Search Engine - Bollywood Dreams

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

An email hits our inbox with the subject line: “My Dad is making a Bollywood Movie… is he being scammed?” We investigate. Become a premium subscriber.

The email hit our inbox in February. The subject line, 11 words, almost a short story on their own. My dad is making a Bollywood movie. Is he being scammed? The email was from a listener, his son, who'd recently learned that his father had been sending large amounts of money to a stranger in India, a director who he'd met via the internet,

in order to fund a film that he dreamed up in a week. The film was set in India in 1780, but also in the present. and according to the email, it would quote, heavily feature cauliflower, a tangle of facts, which would take us most of this year to a knot, a quest which began with a phone call to the email's author.

Can you say your name and tell me where you are right now? Hey, PJ, I'm Rasha and I'm based out of State College, Pennsylvania. Okay, so if you could just give me some context, like you're concerned about your dad, Can you just give me a postcard image? Like, who is your dad? Just tell me a little bit about your father. Yeah, so my dad moved to America from Mumbai and India about 50 years ago.

And he came here with the classic American dream. He had a good education in pharmacy. He started out as a pharmacist and brought his wife over, started a family. But he didn't have exactly a traditional path. Even before he was retired and before I was born, he was getting involved in all these side businesses. And the most recent thing is he sprung it on us during Thanksgiving and said, hey, next month, I'm going to India and I'm going to start shooting a movie.

And before we get into the most recent one, like, just give me a sense of like, what are some of the side businesses? Like, in your email, you were describing the kind of width and breadth of your dad's entrepreneurial ventures. I just want, if you could just tell me about some of them. Oh, absolutely. So before I was born, he started a hardware business where he was competing against Home Depot, where he was selling nuts, bolts, and screws. Or trying to, anyway.

Roger remembers as a kid thinking it was normal to have a garage filled with unsold hardware surplus. When that business failed, his dad started looking for easier prey. He started eyeing Kinko's. He had a photocopy business where he was just also in the garage, just trying to prinked off hundreds and thousands of copies, but he never had one customer. Kinkos also well positioned to take on would-be disruptors like Raja's dad. However, other markets beckoned.

The hair bleaching gel is a clear gel that women would put onto their face, onto any unwanted hair just to bleach it to make it less noticeable. He took over our basement and made his old laboratory, buying everything you can imagine from a chemistry set and setting that up. The gel product actually got stuck in R&D. Roger said he remembers once getting it on his own hand and it burning a lot. If his dad seemed undeterred by the failure of these businesses, the rest of the family felt differently.

My mom has the extremely frugal, extremely conservative, put your money into savings, put your money to investments. Don't chase wild, ridiculous dreams. She was very clear that, hey, this is a waste of money. Your dad's doing another one of his dumb businesses, and this is not going to go anywhere, and it's not going to turn into something. So growing up, I always was a little hesitant and always a little frustrated with him trying these things where I said, yeah, this is just going to be another waste of money.

That's how Roger felt back then. These days, he's an adult, a father himself. His relationship with his own dad has evolved from one of periodic frustration to one of ambient concern. Because his dad's now in his 70s, retired a man living off the nest egg he earned himself, no family money. He has what he has.

Which means if something were to go wrong, it could go very wrong. Which is why when Raja talks about his dad's newest venture, the Bollywood film he's dreamed up, Raja sees how it's absurd, but he also worries about it. So give me, like, start me at the beginning of just like, one day you had a dad with a garage full of ideas. Another day, you had a dad who was trying to make a Bollywood movie. You just like, how did this even happen? Yeah, so my dad doesn't watch Bollywood movies. I've never heard him talk about Bollywood.

I've never seen him watch a Bollywood movie in the background. It just sprung up really out of nowhere. He didn't have a fully baked idea. He didn't write a proper script. He just went into Word and just started typing. And if you look at it, it looks like his first draft. It doesn't look like he even reviewed it. Raja had included this word document in his email to me, the file that began his father's journey into movie making.

It's titled Flower Vali Summary. Summary is slightly misspelled with an E. Flower Vali, though, is the title of the film. In Hindi, it loosely translates to Lady with the Flowers. There's a dancer in the story who goes by that name. The POD summary is not tremendously easy to follow. I can tell you that it describes a time travel movie, which splits its action between India's present and India's past, 250 years ago, that it involves a rebellious teenager and at one point a talking donkey.

Raj's dad had also drafted a two-page script for what he calls a trailer, which is really just a movie scene. In that scene, a would-be movie producer shows up in the office of a Bollywood director to pitch him on his idea, a film called Flower Volley. The director even asks him, what kind of flower? A cauliflower? It's all fairly meta, and as pitches go, certainly very rough. And yet, with nothing but that pitch, Raj's dad had somehow found a person in India who said he could turn his idea into a real film,

supposedly a reputable Bollywood director, who quickly began submitting large payment requests to fund said film. Raja saw one of those requests. The request was coming from a regular Gmail email address. It wasn't tied to any production company. it was just light productions at gmail.com. So very suspicious. If you take it at face value, it didn't seem very legit.

