#aalam

This is a fan theory written in appreciation of the Dhurandhar films and Gaurav Gera's performance, which wrecked me. All historical context is documented and sourced: RAW's founding mandate and the Bangladesh operation are a matter of public record per former RAW official B. Raman's writings; the Balochistan insurgency of 1973-77 is extensively documented; inland groundwater salinity in UP and the broader Indo-Gangetic belt is covered in peer-reviewed hydrochemical studies. The interpretation of Mohammed Alam is entirely mine, and Aditya Dhar probably did not intend all of this, but I choose to believe he did.

I need to talk about Alam Bhai.

Specifically, I need to talk about two details that the Dhurandhar films throw at you almost in passing — details that, on the surface, seem totally unconnected, and that some people on the internet have actually flagged as a continuity error. I want to make the case that they are not a continuity error.

I want to make the case that they are, in fact, the most carefully constructed piece of characterisation in both films, and that if you sit with them long enough against the actual documented history of what RAW was doing in the 1970s, an entire life assembles itself.

The two details:

One:Alam Bhai drinks salty tea. In Dhurandhar, he tells Hamza that hamare yahan khara pani aata hai — the water where he comes from has always tasted like this. Hamza tries the tea and nearly chokes.

Two:Dhurandhar: The Revenge tells us, almost as an aside, that before he was an Indian spy handler in Karachi, Alam Bhai was a pickpocket from Bareilly.

Someone on X pointed out the obvious problem: "If Aalam was a pickpocket from Bareilly, then why did he say 'hamare yahan khara pani aata hai'? I don't think there is any saltwater river/lake in or around Bareilly." They tagged it #peakdetailing missed and moved on.

I went and looked this up. I went and looked a lot of things up. And I think what's actually happening here is something much more interesting than a writing oversight.

Bear with me.

So the X post assumes that hamare yahan means Bareilly. But does it? Alam says where I come from, not where I grew up working as a pickpocket. These are potentially two very different places. And here's the thing about Bareilly it's a city, it's a major railway junction, it's exactly the kind of transit hub where a young man who grew up somewhere else entirely might end up running pockets on the platforms.

The wallets were in Bareilly. That doesn't mean Bareilly was home.

So where is home? Where in India do people actually grow up drinking brackish, mineral-heavy groundwater?

Okay, this is where I fell down a research hole for an embarrassing amount of time. It turns out that inland groundwater salinity — the kind that makes borewell and handpump water taste mineral and slightly salty — is extensively documented across UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, and the broader Indo-Gangetic belt.

A 2020 study published in the Journal of the Geological Society of India on the Ramganga aquifer specifically (which covers Bareilly district, for what it's worth) found that nearly half of all groundwater samples in the region fall under "poor" or "very poor" quality categories, with high TDS and salinity flagged at multiple sites. A broader review in Environmental Science & Technology documents inland salinity as a "growing problem" across UP, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Bihar — not from seawater, but from rock weathering, irrigation overextraction, and the simple geological composition of the aquifer.

What this means practically: in the 1960s and 1970s, before RO systems, before water trucking reached rural areas, before any state intervention got to these communities, poor villages across a very wide stretch of northern India were simply drinking whatever the ground gave them. And what the ground gave them was, in many places, mineral-heavy and vaguely saline. Rich families found alternatives. Poor families drank from handpumps and their palates adapted.

So when Alam says hamare yahan khara pani aata hai, I don't think he's describing a saltwater lake. I think he's describing the specific, ordinary, invisible poverty of a village where nobody ever fixed the water supply.

He left that village at some point ,we don't know when, we don't know why, the film never names it and ended up in Bareilly. Already displaced once. Already operating somewhere he wasn't from. Already practised, in other words, in being somewhere he didn't belong.

Now: The Pickpocket Question

Why Bareilly specifically?

Bareilly Junction is one of the most important railway stations in UP. It sits on the trunk line connecting Delhi to the hills — which means it has historically been a transit point for pilgrims going to Haridwar and Rishikesh, soldiers rotating to northern postings, traders, students, and everyone moving between the plains and the mountains. Constant crowds. Constant distraction. Constant opportunity for someone with quick hands and a talent for reading people to make a living.

Rohilkhand — the region Bareilly is the capital of — also has one of the largest Muslim populations in UP. Bareilly itself is home to the Dargah Ala Hazrat and is one of the most significant centres of the Barelvi tradition in South Asia. A youn man growing up in the mixed neighbourhoods around the station, or coming in from a village in the region, would have been code-switching between Hindi, Urdu, and the particular Bareillvi inflection of both before he was a teenager. He would have known how to talk to everyone. How to blend into any crowd on that platform — pilgrims, traders, soldiers, students, all of them.

