“There are legends of people… born with the gift of makin’ music so true… it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.”In Ryan Coogler‘s The Sinners, Annie speaks these words as a warning, because somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, a young man has begun to play blues guitar with a truth so raw, so devastatingly real, that it does not merely entertain. It summons. It opens a passage between what is living and what is not. And what comes through is not always light.Go back far enough and you will find that every great civilisation built its first altar not to a king or a conqueror, but to a sound.The Vedic priests of ancient India understood that the universe itself was born from vibration, Nada Brahma, the world is sound.The priests of ancient Egypt sang their dead into the afterlife.King David of the Bible was a renowned musician, poet, and songwriter. He was famous for playing the harp (or lyre) and is credited with writing over half of the 150 Psalms in the Bible. His musical skill was used to soothe King Saul’s troubled spirit and to bring worship to the Hebrew nation. The Romans did not merely worship their gods, they sang to them. Every triumph, sacrifice, and coronation moved to music. It was the medium through which the ordinary world reached toward something it could not name.And then there were the heroes.When Alexander the Great wept because there were no more worlds to conquer, his grief was not recorded in silence. His campaigns moved to war hymns and victory odes, the lyres of court poets who understood that a king this extraordinary needed music to contain him, because ordinary language was not large enough.Samudragupta, the great Gupta emperor of ancient India, warrior, conqueror, poet, played the veena with such mastery that his coins bore not his sword but his instrument. Here was a man who held an empire in one hand and music in the other, as if he understood that true power extended beyond land into the deeper, invisible territories of the human soul.Across every civilisation, music performed a singular role, it became the language for people and moments too vast for ordinary expression. Gods. Kings. Heroes. And then, most fascinatingly, those who existed somewhere between them.The mystics. The figures who arrived in history without clear explanation and left without closure.The ones that could not be fully understood, only felt.Annie names three traditions of this gift, the Irish Filí, the Choctaw Firekeepers, the West African Griots. In each, the pattern holds. The gift is real. It is extraordinary. It connects the living to something profound and ancient and beyond.
Every culture that celebrated this gift also feared it, because the same channel that lets something holy through lets other things through as well. The veil, once pierced, does not discriminate.Which brings us, across centuries and civilisations, to a frozen river in Russia.And to Boney M.When Boney M. released Rasputin in 1978, adopted magically by Aditya Dhar in the latest Bollywood banger that is Dhurandhar, the world heard it as a dramatic disco song about a scandalous Russian mystic. Catchy, theatrical, irresistible.The kind of song that fills a dancefloor and becomes an earworm, with proven viral potential on Instagram Reels.But listen more carefully and something else emerges beneath the groove.You will hear Annie’s warning set to music.Because Rasputin is not merely a song about a controversial historical figure. It is, at its core, the story of a man born with a gift so true it pierced the veil between life and death, and the song itself is proof of that piercing. A century after his death, his name still thunders out of speakers, still makes people stop and listen, still carries that inexplicable charge.He was stabbed in the stomach. He survived. He was poisoned. He survived. He was shot multiple times. He survived. He was thrown, bound, through a hole in a frozen river. Only then, finally, did he stop. And even that, the world has never quite believed.Grigori Rasputin was Russia’s Griot. Siberia’s Firekeeper. The frozen empire’s answer to the ancient Filí, that rare, unsettling category of human being who does not merely live in the world but exists at its seam. He was a peasant who walked into a palace. A sinner who healed the sick. A man to whom the ordinary rules of mortality seemed not to apply.And like every figure Annie warns us about, his gift did not come alone, his death foretold the fall of the royal family.Likewise, in Dhurandhar, that same song arrives fittingly amid collapse.Ra Ra Rasputin.
Rasputin never held formal power, yet he remained close to those who did.He was born in 1869 in Pokrovskoye, a remote Siberian village, far removed from the centres of authority. He had no formal theological training, no institutional backing, and no clear path into influence. His early years were marked by restlessness, drifting without direction.A period at the Verkhoturye Monastery altered his course, though he never became a priest. He began travelling across Russia, into the Caucasus, and eventually the Holy Land. Along the way, stories began to follow him. Some spoke of healing. Others of prayer. Many simply spoke of presence.By the time he reached St Petersburg, his reputation had already arrived before him.Through members of the clergy and nobility, he was introduced to the imperial court, where he met Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, and their son, Alexei Nikolaevich.Alexei, the heir to the Russian Empire, suffered from haemophilia, a condition where even minor injuries could become fatal. Medical treatments of the time were limited and often harmful.Rasputin was called during one such crisis, when the boy’s bleeding appeared uncontrollable. After his intervention, the bleeding subsided. Alexei stabilised. He survived.Rasputin was called again. And then again.
Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich and Emperor Nicholas II at Tsarskoye Selo
Empress Alexandra came to rely on him, not just for her son’s health but for reassurance in moments of uncertainty. In that reliance, Rasputin’s role expanded beyond healer into something far more dangerous.As political tensions in the empire intensified, Rasputin’s influence began to alarm the Russian elite. Ministers were appointed and dismissed in ways that appeared to reflect his recommendations. Bureaucratic authority blurred with personal access. To many within the administration, he represented not faith but instability, a man without office shaping decisions at the highest level of government.Accounts from the time describe his presence as unsettling, his gaze, his voice, the way conversations shifted around him.“I am not a saint. I am a sinner.”In Dhurandhar, Hamza Ali Mazari enters a system in a similar way.He does not begin with authority. During an armed encounter, Rehman Dakait’s son is caught under heavy fire. Hamza intervenes and brings him out alive.He is kept close, called upon again, and his role expands through necessity rather than position. Over time, his presence begins to shape outcomes. Others respond to him differently, and his place within the structure becomes harder to ignore.A similar sentiment echoes in Aari Aari:“If I kill for my people, it don’t make me a sinner.”Both figures operate within systems that do not fully trust them, yet cannot function without them.Rasputin survived multiple attempts on his life, poisoning, stabbing, and gunfire, before he was eventually killed. Each failed attempt only deepened the myth around him.Hamza faces repeated threats from Rehman Dakait, SP Chaudhary, and Iqbal, and survives, continuing to move within the same unstable system.Which is where Annie’s warning takes its final shape:“This gift can bring healing to their communities… but it also attracts evil.”Rasputin healed a dying heir and became entangled in the political decay of an empire already on the brink.Hamza saves a life and steps into a system that begins to shift around him and ultimately collapsed.