Lightproductions at gmail.com. Why would a reputable Bollywood director be using this sort of email address anybody could make in about 90 seconds? Raja, curious about this so-called director, asks his dad to give him the guy's name. The director is Kamal Chandra, who, if you go on,

and start Googling him. There's one news report about one of his movies being very controversial. Other than that, I didn't see a lot of movies. I saw an IMDB page. I saw an Instagram, but not much information outside of that. And were you like, was it like you were trying to find out if this was okay, or was it kind of like you suspected it wasn't okay and you were trying to find something to prove to your father that he ought to stop?

I guess I was just trying to prove to myself that it was okay. okay but more so hey is this guy legit because for somebody who claims to be an established Bollywood director to come to him and say hey something about your concept something about your film just really really captivated me and I normally do and these are his exact words I normally do projects that are 10 times the size but your concept was so unique that I felt, I felt gravitated towards it and I felt like I really wanted to produce it. It just, it just doesn't sit right with me.

Did you worry at all that it was possible that this wasn't even Kamal Chandra? Like that that was a real director, but that it wasn't the person your father was doing business with? Oh, absolutely. And what is the movie budget, like, in total? Somewhere around $300,000. $300,000. A lot of money for a person. and a lot of money for your dad to send to a stranger.

But was it enough money to make a real feature film? In India, the big hit films have multi-million dollar budgets. But it wasn't clear which part of the market Kamal Chandra worked in, what his films were normally budgeted for. So Raja started trying to better understand the world his dad had leapt into. I've done some research. I went on to Reddit, and I put a post out there asking people about the situation

asking about this director. No one really gave me any information outside of what I could Google on the internet. Some funny things did happen, though. I started getting DMs from people about, hey, did he finish casting the movie? Does he need a lead female character, your dad?

I'm like, I don't know. This is not what I'm looking for. This is, I'm not trying to help him make the movie. I'm just trying to see if it's a real movie. If Raja was worried that the internet had opened a door between his father and people desperate for his father's money, this was not helping. The fact that even his Reddit post, asking if the director was legit, had itself summoned people looking for work in Bollywood.

However, the Reddit post did produce one intriguing result. A stranger, WhatsApp name Chaya Chaya, reached out to say that he was a Bollywood insider, and he might have some information for him. Raja, who of course knows nothing about Bollywood, excitedly responded, curious to learn about his new source. How well placed in the industry was he? He admitted to being a third assistant director, and when I asked him what a third assistant director does, he said, not much, really. Something more like a production assistant. Probably the first two assistant directors do more work.

Yeah, exactly. Still, Raja found this kid helpful. Even a third assistant director knew more about. Bollywood than Raja did. So he shared everything he had with Chaya Chaya, who in turn told him that from his experience of Bollywood, none of this looked good. He said there's a lot of red flags.

He even suggested telling my dad to pull out, but the wheels were really set in motion. Things were moving ahead very quickly. So it's more, okay, at this point, what can we do to contain this? What can we do to make sure that my dad isn't going to just walk away dead broke from this? And is that, was it after that interaction that you decided to email search engine? Yeah, actually.

I was pretty desperate. And so for us, what do you want us to try to find out? I guess I would love for you to help find out if this project is really happening. If the person who claims that he is Kamal Chandra, the director, if that's really him, at this point, I just care that there is a problem. Whatever my dad has paid for, it becomes something. Okay, we're gonna find out. We're gonna learn more.

After a short break, our investigation begins. The following conversation is brought to you by LabCore on Demand. We're all self-proclaimed experts about something, our jobs, our friends, our favorite places to eat, the inner lives of the stars of reality television. But are we as knowledgeable about our own health? LabCore on Demand provides a convenient way to access health testing and insights. You can take control of your health with convenient health testing through LabCore on Demand. I recently took a general LabCore on Demand test to find out what exactly

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We cannot proceed further into our story without a primer on this world that Raja was chasing his father into. So, Bollywood, as you might already know, gets his name from Bombay, which is what many people who live there used to call the city. When Americans hear the word Bollywood,

they think of a genre. We think of a Bollywood movie as big and emotional with song and dance and over-the-top fighting scenes. And while the word Bollywood literally describes movies made in Bombay, with hinting,

Indie dialogue, it's a word we're using here to cover the entire Indian film industry, which exists throughout the country and makes movies in many languages. Taken as a whole, Indian film does not have the reach of American film, nothing does, but it's big. India releases more films per year than any country on earth, twice as many as we do. And like here, India's film industry is cutthroat, a perilous place for anybody, let alone an outsider. I learned all this from a phone call with a Bollywood insider, a real insider, not a third assistant director. A Bollywood journalist turned screenwriter named Ankur Pottock.

When we spoke, he was on set. How are you doing over there? Good, good. It's been a fairly predictable day, so quite okay. What happens in a predictable day? You know, like, there is usually not a dire emergency where you're called on to set and, you know, firefighting stuff that you've not planned. for it and actors are not throwing dames. That sounds like production.

Yeah. Anker. A person who seemed to deserve his own story, but who today had volunteered to appear in ours as a guide. He told me that over the years, as the industry scaled, Bollywood has just evolved well past the image in my head. That it includes all sorts of movie genres now. Realistic, gritty, indie, not just the sentimental song and dance bonanzas. I'd been picturing.

But surprisingly, he said, even as the industry has scaled way up over the years, it's retained a fair amount of seetiness at its fringes. Like, it's such a vast industry, PJ. It has so many characters kind of going in and out, playing various different parts, that, like, being taken for the right, getting fooled, is remarkably common.