This is not irrelevant. This is, I would argue, exactly the profile that RAW was looking for.

What RAW Was Actually Built to Do

A key member of the Indian Intelligence Community, R&AW's mandate includes surveillance of foreign politico-military developments that directly affect India's foreign policy, counterproliferation and counterterrorism.[5][6]

this is the part where the history gets genuinely fascinating and I cannot stress enough that all of this is documented.

RAW was founded in September 1968 under its first chief, Rameshwar Nath Kao, with Indira Gandhi's direct patronage. Kao laid out two founding priorities explicitly. The first was conventional: collect intelligence on Pakistan and China. The second was something else entirely: conduct covert action in East Pakistan.

What that meant, in practice, was that India's external intelligence agency was built from the ground up with a mandate to break Pakistan apart. And it worked. By 1971, RAW was training Mukti Bahini guerrillas in Indian refugee camps, providing intelligence and equipment support, facilitating the political conditions — and in December of that year, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

The operation is now openly discussed by former RAW officials including B. Raman, who served as head of the Counter-Terrorism division, who has written about it frankly.

Here is the thing. After 1971, Indira Gandhi and Kao looked at what they had just accomplished and then looked west.

West Pakistan — the Pakistan that remained — was already fracturing. The Balochistan insurgency began in 1973 when Bhutto dismissed the elected provincial government and sent 80,000 soldiers in. It ran until 1977, killed thousands, and eventually pushed around 30,000 Baloch fighters into Afghanistan. Sindh had its own simmering discontents.

And Karachi — the country's great port city, its commercial capital — was a pressure cooker. Baloch, Sindhi, Mohajir, Pashtun communities, all competing for the same political oxygen, the same economic resources, in the same dense urban space. The fractures were real. They were deep. And from the then Prime Minister's strategic perspective, post-Bangladesh, they were opportunity.

It is now documented — including in academic research on RAW's historical operations — that during the 1970s, India began building human assets inside Baloch and Sindhi separatist-adjacent communities in Pakistan. Not soldiers. Not diplomats. People who could disappear into the fabric of Karachi. People who could build relationships across years, decades, feeding intelligence back to India and, where useful, quietly feeding the fires of discontent that Indira Gandhi needed kept burning at a manageable temperature.

This is, I believe, the mission Mohammed Alam was originally recruited for. Not to handle Indian spies. That came much, much later.

The Arrest That Wasn't

Here's what I think happened to a young Alam Bhai, and I want to be clear that this is my inference from the historical context — the film doesn't spell this out — but I think it fits the evidence better than anything else.

He was picked up at Bareilly station. Maybe arrested, maybe just detained, maybe just taken for a conversation in a room that wasn't quite a police station by a man who wasn't quite a police officer. This would have been the late 1970s — let's say around 1978-1980, given that Gaurav Gera was born in 1973 and Alam reads as being in his early-to-mid sixties during the events of the film, which places his birth around 1960 and his early twenties in that window.

And what RAW was looking for in this era. Not soldiers. Not graduates. Not anyone with a file, a record of government service, a traceable identity. What Kao's RAW needed for long-term deep cover in Pakistan were people who were already invisible — people who had learned, by necessity, to move through crowds unnoticed, to read strangers quickly, to be trusted without being remembered.

People whose lives had not left a paper trail because the state had never been interested enough in them to create one. People, in other words, exactly like a young man from a poor UP village, with no formal education on record, no employment history, no family connections to any institution — who had been surviving for years by reading people at a railway junction and taking things they would not notice were gone until he was already somewhere else.

The profile was not incidental. It was the point.

The man across the table from him would have explained, with the particular efficiency of someone who has done this before, that there was an option. The option involved going somewhere far from Bareilly. It involved becoming someone else. It involved work that could not be discussed, in service of objectives that would not be explained to him in full.

Now think about what Alam was weighing against that offer. He was in his early twenties. He had left — or been pushed from — a village that couldn't give him a future. He had no trade, no patron, no education, no land. He had been lifting wallets at a train station, which meant every day was one bad moment away from the kind of arrest that didn't end in a quiet conversation but in the system swallowing him whole. He had no one to call. Nowhere to go back to that wasn't, in some fundamental way, already a dead end.

He said yes. Of course he said yes. Not because the offer was good. Because the alternative — the one where he stayed, kept running pockets, kept waiting for the arrest that didn't come with an option attached — was not a life. It was just a slow version of the same ending.

