Udta Teer director fine with Dhurandhar parallels, not reverse

Two new spy films have Hindi film fans doing the same maths: one hero heads from India to Pakistan, another comes the other way, and suddenly the release calendar looks like a double feature with very different tones. Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar follows an Indian operative through Pakistan’s underworld. Aakash A Kaushik’s comedy Udta Teer, starring Ayushmann Khurrana as a Pakistani character, plays the India-Pakistan spy game for laughs. The side-by-side reading has become so common that some viewers have labelled Udta Teer the “reverse Dhurandhar“.

An old joke between brothers

Kaushik says the public conversation is really a private joke that got bigger. He and Dhar are close friends and were writing their individual spy stories around the same time. “Your guy is going there from here, and my guy is coming here from there,” he would tell Dhar, long before audiences joined in.

That friendship is why he cannot work up any defensiveness about the comparisons. He told India Today he loves Dhurandhar and sees the parallel as obvious. When he is being compared, he says, it is with “my brother’s film.” What he does not accept is the reverse framing. “I have never perceived it that way,” he said, adding that knowing the material from the beginning kept it from ever feeling like a mirror image.

Why Udta Teer invents its own spy agency

Kaushik also made a deliberate choice about where his comedy unfolds. Rather than set the film inside RAW, the team created the Counter Terrorism Squad, or CTS. The fictional agency gives Udta Teer room to find humour in its invented world without making a real Indian intelligence setup the punchline.

• Fictional CTS: the comedy can be sharp without naming a real agency.
• Cantonment roots: Kaushik grew up around his father’s Army friends.
• Respect first: he says he could never portray India’s forces negatively.

Several friends from the armed forces have already watched the film and called him to say they enjoyed it. Kaushik also kept the project deliberately understated before release, trusting private screening reactions over pre-release buzz.

A delayed debut that finally found its audience

Udta Teer did not reach theatres without setbacks. The production was delayed by the death of actor Mukul Dev, and the extensive VFX work took longer than planned. The original goal was to finish before Ayushmann moved on to Thamma, but the extra schedule made that impossible.

Kaushik describes the mood as frustration rather than fear. He does not blame any individual, and says the situation had to be lived with. “Whenever the film arrives, it will do its job,” he said, adding that he always believed it would “arrive late, but it would arrive well.” That is exactly how he sees it now that appreciation is coming in.

Source: India Today