You know, just down the road where I live, I mean, I live in the part where, like, most of the production companies are. Like, if I go and grab a coffee right now, while I'm still on this podcast with you at a local cafe, I'll just see, like, some really shady guy trying to, like, meet another person and they wouldn't know who's trying to scam home. You know, they'll all talk, like, oh, yeah, we're going to make, like, this big Bollwood film, and, oh, I know this one.

Oh, yeah, that one, I worked with that. I mean, they'll all be name-dropping. They'll all be talking big. And it's very rare for something. really serious to come out of it, right? You just end up spending a lot of time. I say, you'll waste a lot of money. And it's very, very, very likely that you won't see any return,

let alone a profit or a reasonable film that you're proud of. When I told Ankur the full story of Raj's father, the amateur, outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave Ankur real pause. He didn't want to comment specifically on Flower Valley or on its director. He'd never heard of Kamal Chandra. And though he was concerned, he did stop short of the word scam.

It imputed motive. It accused people he hadn't met. I thought maybe he was just being polite or litigation averse. But when I'd repeat the story to my friends in the American film industry, they'd all have the same reaction. Didn't I see?

The story of a movie producer pouring his money into a director's bank account and never getting that money back, how could you call that a scam? That was how much of the time the film industry worked. I thought they were being funny, but then my friend Zev pointed me

to this then-ongoing legal battle. Netflix was tussling with a director named Carl Eric Rinch. Netflix had given Rinch $55 million for his project, which Rinch had then spent on luxury cars, luxury watches, and not one, but two luxury mattresses.

Rinch then tried to claim that these were all just very expensive movie props. They weren't. But this has gone on for years. Tens of millions of dollars squandered by a company as sophisticated as Netflix. Maybe in film, the line between an artist and a scam artist was a little blurrier than it was elsewhere.

A scam or a movie. My question was wrong. So I kept the question in my pocket for weeks. I take it out, worry it in my palm, chew on it, just trying to work it into a more correct shape. And then one day it returned to me, finally right. The question, the one to answer here, was this. Was Raj's father being taken advantage of?

That's what Roger really wanted to know. The word scam was loud, SEO, something simple to click on. The actual question here was quieter and, frankly, maybe a little more sad. Was Raj's father, a man in his mid-70s, being taken advantage of? Do you mind just starting with your, by telling me your name? Oh, my name? Oh, Ranjit Kaliskar. And I know that you're retired, but I was wondering if you tell me what your profession was before.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm a lot of life history. Okay. No, it's not really. I graduated from the pharmacy and took off from there, from India. I'm here for more than 50 years. I worked for about 40 years in pharmacy. section, then I got retired, and I had nothing else to do. So I explored a lot of things,

and one of that ended up with making a movie. This first conversation with Renjeth from his home in Florida happened this past spring. I've since spent much more time with this man. He has a way of speaking I really enjoy. He's funny. It feels sometimes like there's something larger than life in him that he contains behind a curtain of warm self-effacement. Like when he tells you, correctly, that he has a colorful life history, and then a beat later walks it back with a not really. Your son told me that in your years as a pharmacist, you were also a real entrepreneur.

Yeah, but I'll tell you the score. If it is a successful business and my attempt, the score is 100 to 0. Wait, 100 to 0, more successful businesses or more attempts? No, unsuccessful. I'm a little clumsy businessman. Runjeth, the self-described clumsy businessman, told me how he'd been inspired to plunge into this latest expensive venture,

Bollywood filmmaking. Runjith, as his son already told us, not actually a huge Bollywood expert or even fan, but an enormous fan of long-shot entrepreneurship. And one fateful day, Runjith found himself watching an Indian movie when I thought occurred. The movie was competently made, sure.

But also, there were things about it that bothered him. Something like you expect it, okay, this is going to happen. There will be villain and there will be dancers and there will be a fight. Oh, I think the word you mean is, it's formulaic. It's like you know everything's going to happen once you know the genre. Yes. I said, no, I think I can improve on it. So, Rungeth cracked open his story.

computer. At first, he just started writing down the ways he'd improve the movie, his tweaks. But before long, he found he was actually just designing his own Bollywood film from scratch, one he'd actually want to watch. Certainly weirder, certainly more tuned to his particular sense of humor. The resulting document was that so-called summary I'd seen, the story with the time-traveling kid and the talking donkey. Fortuitously for Runjeth, this idea also happened to strike at about the same time he'd come into some easy money. I had a little luck on the stock market. I was watching stock for a meta or what is the Facebook then.

Yes. And it dipped to below $100. So what I did, I borrowed some money from a stockbroker and bought thousands of them. Fortunately, it shut up. I think it's something $600 and a plus. Oh, wow. I sold some of them to finance. this movie. So out of nowhere, I could rail about $300 plus $1,000. Okay, so you've made your money

in the stock market. You have an idea for a Bollywood movie. You know what you wanted to be, but you've never made a film before. So, like, how did you find people who were going to help you? Like, how did you meet the director Kamal Chandra? Just a cold call. Cold call. How did you find this number to cold call him? There was a movie studio. My brother called and said, do you have any movie director? who had experience in movie making. So this guy answered. Wait, so how did you, but sorry,

how did you find the number for his studio? Like, how did you pick that studio? Oh, if you go online and look for the movie studios in Mumbai, and you get a bunch of them. Okay, so you went online, you found listings for movie studios in Mumbai. So you get his phone number, you cold call him. He picks up.

and you say, you're a director, I have an idea for a movie, I have money for the movie, will you make it? Then he asked me for the budget. Then he said, that budget is a little low, but if you send me the script,

I'll check it, it could be done. A week later, Runge's said the director told him, it could be done. For an initial budget of $200,000. He told Rungea to expect a 10% overage on that,

but not more. Okay. The director, Kamal Chandra, also had notes about the actual story, like a critique. The movie couldn't just be jokes about cauliflower and the talking donkey. It would need more than that. We would need mystery, action. They agreed to add an attempted murder plot. And with that, a deal was struck.