The state was not doing him a favour. The state was recognising, with cold-eyed practicality, that a certain kind of person only becomes available for this work when desperation has already done most of the recruitment for you. RAW didn't find Alam in spite of who he was. It found him because of it. Because the village with the salty water and the years at the station had already stripped away every other option.

All RAW had to do was show up and offer one more.

Pickpocketing at a busy railway station already teaches you: Surveillance and counter-surveillance: you are constantly reading who is watching, where the plainclothes police are, who is paying attention to you and who isn't. You develop a paranoia that is actually just hypervigilance. RAW trains this deliberately. Alam already had it as muscle memory. Crowd psychology:you know exactly how to engineer the moment of distraction. You understand how people's attention works, where it goes under stress, what makes a person look left while you're on their right. This is the core of any field operative's toolkit. Physical composure : a pickpocket who looks nervous is a caught pickpocket. You learn to keep your face, your walk, your hands completely calm while doing something that should make your heart race. This is what intelligence training calls "legend maintenance" — holding your cover under pressure. Reading people in seconds: who is distracted, who is alert, who is carrying what where, who is alone, who is in a group. Alam could profile a mark in thirty seconds at a railway platform. In Lyari that becomes: who is ISI-adjacent, who is safe to talk to, who is being watched. Exit planning :every pickpocket knows three ways out of every situation before they move. Standard tradecraft. Operating without leaving traces:no records, no witnesses, no evidence. His whole livelihood depended on this.

What He Was Sent to Do in Lyari

Lyari, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was not yet the full-blown gang war zone it would become. It was a dense, working-class, predominantly Baloch and Makrani neighbourhood — Karachi's oldest — with deep cultural roots and genuine political grievances. Exactly the kind of community where a patient, trusted insider could do the slow work of intelligence cultivation that RAW's post-Bangladesh strategy required.

A small business was the obvious cover. Cash, foot traffic, legitimate reason to be present in conversations across all social strata of the neighbourhood. Labourers, political workers, low-level criminals, police contacts — everyone needed somewhere to sit and drink something and talk. And the man behind the counter would have been, over years and then decades, simply there. Unremarkable. Trusted. Forgotten the moment you left, remembered warmly the next time you arrived.

I want to stress what "decades" means here. If Alam was deployed around 1980 and the events of Dhurandhar take place in the early-to-mid 2010s (consistent with the Operation Lyari timeline, which ran from 2012-2023), then Alam was in Karachi for thirty-something years before Hamza walked through his door. He arrived with a mission that was, in the strategic terms of Indira Gandhi's RAW, about cultivating Baloch and Sindhi separatist networks.

He would have still been operating under that mandate when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984. When Rajiv Gandhi came and went. When the Khalistan crisis consumed RAW's bandwidth through the 1980s. When the Cold War ended. When the nuclear tests happened. When Kargil happened. When the whole geopolitical context of his original mission had quietly ceased to exist.

Nobody flew to Karachi to tell him it was over. He received new instructions as they came. He adapted as directed. The juice shop stayed open.

He became, over time, a general-purpose asset. A courier. A facilitator. A handler. Roles that accreted onto him across thirty years because he was there and he was trusted and institutional memory in any intelligence organisation is a kind of gravity — you use what you have, what you know works, what has survived.

The Tea, Again

And here is the thing about the salty tea that I keep coming back to.

In Karachi, it would have needed no explanation whatsoever. Pakistan has its own robust salted tea tradition — noon chai, the Kashmiri pink tea made with gunpowder leaves, milk, baking soda, and salt, is consumed several times daily across Kashmir and the mountain communities and carries associations of highland, of cold weather, of a certain kind of rootedness in a particular geography. In a port city built from migrant communities from every corner of the subcontinent, an older man with a preference for salt in his tea would have read as regional. As particular. As himself and nothing more.

But what it actually was — and this is the piece that I think is quietly devastating if you read it this way — is a habit so old that it predates his cover identity by decades. It is older than Hamza. It is older than Lyari. It is the taste of water from a nameless village in UP that the film never identifies because it never needed to, because Alam himself probably stopped saying its name at some point in the 1980s when it became clear that saying it was a form of risk he couldn't afford.

He is in his sixties. He has been someone else for longer than he was ever himself. And the one thing that survived all of it, the one habit that thirty years of being Mohammed Alam the Karachi juice shop owner never overrode, is the way he makes his tea.

Hamare yahan khara pani aata hai.

