3 min readMumbaiMar 23, 2026 03:46 PM IST
It was Arjun Rampal’s 36th birthday. He had set out with his friends to celebrate the occasion at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Colaba, Mumbai. But they decided to take a pitstop at another luxury hotel in Worli where a few of his friends had put up. As they ordered the first drink at the bar, a bomb went off at Mahim, which even rattled the glass of their hotel. “What the hell was that?,” wondered Arjun and his friends. It was the start of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008.
Seventeen years later, Rampal would be seen playing a fictional mastermind behind those attacks in Aditya Dhar’s blockbuster spy thriller Dhurandhar. He essayed Major Iqbal, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief in Pakistan, who’s seen celebrating while watching the live broadcast of the 26/11 terror attacks in Pakistan. He also reprised the role in the sequel, Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge, which released in cinemas earlier this month.
At the Hello! Hall of Fame Awards, held in Mumbai on Sunday three days after the film’s release, Arjun Rampal revealed how Dhurandhar was his “revenge” for the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks ruining his birthday back in 2008. “Our phones were ringing and everybody said there was some gang war that had broken out in Colaba,” he recalled. The hotel they were drinking at was cordoned off within 30 minutes. But the management “very gracefully” gave them a suite, but asked them to stay indoors as the city wasn’t safe outside that evening. “And on my birthday, I saw the horrors of 26/11 play out,” added Arjun.
Rampal was so traumatized by what he witnessed that evening on his 36th birthday that while driving back home the next morning, he had to “stop thrice because I thought I was going to be sick.” Years later, when Aditya Dhar narrated him the script of Dhurandhar, particularly the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks sequence, the actor knew instinctively that he had to do the film. “I knew I was going to have my revenge, and that’s what I did with Dhurandhar,” said Rampal.
In the first part, Arjun Rampal’s Major Iqbal is seen conspiring with Liyari gangster and weapon supplier Rahman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna) to execute the terror attacks in Mumbai, most notably on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Colaba, as Indian spy Jaskirat Singh (Ranveer Singh) looks on as his alias and their trusted aide Hamza. After eliminating Rahman Dakait at the end of Dhurandhar, he completely infiltrates Pakistan’s terror network.
The sequel sees Hamza avenge such acts of terrorism on Indian soil, particularly those orchestrated by Arjun Rampal’s Major Iqbal. Apart from both of them, Sanjay Dutt, R Madhavan, Sara Arjun and Rakesh Bedi also reprise their roles from the first part. Dhurandhar 2, co-produced by Aditya Dhar and Lokesh Dhar’s B62 Studios and Jyoti Deshpande-led Jio Studios, has already become the fastest Hindi film to cross the Rs 400 crore mark at the domestic box office and the Rs 700 crore mark worldwide.
