Sharma, who was martyred on 21 March 2009 and posthumously received the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime military decoration, ‘Dhurandhar’ stars Ranveer Singh as Indian agent Jaskirat Singh Rangi, who infiltrates a criminal gang-turned-terror outfit in Karachi. Soon after its release, several film critics pointed out that, like Dhar’s previous film, ‘Uri: The Surgical Strike’ (2019), ‘Dhurandhar’ is another example of Bollywood’s jingoistic turn.
It is a mere coincidence that ‘Uri’ was released in January 2019, barely months before a border conflict between India and Pakistan, and ‘Dhurandhar’ hit the screens following the war between the two countries in the summer of 2025. Both films have, however, benefitted from the mood of jingoism in the country following incidents of conflict. Earning nearly Rs 350 crore at the box office, ‘Uri’ depicted the surgical strikes carried out by the Indian army across the Line of Control, following terror attacks in Uri, Kashmir, in 2016. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, quoted a popular dialogue from the film during the inauguration of the National Museum of Indian Cinema.
Film scholar Nihar Sreepada, in a 2021 paper, argues that ‘Uri’ is an example of a “new Indian nationalism,” where “revenge” serves as a source of catharsis. In the film, the character of the National Security Advisor (NSA) Govind Bharadwaj (Paresh Rawal), based on India’s NSA Ajit Doval, espouses the film’s core philosophy: “Yeh naya Hindustan hai… yeh ghar mei ghusega bhi, aur marega bhi (This is a new India… it will get into your house and kill you too.)” This dialogue was later used in Modi’s 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign and is also referenced in ‘Dhurandhar’, where R Madhavan plays the role of Intelligence Bureau director Ajay Sanyal, a character based, again, on Doval.
Like other pro-Hindutva films — ‘Padmaavat’ (2018), ‘Animal’ (2023), ‘Chhaava’ (2025), to name a few — ‘Dhurandhar’ also uses the narrative strategy of the spectacle. As Nandini Ramnath, the film critic for Scroll.in writes: “A considerable stretch of the staggering 214-minute film is no different from gangland chronicles led by swaggering, aphorism-dripping men.” The film is spectacularly violent on purpose. French philosopher Guy Debord, in his book ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (1967), draws upon Karl Marx’s idea of consumer fetishism to argue that in late capitalist societies, lived experiences are increasingly replaced with representation as social relations operate through images. For Debord, post-World War II European society was overrun by mass media that used images to manipulate the public, distracting it from more pressing social concerns with entertainment tailored for passive consumption. Debord’s ideas have been used to pejoratively connect media spectacles to authoritarian — or, at least, undemocratic — regimes.
A spectacle’s power resides in its solemnity. Take, for instance, the films of Leni Riefenstahl, often described as Adolf Hitler’s favourite filmmaker. Riefenstahl’s films, such as ‘Triumph of the Will’ (1935), ‘Olympia Part One’ (1938) and ‘Olympia Part Two’ (1938), draw heavily upon German mythology to portray the Führer as the national leader. Their use of photography, music, narration, and other cinematic techniques attempts to create an aesthetic experience that Immanuel Kant would have described as “sublime” — one that overwhelms the senses and inspires awe. But compare these films to Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’ (1940), which uses slapstick and even physical humour to erode the sublimity around Hitler’s carefully manufactured public persona.
Film scholar Eyal Peretz, in a 2017 paper, argues: “Both Chaplin and Hitler understood the screen as an arena in relation to which the question of the modern city crowd is raised. … However, whereas Chaplin’s project is a revolutionary and liberatory one, allowing the crowds to conceive of themselves as part of an unprecedented democratic project, Hitler’s project cancels the freedom of the crowds and submits them to a ruling fascist identity.” The innumerable spy memes on social media do to ‘Dhurandhar’ what Chaplin’s film did to Riefenstahl’s projects. They burst its bubble of solemnity. Drawing upon Gen-Z or Gen Alpha slang, I call it the 6-7-ing of its spectacularity.
For the uninitiated, 6-7 is another meme that emerged on the Internet in 2025 and was selected, in October of last year, by Dictionary.com as its word of the year. Originating in American rapper Skrill’s song ‘Doot Doot’, the slang “6 7” (pronounced “six seven”, and not “sixty-seven”) grew into a cultural phenomenon, with millions of reels, but also widespread offline use, especially by Gen Alpha (young people born after 2010-11). Its meaning is ambiguous, often nonsensical, and older people like me would like to relate it to the wider cultural phenomenon of “brain rot” — the Oxford word of the year for 2024. For the uninitiated, “brain rot” means the perceived loss of mental faculties due to overconsumption of low-quality online content.
What the flood of spy reels reveals is not a crisis of national security but a crisis of seriousness. Spectacular films like ‘Dhurandhar’ attempt to inspire awe, but the internet responds with parody, inadvertently performing a democratic function. Memes refuse reverence, puncture authority and turn the carefully choreographed nationalist masculinity into farce. The Indian spy getting caught with a biryani reference is funny precisely because the joke exposes the brittleness of these cinematic ideas of identity. In the age of endless reels and brain rot, even jingoism cannot remain solemn for too long.
(Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist)
(Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)