Run just believed now that through a series of cold calls, he found himself a bona fide director thousands of miles away. So he started to wire money. And we didn't even have formal agreement, just a handshake. Just a handshake, not a contract. Yeah. And who is he? Like, tell me about him, tell me what he's done before this.

Who is Kamal Chandra? He's actually my profession, is an engineer. But like me, he didn't go work as an engineer. He got into a movie industry. And after a few rough years, he became a job. director. He made by six movies. Okay, I'm actually looking him up right now. He has an IMDB page.

He's done a bunch of music videos, and he's done some shorts, and he's done some features. Like, the last film he directed, Arya Botka Zero is 2026. Have you gotten to watch some of the movies that he made before this? No. Why didn't you watch them? I had no idea. Something about Runjitz you should know is that, like every artist and some madmen, he is guided by a second sight. He sees the real world, but he also sees visions, things that don't yet exist but could.

Those visions guide him sometimes. Also, Runjut's possesses a great deal of trust, trust that the world will want the things he imagines, and trust that the people he's chosen to help him are who they say they are. Runjeth didn't need to see all of Kamal Chandra's past work, because he felt like he felt. felt connected to this man, who said that he too could see Renghis' vision, this film that existed for now, only in Rundjith's mind. As for the large amounts of money, Renghis would soon be sending, he felt like he had a sense of where it would all go. The director's production company had sent him, after all, a line-by-line budget. The given full detail, how much will be used for actors, how much for the food, for camera.

part of that I was a little worried about. For actors, they were only assigned about $20,000. I said, how can you get an actor for $20,000? So I raised it to $40,000. I see, because it felt like they were

under budgeting for actors and obviously part of the quality of the movies to actors. Yeah. Because, you know, what happened? You know, actors are really hungry for the job. And I don't like to exploit them just because they wanted. So my attitude was different.

I said, you know, they're human beings, and I had to respect their skill. So you're looking at the budget, and instead of thinking, like, they better not be spending my money too much, you're thinking, these poor guys, like, they're not paying the actors enough. Like, you're like, you're just thinking about the workers.

Yes. Runjith, concerned about money, but not in the direction his son had worried. The audition tapes began to roll in. tape after tape of would-be stars reading lines for these characters, Runjeth had imagined. 300 people came in for casting different roles. Was it strange seeing this idea that had been in your head, and then you have these actors who are...

Oh, yeah. I was Flavagaster. Actually, I never thought it will be this giant. Were you having fun? Oh, yeah. More fun than working in a pharmacy. Yeah, I'm addicted to it. I'm not ready.

A little bit addicted to it. Yeah. Runjith, a little bit addicted, told me he had already traveled to India three times in the last year for the project. Things were moving quickly. That cold call to director Kamal Chandra happened last November.

They'd also met in person in Mumbai. And within just months, Kamal Chandra had organized a shoot, a production with about 50 people. Well, 51. Runjith had been there too, traveling with the crew from Mumbai over to Mudya Pradesh, a pretty rural state in India,

where their numbers had swelled to around 100. There were lots of extras. They'd apparently shot this entire film in three weeks. Rundjeth sent me a handful of iPhone photos. He'd taken on set, but it was a little hard to tell what I was seeing. His son, whose question had sent us here, had worried that the film shoot itself wasn't real. I could tell something was really being shot, but what?

What would exist at the end of all of this? when Runge's money was finally spent. Runjit did not have this concern. He was sure there'd be a film at the end of this. And not just that, he was convinced that he would even make his money back. He said the director had guaranteed it. How soon are you going to be able to see

like a cut-together version of the movie? I think they said in the beginning of June. Oh. They said they'll string it together, yeah. And is it? In person, are they going to send it? How does it... No, no, no, I'll be going to go.

You're going to go in Japan? Yeah. I'm actually going to be in India in July, I think. July, I think, yeah. I think you'll be welcome. It will be more than a pleasure to host you. Only thing, it will be a little rainy and hot. I don't mind rain and I don't mind heat.

The only thing I mind is cold. I booked a ticket. After the break. break, search engine goes Bollywood. Welcome back to the show. This July, I found myself in India. On a plane to Mumbai with my editor Shruti. She'd been coordinating over the months with Rangeth.

The original plan had been for us to come to watch and edit of the completed film, Flower Valley. But there'd been delays. The crew was still shooting, which had created an opportunity for us. We could actually go inspect the set, witnessed the shooting in person, watched this director at work. Anker, the Bollywood journalist-turned-screenwriter,

had told us that to know for sure whether Runge's money had been spent well or not, you really have to hire a film auditor to review the film's budget, but when we asked Runjeth for a copy of the budget, he politely declined. So, we were arriving in person, hoping to use our own eyes and common sense

to answer our question. Was Runjeth? Raj's father, being taken advantage of. Our flight to Mumbai arrived exactly on time. Check, check, check, check. Shruthy and I walked out of the terminal. Okay, so we're looking for Runjith, who is wearing a light blue shirt. We scanned the crowded outdoor arrivals area, searching for our man.

