Behind Every Behaviour: NLP Insights from Dhurandhar (Chapter 7)

Lights! Camera! NLP! · The Dhurandhar Arc, Chapter 7 of 10.

Previously, we descended through the modelling iceberg, layer by layer, ability to belief. Today, we turn the lens on the men on the other side. Rehman, Iqbal, Aslam. Three faces of the antagonist, and two NLP presuppositions that are almost always misread.

(For the full arc, visit Lights! Camera! NLP!.)

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Let’s examine two of NLP’s oldest presuppositions.

1. Every behaviour has a positive intention.

2. People are not their behaviour.

Read them again, because they are almost always misread.

NLP Presupposition	What It Says	What It Does Not Mean
Every behaviour has a positive intention	The actor, in their own map of the world, is trying to get something they value. Safety. Power. Belonging. Significance. Survival.	That the behaviour is good, right, or excusable.
People are not their behaviour	The refusal to reduce a human being to the worst thing they have done, so you can continue to think clearly about them.	That you have to forgive, accept, or stay in the room with them.

These are not moral instructions. They are operator instructions.

And in Dhurandhar, Hamza has to work with men who have done terrible things.

 

Three Men on the Other Side

Rehman. Iqbal. Aslam.

A gangster. A major. A police officer.

Three men whose behaviour, in the real world, would be met with a bullet or a courtroom. And rightly so.

But the dhurandhar cannot afford to only hate them. Hate is a closed file. And a closed file cannot be read.

Watch how the film writes each of them.

Rehman Dakait is not drawn as a cartoon villain. He is a man who has built his identity on raw power and loyalty. His behaviour says kill. Underneath, his positive intention is control, belonging, a circle where he is visibly irreplaceable. The dhurandhar notes this and uses it. A man who needs to feel irreplaceable can be flattered. Can be drawn into over-reach. Can be lured into a mistake.

Major Iqbal is not drawn as simple evil either. He is an institutional man. His positive intention is duty, loyalty to his flag, a chain of command he believes in with full conviction. He has his own Balidaan Parmo Dharam, pointed in the opposite direction. The dhurandhar reads this and realises: you cannot break Iqbal with a better argument. You have to either match his discipline, or find where his loyalty is frayed.

SP Aslam’s positive intention is often as ordinary as keeping his career alive, not being crushed between two machines. The dhurandhar does not treat him as a monster. He treats him as a pressure point.

Three different positive intentions. Three different readings. Three different moves.

If Jaskirat had walked in with a single label, “they are all bad men”, he would have died in their company.

 

Understand the Behaviour. Never Endorse It.

Here is where the NLP principle earns its moral weight.

Understanding positive intention is not the same as approving the action.

A man who bombs a market is not less guilty because his positive intention is his twisted version of loyalty. He is still fully accountable for what his hands did.

But in order to stop him, catch him, or outthink him, you have to know what is driving him. That is not empathy as indulgence. That is empathy as tradecraft.

It is also the only reason the dhurandhar can walk among such men without becoming one of them. He does not moralise internally, because moralising would slow his reading. He does not glorify internally either, because glorifying would seduce him. He simply reads the behaviour, names the intention, and plans the counter-move.

Judge the behaviour. Do not erase the being.

This distinction is something I have learned slowly, over years. It has taken years of practice. It still does.

 

Your Rehman. Your Iqbal. Your Aslam.

You probably do not have a gangster in your life.

But you have your own Rehman. Your own Iqbal. Your own Aslam.

The boss whose behaviour you cannot stand. The family member who disappointed you. The ex-partner who broke something you hadn’t finished building. The colleague whose one action you still replay at two in the morning.

You can choose to treat them as reduced versions of themselves, fixed at the worst thing they did. That gives you short-term moral comfort. It also gives you a closed file on a living person, with no new information coming in.

Or you can ask the dhurandhar’s question. What positive intention, in their own map, was this behaviour trying to serve? Not to excuse them. To see them clearly.

A senior leader once told me, in a workshop on Leadership Lessons from Dhurandhar, that her boss was simply toxic. The file, in her words, was closed.

I asked her to try one experiment.

What might his positive intention be, in his own map of the world?

A long pause.

Then, slowly. “Maybe insecurity. Maybe fear that the team will outgrow him.”

You are still allowed to hold your line, I told her. You are still allowed to leave the role if you choose. But you now have information you did not have a moment ago.

The closed file was open.

A different client once told me about a wound from a relationship that had ended five years earlier. One particular action by his former partner had stayed in his head, replaying at two in the morning.

I asked him what might have been driving that action, in her own map of the world.

A longer pause.

Then, slowly. “Maybe she had not yet learned to see herself clearly. Maybe she had been carrying a wound from her own father all along, and what came out at me was actually that.”

So the positive intention, he figured, was survival. Self-protection.

“That doesn’t excuse her”, he said.

“It doesn’t”, I agreed. “It doesn’t lift accountability either. But the closed file is now open. And from open, you have options. You can hold your line. You can name the harm. You can walk away. You can forgive, or not forgive. But you do it with open eyes. Not with a caricature.”

Every behaviour has a positive intention.

People are not their behaviour.

Two sentences that could change how you think about every difficult person in your life.

 

Three Questions

1. Who is the one person you have reduced to their worst behaviour, and what are you losing by keeping that file closed?

2. What positive intention, however distorted, might have been driving their behaviour that hurt you?

And the hardest one:

3. If you had to work with this person tomorrow, without needing to like them, what would you need to read about them first?

That third question is the dhurandhar’s question. It is also the question that gives you back your own clarity, regardless of what the other person ever does.

But reclaiming your clarity is the work.

Till the time we meet next, stay cinematic, and keep the curiosity alive.

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Tomorrow.

Chapter 8 of the Dhurandhar Arc. Sanyal and the Long Board.

In every operator story, there is a second hero. Rarely on the poster. Never in the action cut. Without him, the blade is just a loose weapon.

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