War & Peace Quote by Akshay Kumar

Akshay Kumar’s line does a careful two-step: it sells the role as a professional stretch ("a novelty for me") while preemptively disarming the most predictable backlash around an India-Pakistan war narrative. In a region where cinema routinely doubles as soft power, he’s signaling that the film wants moral authority without waving a flag too hard.

The "novelty" phrasing is doing subtle labor. It frames the ordeal of captivity not as spectacle but as actorly new territory, a way of acknowledging the extremity without turning it into trauma tourism. Then he pivots to the real tightrope: "We made sure that we didn't talk about India versus Pakistan". That’s less a plot description than a promise to audiences, censors, and critics that the movie won’t be cheap jingoism. It’s also a savvy PR move in the age of instant outrage, where a single line can be clipped into a nationalist talking point.

The subtext is about legitimacy. By shifting the emphasis to "the emotions of people on both sides", Kumar appeals to a liberal-humanist frame that still plays well in mainstream entertainment: empathy as proof of seriousness. The last clause, "terrorism affects us all", universalizes the threat, creating a common enemy that allows cross-border compassion without challenging the larger political story. It’s reconciliation-by-circumvention: acknowledge shared pain, avoid naming the forces that produce it, and keep the film safely in the zone of broadly marketable sentiment rather than contested history.