So he said that he's right next to the game? Ah, there they are. Hi, Ranjid. I've got we've been speaking a lot. Do you ever meet someone in person and only then realized that you'd been picturing them, completely wrong. I don't know why, but I'd expect him to be flamboyant. Like, my imagination had cast him as a person in a Bollywood movie, but he was normal, nondescript.

On screen, he would have been an extra, a pleasant man with a line of dialogue. Our Hindi interpreter, Charna Kanchindani, was there too. Very windy. Thankfully, thankfully, otherwise it is so stifling. It was monsoon season, so lots of rain, but also, humidity, like I've just never experienced. The air in front of my face felt like a hot, wet towel left on the floor of a steam room for a century or two.

We hop in a car together, all four of us. We're driving from the airport towards an area called mud. Runjith tells us it's where some people rent small, cheap lots to shoot in. There, we would meet the director, Kamal Chandra. See them at work. So what time does the shooting start today? It's not at 9 o'clock. What is the scene that is being shot today?

Okay, this is a parody of the character from 250 years back. He shows up in a director's office, movie director office, and he dictates, I want this movie, this is how I want it, and he had outrageous demand for it. As Runge just described the scene, I realized this was from that two-page script that his son had sent us. in that email so many months ago. The scene where a movie producer, with an idea for a film called Flower Valley, throws money on the desk of a director,

and then starts telling him his increasingly strange ideas for the movie. I'd found the scene to be a bit meta, and I wondered if Runjeth, who loved to make jokes at his own expense, was doing that again here. Does he, like, a parody of you? Because it's, like, the person saying what they want the movie? It would be me. I don't know.

I wrote it. I'm pretty sure he means yes, but like all artists, he's cagey when you ask him what things mean. He's happy enough to talk about his life, though, a life which had begun in the very city we were driving through, Mumbai. Runjith explains he was born here, born the son of a police officer, a family of modest means,

the son whose life had followed an unusual path. As we make our way through the city's sluggish traffic, Runjith retraces that path, through various buildings where moments in his life had happened. The whole U.S. Consulate was close to that. Fifty-two years back, I had an interview over there. When you were leaving? Right?

His journey to America had begun in that U.S. consulate, but it had been a wandering kind of journey. It actually started this one day at the movies. Runjeth ended up a pharmacist, he says, all because of a plan to catch a film at a nearby theater. And the funny part is the way I got into this pharmacy college was there was a movie theater called Aurora. Me and my friend went there and we went there

a little too early. So my friend said, you know, there is a pharmacy college there. Why don't we go and see if we can apply? And I just put my application, then I forgot about it. I get a call, okay, you got admission for pharmacy, come on in. And then there was an opportunity to come to USA. to this, I jumped on the world.

I was starting to recognize the logic by which Ranjeth sometimes adventured through his life. There was a dreaminess to it. Like here, the way killing time before a movie had led to impulsively applying for pharmacy college, which had led him ultimately to this career in America, a career more lucrative than anybody at home would have imagined. So what were you going to say, Ranjad?

No, I don't have anything. I'm a quiet guy, actually. Not a lot. Just so harking. So much. It's like a full audio-visual immersion experience. Very maximalist. Bombay is a city so overwhelming that when I try to reduce it to words, I can feel it slipping through them.

But here's how it felt as an American. Take the hustle and honking cacophony of New York City. Mix it with the feeling L.A. offers. The anxiety of being in a city that's socially organized like the world's tallest pyramid. Golden success beyond your wildest dreams for the people who fight to the narrow top. Supported by an infinitely wide base at the bottom, packed with hustlers, strivers, people dreaming of a fantasy that all of them can see, and most will never touch.

That's the baseline feeling, but what amplifies it so strong, Strongly is the city's density. Some of the densest neighborhoods you can find anywhere on Earth, millions more residents in New York City, crammed onto a much smaller plot of land. One neighborhood, Daravie, 12 times denser than Manhattan. There are so many dreams here.

You almost can't breathe. And now we've arrived. It's open the gate. At the gated entrance of a place called Boular Gardens. There's a few little sets here. a fake temple, a fake police station. But it's pretty bare bones. I see lots of extras.

Many chowing down hungrily at a little table where food's been set up, I think some doll. And running between the legs of these extras. Fighting over scraps, many stray dogs. I think about Ankur, our Bollywood expert, who said that there were ways to make a film for 300K or less. A studio lot like this, I think, could save you some money. I ask Grunges,

Are you paying for that catering? I'm supposed to arrange for us. We get out of the car and stride towards the set with the Flower Valley crew is using today. We're walking into the shooting place. Do they know who you are, Ranjit, when you walk in? Of course they know who I am, Ranjith says. And he's right, they do.

As we walk into the small building where his scene is being shot, here's what I notice. This big crew, maybe 50 people, running around with props and lights with this hurried focus that only pauses for Runjith. When Runjith passes, people step back respectfully. Runjith is not nondescript here. How would you describe the building where in the interior?