He was never really from Bareilly. He was never really from Lyari. He was from wherever the water tastes like that — a village that policy forgot, that the state never fixed, that he was taken from when he was young and brought back from only in the way you carry a flavour in your body long after the place that made it has become something you can no longer afford to remember.

Nobody interrogates old habits in old men. This is probably the only honest thing Alam ever got to say out loud, in a life that contained almost nothing else that was honest.

DISCLAIMER: disclaimer: this is not political propaganda. i am 17 years old. my prefrontal cortex is still under construction and i just think morally questionable men with guns and unresolved trauma make for compelling fiction.

Yaad hai kuch bhi humari, Kanhaiyya?

Kanhaiyya was the epitome of a thief. 

The loose trousers, now ripped at his knees? Begged. The flashy T-shirt which had lost its colours? Borrowed. The Motorola MicroTAC phone in his pocket? Stolen. 

Over the years, theft had become more of a habit than a skill. The city of Bareilly provided a buzzing site for it, filled with locals and tourists who came in search of the jhumka of Bareilly. Some of them would go home and realize that they had lost one of their belongings.

But, Kanhaiyya was a soft-hearted boy.

The elders of the village had accepted him as their collective son. They had often condemned his unethical ways. They had tried to reform him, but all in vain. He used to joke around with them whenever they scolded him for his thievery. Especially in front of Vikas Baba who was a priest in a nearby Krishna temple.

“Tumhara Kanha kare toh natkhat, aur ye Kanhaiyya kare toh jurm!”

He used to flex whatever he had stolen- sometimes a gold luxury watch,other times a wallet filled with cash, rarely a phone, and used to argue fervently, without meaning any of it. 

“Ab jaisa naam, waisa kaam!”

Vikas Baba then used to run behind him with a stick despite his weak knees.

“Bhagwan maakhanchor the! Paaketmaar nahi!”

Kanhaiyya’s laughter echoed loud in the temple’s courtyard. 

One summer morning, as Dadi sat under the shadow of the banyan tree enjoying the kulfi that Kanhaiyya had bought for them, her eyes narrowed at him. She clicked her tongue in disapproval of what he had become.

“Ye chori-chakari karke tujhe kya milta hai?”

Kanhaiyya threw a disinterested glance at her and muttered.

“Do time ka khana, kapde aur ek makan.”

He had had this conversation many times.

“Woh toh mai bhi tujhe de doon!”

“Aur jab aapka beta aapko Banaras bula lega? Tab kya? Bheek maangne pe utar jau?”

Dadi knew she would never get invited to her son’s house now that her daughter-in-law did not like her interference. All she wanted now was that Kanhaiyya, her son not in blood but bond, would make a good life for himself. 

“Ye chori ki cheezein kabhi tikti nahi hai! Achaa kaam nahi hai, Kanhaiyya!”

There was a long pause. If not her scoldings, if not her lectures, then at least the faith of his dead parents could budge him. That was what Dadi thought.

 She bent down to caress the back of his head, and asked.

“Tere maa- baap tujhe swarg se dekhenge, toh kya sochenge tere baare mein? Kaisi zindagi banayi hain tune apne liye?”

Kanhaiyya knew nothing of his parents. Except for the tale that Dadi had told him once. It sounded like a poorly made-up sad story to his teenage self. His mother had died while giving birth to him. His father, a patient of terminal illness, had wept and wept in the hospital. He had lamented that there would be no one to take care of his newborn son.

Dadi was there at that time. She had assured his father that if he ever needed someone to look after his son, she would be there. Only eight years later, his dying father had found Dadi’s address in Bareilly. He left his young son at the station and headed straight to the hospital. When Kanhaiyya turned up at the doorstep of the scribbled address, he had found the door locked. As it turned out, Dadi had gone to Banaras to stay with her son. 

Poor Kanhaiyya was left to fend for himself all alone in this unknown city. He slept outside Dadi’s house at night and wandered around during the daytime. It was then, that he had taken to stealing. It started with food. Rotis, sweets and prasad. Soon he was stealing money when he realized that it brought greater returns than anything else.

Dadi returned a whole year later. The old woman who lived alone in her shabby house had recognized this boy in an instant. She took him in her arms, and apologized for her absence. It was her who had given him the name- Kanhaiyya. She used to say that he was in Gokul now, and that she was his Yashoda Maiya. 

Like any other person, he should have felt grief at the thought of his long gone parents. But he felt nothing. No matter how much he tried. He gave a slight shrug, and answered.

