I HAVE no memory of ever watching a Rambo movie though one did enjoy wrestler-actor Dara Singh taking on the ferocious dragon with bare hands to save the delicate Mumtaz from becoming its meal. Likewise, one couldn’t progress beyond the first 10 minutes of what may be called the poor man’s version of Hollywood’s Rambo, the Indian movie Dhurandhar. What one could figure out about Sylvester Stallone’s legend of Rambo was that wherever the sullen hulk travelled to upstage or bomb America’s enemies, in truth America lost that war. Rambo travelled to Vietnam and Afghanistan, for example, to carry out his now clichéd and much copied daredevil missions. In both countries the US military suffered humbling defeats. Rambo, according to write-ups from the 1970s, also went to Burma with similar outcomes. Burma threw itself in a tighter embrace of America’s leading rival, China. Dhurandhar, too, comes across as the product of a nationalist reverie being thwarted.

The brooding Indian Rambo exudes a similarly cultivated aloofness as he goes about single-handedly wrecking his nation’s enemies in Karachi’s feuding districts. My instinct is that the compliment is mutual. Pakistanis have their own genre of movies and narratives diminishing India military like Hollywood movies did with Germans.

It was on Aug 14, 1997, one remembers clearly, when a documentary on a TV set in a Lahore hotel showed Pakistan’s freedom struggle against the twin challenge of predominantly Hindu Congress Party and British colonialism, the former being the steeper climb. In 1945 in the documentary,........

© Dawn