But there's a bunch of film lights, whatever, and then there's a door on which says, director. Just to be clear, this is not director Kamal Chandra's office. This is a fake office of a fake director for the movie scene they're shooting. A big wooden desk behind it, fake-looking posters that show diagrams

for filming specific shots. There's even hung on the wall one of those boards that claps shut when they yell action. The clapboard. I feel a moment of vertigo. We've come here to record a podcast about whether a movie is actually being filmed. And now we're on a set for a fake movie with a fake director inside of a possibly real movie. I wonder for a second if I myself am fiction. And then Ron just points and says, here's the real director.

Hi. PJ, so nice to meet you. Hi. At last, same here, same. Hello. Hi. Kamal Chandar. Nice to meet you.

Same here. At last, Kamal Chandra, the director, he looks the part, baseball hat, headphones wrapped around his neck, and I recognize his face from the IMD page. Meaning, right away, we can rule out the theory that this has all been an elaborate catfishing scam. How has shooting been today?

We have shot one scene over here. This is the second scene. Now we start here. You can't no Hindi. No Hindi. No. Kamal asked if I speak any Hindi at all, I say no. But fortunately, Jarnah, the Hindi interpreter, was here to help.

If it's okay, we'll just follow you around and kind of record. We can do it for lunchtime. He says we can talk at lunchtime, although lunchtime would prove to be a horizon. Always in sight, never in reach. Across from the fake director's desk, a love seat where the real director, Kamal Chandrivel said, his monitor in front of him. He invites me to squeeze in besides. We're further crowded in by the three cameras.

Prep for the scene begins. Crew members spraying down the whole set with something that has this real chemical smell. What's that spray? They're spraying everything down with. For flies. Because of the rain, lots of flies. There's a lot of flies.

The idea is to spray, kill a big cloud of flies, and then shoot quickly before the next cloud inevitably arrives. Kamal Chandra begins directing. Starting by? Sal. Silence. C-camera. Silence, please, silence, silence.

Silence. Do you. Do you? Where is? A buro. Mood, mood. Action. The actor playing the Bollywood director sits alone in his office,

his thick black glasses. As he closes his laptop, the door swings open. And we see this comic actor bounce in. Heavy-set man with a big mustache, a dollop of Chris Farley to him. dressed in pink wearing the clothes of a rich guy from another time, the aristocrat from 200 years past. The aristocrat announces that he is a producer

and tells this director that he not only has an idea for a movie, but also money to fund it. The director sees the cash, and his attention sharpens on this strange man in front of him. What kind of movie did the producer want to make? The producer unspoles a series of increasingly outrageous ideas. He wants his 14-year-old nephew to be the star of the film. He wants the movie to have a talking donkey.

He wants the title to be flower volley. The director asks, what kind of flower? A cauliflower? Coloflower? Wow, what idea is? It is so strange to watch this idea which has gone from Runga's imagination through the internet, from Florida to India. And now to watch these actors dutifully recreate it.

It's like listening to a foreign orchestra play a tune that someone mindlessly hummed to themselves while folding clothes. Extraordinarily strange. The director, Kamal Chandra, calls cut, gives his notes. And they take it again. Ready? Roll it? Action.

Over and over. Action. Minutes to hours. Action. Oh, you heard the end. So we've been here for about three hours now. They're definitely filming. A lot of takes.

They're still in the same scene. They're in the scene that they were in when we walked in, which is like not a very long scene, but there's like the wide shot, the medium shot, the pose-ups, they reset things. I think the sort of like funniest thing is like they are not even remotely half-assing it. They are like absolutely whole-assing the thing they're doing. It's totally crazy. Action!

The actors are locking in, finding new laughs in the dialogue. The scene's getting noticeably sharper. At one point, Runjeth stands up to whisper a note to Kamal Chandra, to his director, to make sure the scene plays exactly as he intended it. At another point during a quick chai break, Runjus walks over and asks us, I was commanding the respect from everybody here.

Does it feel good to be like the producer on set? Oh, yeah? Yeah. Our interpreter, Jarnah, adds that she has also noticed this dynamic. You know, everybody knew him. Everybody was kind of deferring to him. Because he's a guy with the money. Yeah. That's what it do.

When they have a little hint and I'm running out of money, they will dump me like a hot potato. Are you worried about that at all? No, I have enough money. Jarnah jokes about Rang's power here, about how, not that he would, but if he wanted to, he could make anyone on set disappear. You see you, that one, out.

And, you know, that question will be out. That's some command. At least one should have it in one lifetime, right? And this is my 15 minutes. Back home, does your family understand what's happening here? Does anybody understand? No. Absolutely no.

My wife has no idea that I'm feeding 50 people here today. She doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you. That's the way it is. I'd come here wondering if Runjith was being taken advantage of. I had been thinking narrowly, just about money, but I hadn't had much of an understanding of what else could drive him. He commanded respect here. And more than that, Runjus told me about how, in his decades as a pharmacist,

the weeks that turned into years, counting pills for people over and over again, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him, was an armed robbery. But that life was over now. And Runjith found himself, at an age when many people rest, instead on a great adventure. I was starting to better understand

what had brought Runjith here. But what about Kamal Chandra? He was clearly an actual director. Why was he working on this particular project? Action. Oh, you're a fucking like and producer. When would we get to talk? We're smushed together, thigh-to-thigh on a love seat.