“Jo sochna hai woh soch lenge. Mujhe toh ye bhi nahi maloom woh kaun the. Yaad bhi nahi kaise dikhte the.”

Dadi sighed heavily, her heart had always ached for this boy orphaned too early.

“Woh chhod! Kal ko tu shaadi karega! Tere biwi bachhe honge! Tu kya chahta hai? Tere bachhe tujhe aise yaad rakhe?”

Kanhaiyya was getting irritated. He didn’t want to get married. Or have kids. It would be considered a success if he was able to die with a respectable profession to his name. He threw aside the stick of the kulfi and stood up abruptly. His voice came louder than he intended it to.

“Koi mujhe yaad rakhe ya na rakhe, mujhe koi farak nahi padhta!”

“Koi aur yaad rakhe na rakhe, bas tu mujhe yaad rakh! Mujhe achaa lagega!”

Aalam remembered the words he had spoken before sending Hamza back outside. Now as Omar grabbed him by the throat and demanded who else was with him in this espionage, he waited eagerly for death. Although he knew, it would not come to him so kindly. Maybe now was the time that he might have to pay back for his sins, for all his thefts. 

When Hamza walked in a moment later, Aalam looked at him. Even as the blood from the cuts he had made himself seeped into his eyes, it could not hide the pride that flickered in Aalam’s gaze for Hamza. Jaskirat.

The day Hamza Ali Mazari had successfully killed Rehman Dakait and had made everyone believe that he had tried to be the saviour once again, Aalam knew this boy would go places. And by places, he meant Lyari, Karachi and the rotten terrorism inside Pakistan. 

His job would be done then. It might have been considered done that day as well.All he had to do was bring Hamza till here, lead his way up to Lyari’s throne. Teach him patience and give him tactics until he could handle everything on his own. He was Hamza’s charioteer. Saarthi.

Hamza had it in him to become Arjuna. Hamza would be the Mahanayak. Aalam had done his job as his Krishna. 

He wasn’t expecting Hamza to raise his gun at him.The first bullet hit him and a sharp pain shot through his abdomen, blood splattering on his kameez. He barely registered the second and third bullets, until all he could feel was warm blood seeping out and the strength in his body giving out. 

As his body fell limp in Omar’s hold, he thought of the favour Hamza had done for him. A favour he hadn’t even asked for, a favour he wouldn’t be able to repay in this lifetime. The favour of death. A peaceful one at that. He knew it must not have been easy for him to press the trigger, but he had done so.

It was as if this Kanhaiyya had whispered in his Arjun’s ear. 

“Yudh karna tumhara kartavya hai, Parth! Shastra uthao!”

As his breaths shallowed in his burning chest and darkness enveloped around him, he heard Hamza’s low voice. Jala do inki laashe. Burn their bodies.

Not only had his Hamza given him a peaceful death, but also a ceremonious funeral. In his last breath, Kanhaiyya felt grateful that his immoral life tainted with thefts and lowly crimes had attained a legitimate end with a sacrifice for his motherland. 

Months later, when Hamza travelled to Dubai for his meeting with Sanyal Sir, he carried the cremated ashes of Aalam Bhai and Pinda with him. He requested Sushant Bansal to scatter Aalam Bhai’s ashes in the Ganga river.

Aalam Bhai never got the chance to tell the story of his life. But Hamza remembered that he was from Bareilly. Flowing through the Ramganga river, he hoped that his ashes would reach the banks at Bareilly and Aalam Bhai would reunite with his motherland once again.

Pairings: Naieem Baloch x Y/n

Summary: Just your luck. The boy you thought was meek was actually the son of the biggest gangster in Lyaari.

Disclaimer: This is not based on the real life gangsters and terrorists. This is based on the characters portrayed by the actors in the dhurandhar franchise directed by aditya dharr

"Mai Pathan hu." She said.

The boy blinked and smiled "Aur mai baloch."

She pulled her hand and was about to walk away when he said "Arey kaha jaa rahi ho dost banke canteen jaane ki deal thi na?"

"Haa but mai Pathaan hu aur tum Baloch."

PART 1

Didn't realise that the sad song they played when Aalam dies is called Kanhaiya...

A devotional song in braj bhasha because Aalam was from Shri Krishna's bhoomi and likely a Krishna bhakt, upholding his Dharma with a sagacious patience, living among Vidharmis. His Veergati sent him to Vaikunth Loka to his Krishna's Lotus feet.

He lived up to the standards of the Bhagwat Geeta to the fullest.

everyone is a lesbian

yes even u