India, Dec. 5 -- "Beta main intelligence mein kaam karta hoon, circus mein nahi"... As I stepped out of the theatre after Dhurandhar, this Manoj Bajpayee gem from the latest season of The Family Man was the only line ringing in my ears. He utters it when his son asks why he doesn't have code names like Tiger, since he's a spy, and it lands because it cuts through the mythmaking.

We have spent years watching spies depicted as superhumans, after all. Dhurandhar pushes back against all of that. The question is: does it work?

The story begins with the longest hijack in Indian aviation history, the Kandahar episode of 1999. The Indian government is rattled, and things only escalate with the Parliament attack in 2001. The intelligence communi...