But it wasn't like I could sneak in a whispered question to Chandra while his scenes ran as much as I wanted to. Somebody finally calls for a lunch break. I get excited, but only some of the crew filters out. Kamal Chandra and his actors, they keep shooting. I genuinely cannot tell if he's busy avoiding a conversation with me, or perhaps both. It's now been over four hours. We're still waiting for our Bollywood exclusive interview with the film's director, Ronjith. He seems to have gotten tired because he went to go nap in the car.

I think he consumed his daily allotment of glamour today. So we're just hanging out, swatting it flies, waiting to see if we get to ask some hard-hitting questions. While we wait at Jarnah, the Hindi interpreter, had been on a lot of the time. her own mini quest to try to learn more about the director. And she told us she picked up something intriguing. She was saying that the director is an IAT from Kanpur, IATian. They are the most educated and the most respected people over here. I have to explain.

In America, an engineering school graduate like Kamal Chandra becoming a film director is not that remarkable. But in India, to get into IIT specifically is so difficult, like Harvard or Yale, dropping that opportunity for Bollywood is considered very weird. It just didn't map onto anybody's understanding of normal motivation or ambition. Also, we'd learned in India that the trailer for Chandra's new movie was out, and it looked good. Decent budget, like a normal indie movie, something you'd watch on Netflix. Both facts just made our question more stark.

Why was Kamel Chandra working on this particular project? It's 5 p.m. now. The crew resets for a new scene. Lights are moving, cameras are moving, fly just flew into my eye. The next shot is outside. It features finally the famous cauliflower. Literally, there's a man whose job it is to hold the cauliflower. Do you see him?

He's a cauliflower grip. They have one on every set. We stand outside in the drizzle. The grip hands the cauliflower to the actor playing the director in the film, and the new scene begins. All right, goal. Action. The actor looks at the cauliflower.

First, a little scared? He sees a movie poster, the movie poster for the film, for Flower Volley. In the poster, the woman, the dancer, holds the cauliflower towards the sky, beatificly. The actor, playing the director, now somehow understands this is the movie he's going to make. He triumphantly cast his cauliflower towards the sky and says in English, to no one in particular. Lights. Camera. Camera.

action. The cut, says the real director, Kamal Chandra. They now have the first take. Of course, they want more. They shoot this scene now over and over. Reality, for me, has just become a CD that skips. With each take, I lose hope. I keep thinking I have no hope,

but I keep finding little, marginal additional percentages of hope to lose. I now understand that I have flown 15 hours and watched 1,000 takes of two days. scenes and that I will never interview Kamal Jandra. He is either a serious man who takes his work seriously or a tactical man who has figured out how to box me out. I petition Shruti. Let's just get him on the phone when we're back in America.

Like that'll happen. And then, a miracle. He calls for a break. After 10 straight hours of working, Kamal Chandra says, now we can talk. We go back inside, back into the fake director's office, and settle down on the couch. Ranjeth, whose son's concern has sent me 8,000 miles from my home,

has nowhere to be found. Kamal Chandra begins by apologizing. No, very busy. He's sorry we've had to wait this long. And then we dive in. Jarnah, our interpreter, sitting next to us. I begin with the obvious question. I'm trying to understand, like, this film, Flower Valley,

like, how did this happen? How did you end up shooting this movie? So, Ranjji did me contact here, finally, Kamal Chandra's recollection of events, which differed a bit from Ranjith's. Kamel says the way he remembers it. When Runjith first reached out, Kamel's assistant had taken the initial call. only after had Kamal taken a meeting,

and he'd left that first meeting feeling uncommitted. The project, he said, didn't feel at all concrete. But then, they met again. And Kamel found himself beginning to just work it out in his mind. How would you make this movie? Over the next months, he took Rengis nub of an idea and converted it into a proper screenplay. Why?

Why? I think the money, the idea that this story came with a paid-for budget must have helped. But Kamal Chandra insisted, for him it was the story. He liked it, the time travel, the fact that it was told from a kid's perspective, and the dreaminess. The way it combined, as Chandra put it, the logical and illogical. Somehow the director related. He said that despite the five decades Renghis had spent in America, the story The story's surrealness felt to him fundamentally Indian. When I met with Ranjith, I felt this film is his dream.

He's a dream. He's, I think, I think, know, I think, I know, how since it's working out. Kamal's saying here, when I met with Ranjeth, I felt that this film was his dream, like an actual dream. Maybe he'd had it since childhood.

I don't know how long he's been holding on to this, Kamel says, musing about the unknowable mind. mind of his collaborator. I also can't know the inside of Kamal Chandra's mind, but I will say, when I remember how skeptical Rung's son was of the notion that a real director would take his dad's movie idea seriously, here it did seem like Kamal Chandra was taking the project seriously.

Is it strange to, like, you know, movies, they're like, they're like dreams, you know, like you sit in the dark and you see these images and the feeling of sitting in a movie theater, It's like you're having a dream with other people. Is it strange, like you're making this man's dream from far away, but that you also relate to? He pauses for a second and says, actually, I'm this is how I think about it.

He says he studied mechanical engineering at a reputable college. He had an MBA. He'd been waiting on his end of school results. And in his downtime, he'd signed up for a month-long film workshop. He said that one workshop changed his entire life. He decided to drop it all, the prestigious degrees, and he began studying film instead. He'd been on a course for one life

and gotten knocked off of it by this gust of a dream. Kamal says when he met Ranjithji, he realized, this person was really another version of himself. But one who'd discovered his dream late instead of early. Kamal says, I fulfilled my dream, so I felt that it was my duty to help him fulfill his. You saw yourself in him. You saw a different version of your life where you had not found what you loved as early.

Yes, yes, we can say. Here, Kamal adds, one thing you should know is that Ranjith and I argue constantly. He reminds me, Ranjit and I argue constantly. He reminds me, Runjitz is not a professional screenwriter, and that he's quite emotionally attached to his story. Every change provokes real sadness. Kamal says he tells Runjit

what he tells every new producer. You have to give your director some creatively way or else the film won't work out. He says that he tells Ranjith, if I'm going to make this dream real, I need to be able to speak to you honestly. None of this is the relationship I'd picture between Kamal and the person he respectfully calls Renghisji. I try to explain to him how this story might look from the other side, from America.

So like, for someone in America, the story goes like this. It's like you have this like retired man. He's made a little bit of money. He's decided he's going to make a movie. And he started sending emails to like, people he doesn't know in another country, to be like, take my money and make the movie. And I think most people would be very worried for him

that somebody would be like, yes, yes, and whatever. And I think it's hard to imagine that you're a person with a career and a job. You got this email, and you were like, I'm going to help this person because I think it's the right thing to do. Actually, we have many producers. Kamel said that from his point of view, he meets with a lot of producers. Time wasting.

And he also has to worry about who's real. Most producers just waste his time. But Runjit, he said, after meeting him twice, Kamal Chandra could tell at least that he was unusually serious about making his movie. And that while the budget was much less than the movies Kamal normally makes, he tried to do his best. And that he hopes when I see it, I'll be impressed, despite the low budget. It's a nice sentiment, but Shruti has a final question for Kamal.

What is for you the goal for this film? Like, what do you, realistically, what do you think is going to happen when it's finished? He tells us in Hindi, in my industry, every film has a future, a fortune, luck. It's not a given that a great film will succeed or that a bad film will face. But just like every person has a destiny, he says every film does too. Kamel says that for his part, the team has worked very hard on the movie. At the very soon, they'll have to leave it to its fate. We've talked for about 30 minutes, and his break is now over.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's 7 p.m., which means he has to get back to work. There's still some daylight. They're going to shoot a little more. We go to the car to wake up Runjith, but it turns out he's no longer there. What do we do? We've lost.

Now it turns into a different kind of story. We finally find him. We lost you. Where did you head? No, I didn't have it. He had to pay everybody. Over the end of the day. It turned out, we should go. It turned out while we'd been recording, Runjith had been settling the account

with the executive producer. He needed to take out $10,000, the cost for that entire day of work, the 50-person crew, the location, the food. We get in the car and we leave. Runjith is clearly tired after the long day. But if anything, he feels even more confident about the movie he's making.

And would you make another movie if this works? Oh no, this is it? Why not another one? I'm too old. How did you decide that? Oh, I'm not. I know it. Time to go and play with grandkids.

That's right. I fly home. I think about what I'll say to Wrench his son, to Raja, who'd wondered if his dad was spending all his money on a movie that didn't exist or wouldn't be made. I tried to make sense of what I'd seen. I really do believe that Raja's worst fears, thankfully, were in the end, unfounded.

His dad was not being taken advantage. of. He understood what he was buying and why he was buying it. The promise that Runjus said Kamal Chandra made to him that he'll make all of his money back, that feels Bollywood to me. A dream that could come true, but which I myself would not personally bet on. Here in the end is what I do feel confident about. About 50 years ago, a trip to the movie theater sent Ranjith on a path that led him to a successful life as an American pharmacist. A dream for so many people in the place he grew up, but not his dream.

And so when he'd made his money and his kids had grown up, he went home one more time to be somebody else, a Bollywood producer. And he took a very strange dream he'd had with a talking donkey, a time-traveling teenager, and a symbolically important cauliflower. And he spent a lot of money so that it could be projected on a wall for strange.

And at some point, it will be. What happens after that is anybody's guess. Movies have their own fates. People do, too. The life you're given, the life you dream about, and the rooms you can enter where they blend together, until even you can't tell them apart. That's her story for you this week.

Stories like the one you just heard, which take months of research, international travel, original music. Obviously, it costs much more time and money, but we're able to do them thanks to the financial support we received from our incognito mode subscribers the people who pay

for an ad-free version of this show with extra episodes. Next week, on the incognito mode feed, we have an interview with Anker Pawtuck, our Bollywood expert. I learned a ton from him, but he also kept cracking me up.

It's a good conversation. If you're not already a member and would like to support our show, please head over to search engine. com or just sign up in Apple Podcasts. I will say if you get the annual subscription on our website, you can support us for less than $5 a month.

Thanks to everybody who has signed up and anybody who's considering it. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was graded by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinnamini, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Every week the man does magic, but this week in particular, Armin, this music. And for the special version of our theme this week, We had vocals from Armin Bizarion and from Phoebe Bridgers. Bag checking this week by Natsumi Agisaka.

Hindi interpretation and translation by Jarna Kanchindani. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Special thanks this week to Supriah Dravitt. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkati, and Hillary Schoff. If you have a question for the show, please send it to us via email,

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