Dhurandhar: Storytelling In The Age Of Restless Viewers

If the stories are food for the mind then our digestive system has changed.
If they are a piece of art, our gaze has altered.
This calls for a change not in stories, but in the grammar of storytelling so that it can cut through the deluge and gluttony and force people to savour, appreciate and re-visit it.
That is what the creators of Taskaree or Dhurandhar are trying, points out Vanita Kohli-Khandekar.

Neeraj Pandey's Taskaree: The Smuggler's Web (Netflix) is a thriller set at an airport. The story is simple -- honest Customs officers fighting within and outside the system to stop smugglers from bringing in gold, handbags, watches and drugs, among other things.

But the way it is told is unusual. It moves in a staccato fashion, the images feel too bright, the faces feel photoshopped, as if you are watching a bunch of short videos.

And some of the flashbacks are anime-style. Soon after its release in January this year, Taskaree raced to the top of the global charts on Netflix and stayed there for three weeks.

Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar, one of the biggest hits in recent times, also employs an unusual, eight-chapter narrative to tell the story of spies.

Note that these are not unusual stories like, say, Severance or Pluribus on Apple TV are. They are simply stories told in a new way aesthetically and otherwise.

They offer a glimmer of hope to storytellers grappling with a new audience shaped by the deluge of content in the last decade or so.

Consider this. India now has over 900 TV channels, thousands of newspapers and over 860 radio channels. We make more than 1,600 films in a normal year.

It has been over a decade since streaming took off and six years since short videos did.

The last two years have added micro-dramas to the list. With more than 60 video streaming apps and a dozen music streaming ones, there is now an obscenely rich spread on tap.

Here's a sense of the scale: YouTube uploads 500 hours of video every minute. This column only talks of the 523 million Indians who use broadband Internet-connected laptops, TVs or phones, making for an over-served, pampered market.

Now add gluttony. We skip from cat and dog videos to web series to a friend's wedding dance video to one on cooking udon noodles to a full-length feature film with equal ease.

This constant flitting across genres, languages, countries and cultures, on demand, has meant a neurological rewiring that researchers across the world are studying.

One study finds that heavy screen users have an attention span of 8 seconds, less than that of a goldfish's 9 seconds.

How do you tell a story to this audience?

If the stories are food for the mind then our digestive system has changed. If they are a piece of art, our gaze has altered.

This calls for a change not in stories, but in the grammar of storytelling so that it can cut through the deluge and gluttony and force people to savour, appreciate and re-visit it.

That is what the creators of Taskaree or Dhurandhar, among many others, are trying. The economics of the business depends on their ability to do that.

There are two footnotes here.

One, this is not only about the amount of time spent on media. Online consumption (news, entertainment and social media) in India was 2 hours a day in October 2025, according to Comscore data.

Add TV (just under 4 hours), other media, and the figure is closer to 7-8 hours a day for over one-third of Indians. That has been the average for a few years now.

Two, this is also not about the "quality of content". From Kohrra (Netflix) and The Family Man (Amazon Prime Video) to Freedom at Midnight (SonyLIV), Indian studios have been making world-class shows.

And movies too. Ikkis, Manjummel Boys, 12th Fail, or Laapata Ladies stand out.

This is about the need for a new grammar in filmmaking or storytelling. It comes up every few decades.

Yash Chopra changed it in 1965 when he made Waqt. India's first multi-starrer had four concurrent stories that converged in the end.

In an era when stories were largely linear, two character tropes, Waqt cut through the clutter to become a huge hit.

Soon the multi-starrer lost and found theme became formulaic. In the eighties, realism became the way to tell a story in Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya or Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.

Their tone and tenor was grittier, more real than the mediocre movies that the era saw. The stories were the same -- friendship, justice, love and family.

Jump to post-2001 and the decade or so after Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai. The look of films became fresher, the stories more real, and production values rose.

From Kaminey and Rang De Basanti to Kal Ho Na Ho and Chak De India, the colours seemed brighter, happier.

Each of these changes was triggered by economic and social factors. For instance, the rise of multiplexes in the early part of the millennium.

The well-heeled audiences that had eschewed theatres had been watching loads of home videos and satellite television started coming back. But their sensibilities had changed.

India had seen a very happy decade of economic liberalisation -- and the colours and brightness simply reflected that, much like the darkness and economic misery of the eighties and the lack of media choices were reflected in the films then.

Similarly, the deluge that is our media and entertainment world now is reflected in the falling success rate and rising costs of films and shows.

Hopefully, a new way of storytelling will be able to talk to this frazzled, restless viewer.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff