Bollywood Dreams

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. https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

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• 0:42PJ Vogt?

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• 1:27PJ Vogt?

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• 2:32PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 3:18PJ Vogt?

  Can you say your name and tell me where you are right now?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Hey PJ, I'm Rajah, and I'm based out of State College, Pennsylvania.

• 3:26PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so if you could just give me some context, like you're concerned about your dad, can you just give me like a postcard image, like who is your dad? Just tell me a little bit about your father.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my dad moved to America from Mumbai in 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."

• 4:26PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:54PJ Vogt?

  Or trying to, anyway. Rajah 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.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  He had a photocopy business where he was just also in the garage, just trying to print off hundreds and thousands of copies, but he never had one customer.

• 5:20PJ Vogt?

  Kinko's also well-positioned to take on would-be disruptors like Rajah's dad. However, other markets beckoned.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  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 own laboratory, buying everything you can imagine from a chemistry set and setting that up.

• 5:45PJ Vogt?

  The gel product actually got stuck in R&D. Rajah said he remembers once getting it on his own hand and it burning a lot.

• 5:56PJ Vogt?

  If his dad seemed undeterred by the failure of these businesses, the rest of the family felt differently.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  My mom has the extremely frugal, extremely conservative, "put your money into savings, put your money into investments, don't chase wild, ridiculous dreams."

• 6:19Speaker 01

  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 just could be another waste of money."

• 6:44PJ Vogt?

  That's how Rajah 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 Rajah talks about his dad's newest venture, the Bollywood film he dreamed up, Rajah sees how it's absurd, but he also worries about it.

• 7:20PJ Vogt?

  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. Like, you're just like, how did this even happen?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:00PJ Vogt?

  Rajah 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 Volley Summary." Summary is slightly misspelled with an E. Flower Volley, 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.

• 8:22PJ Vogt?

  The plot 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. Rajah'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?"

• 9:01PJ Vogt?

  It's all fairly meta, and as pitches go, certainly very rough. And yet, with nothing but that pitch, Rajah'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. Rajah saw one of those requests.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  The request was coming from a regular Gmail email address. It wasn't tied to any production company. It was just [email protected]. So very suspicious. If you take it at face value, it didn't seem very legit.

• 9:39PJ Vogt?

  [email protected]. Why would a reputable Bollywood director be using this sort of email address anybody could make in about 90 seconds? Rajah, curious about this so-called director, asks his dad to give him the guy's name.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  The director is Kamal Chandra, who, if you go online 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.

• 10:15PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I guess I was just trying to prove to myself that it was 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.

• 11:09PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 11:18PJ Vogt?

  And what is the movie budget like in total?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Somewhere around $300,000.

• 11:26PJ Vogt?

  $300,000. A lot of money for a person, 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 multimillion dollar budgets. But it wasn't clear which part of the market Kamal Chandra worked in, what his films were normally budgeted for. So Rajah started trying to better understand the world his dad had leapt into.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  I've done some research. I went onto 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 them make the movie. I'm just trying to see if it's a real movie.

• 12:28PJ Vogt?

  If Rajah 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. Rajah, who of course knows nothing about Bollywood, excitedly responded, curious to learn about his new source. How well placed in the industry was he?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:17PJ Vogt?

  Probably the first two assistant directors do more work.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:21PJ Vogt?

  Still, Rajah found this kid helpful. Even a third assistant director knew more about Bollywood than Rajah 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.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  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?

• 13:59PJ Vogt?

  And was it after that interaction that you decided to email Search Engine?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, I was pretty desperate.

• 14:07PJ Vogt?

  And so for us, what do you want us to try to find out?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  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?

• 14:27PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  At this point, I just care that there is a product. Whatever my dad has paid for, it becomes something.

• 14:36PJ Vogt?

  Okay, we're gonna find out. We're gonna learn more. After a short break, our investigation begins.

• 15:19PJ Vogt?

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• 16:02PJ Vogt?

  I bought the test online, picked a nearby LabCorp location for sample collection, there's a ton of them, was able to get an appointment the next morning, biked over, was in and out in about 15 minutes. And then, early next week, I got notified by email when my results were ready, so I could find out what was going on inside my own body. And I shared my results with our show's editor. So you're, if not the person that I talk to the most, in contention for the person I talk to the most, is that true or not true?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 16:29PJ Vogt?

  And what percentage on the pie chart of our conversations are about real or imagined health issues that I have diagnosed myself with?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, I think the percentage has gone down over the years, so it might have been higher, it was definitely higher, and now I would say it's about 20%.

• 16:49PJ Vogt?

  So if I told you that I just got like a fairly like full panel test results, so I can tell whatever's wrong with me, what's your level of anxiety as just a person who has to have a conversation with me?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  As a person who's also in my 40s and thinking about my cholesterol, yada, yada, I'm curious what you've learned.

• 17:10PJ Vogt?

  Okay, you ready?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:13PJ Vogt?

  Here's what's very crazy.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  You're healthy.

• 17:16PJ Vogt?

  Totally healthy.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 17:18PJ Vogt?

  Thank you. I honestly am not sure what to think about now. I'm like totally unremarkable. I was convinced, because I'm always tired, I was really convinced I was gonna have low testosterone and I didn't.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Or an iron deficiency or something like that.

• 17:33PJ Vogt?

  Well, I was convinced low testosterone, and then when I talked to my doctor, she was like, you're, you're spending too much time on the internet. The internet's trying to convince everybody they have low testosterone. She said you have anxiety.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm only surprised because I think I have thoughts about eating habits.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  Dude, my cholesterol's fantastic.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Well, congratulations. You must have great genes.

• 17:54PJ Vogt?

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• 18:34PJ Vogt?

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• 19:16PJ Vogt?

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• 20:01PJ Vogt?

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• 20:44PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 20:49PJ Vogt?

  Bollywood. We cannot proceed further into our story without a primer on this world that Rajah was chasing his father into.

• 20:57PJ Vogt?

  So Bollywood, as you might already know, gets its 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 Hindi 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

• 21:38PJ Vogt?

  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 Ankar Paddock. When we spoke, he was on set. How are you doing over there?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Good, good. It's been a fairly predictable day, so quite okay.

• 22:05PJ Vogt?

  What happens in a predictable day?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  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 and actors are now throwing tantrums.

• 22:20PJ Vogt?

  That sounds like production.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:25PJ Vogt?

  Ankar, 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 seediness at its fringes.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  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 a ride, 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, they'll all talk like, oh yeah, we're gonna make like, this big Bollywood film, and oh, I know this one, oh yeah, that one, I worked

• 23:37Speaker 03

  with that. I mean, they'll, 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.

• 23:49PJ Vogt?

  I see.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:03PJ Vogt?

  When I told Ankar the full story of Rajah's father, the amateur outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave Ankar a real pause.

• 24:17PJ Vogt?

  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 Zav

• 24:58PJ Vogt?

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

• 25:40PJ Vogt?

  was wrong. So I kept the question in my pocket for weeks. I'd 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.

• 25:56PJ Vogt?

  The question, the one to answer here, was this: was Rajah's father being taken advantage of? That's what Rajah 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 Rajah's father, a man in his mid-70s, being taken advantage of?

• 26:22PJ Vogt?

  Do you mind just starting with your, by telling me your name?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Oh, my name? Oh, Ranjith Kaliskar.

• 26:27PJ Vogt?

  And I know that you're retired, but I was wondering if you could tell me what your profession was before?

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. A colorful life history, okay. No, it's not really. I graduated from the pharmacy and took off from there, from India, and I'm here for more than 50 years. I worked for about 40 years in pharmacist 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.

• 27:02PJ Vogt?

  This first conversation with Ranjith, 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.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I'll tell you the score. If it is a successful business and might attain, the score is 100 to 0.

• 27:44PJ Vogt?

  Wait, 100 to 0, more successful businesses or more attempts?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  No, unsuccessful.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  I'm a little clumsy businessman.

• 27:57PJ Vogt?

  Ranjith, the self-described clumsy businessman, told me how he'd been inspired to plunge into this latest expensive venture: Bollywood filmmaking. Ranjith, 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, Ranjith 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.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Something like, you expected, okay, this is going to happen, there's, there'll be villain, and there'll be dancers, and there'll be a fight.

• 28:39PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I think the word you mean is, it's formulaic. It's like, you know everything's gonna happen once you know the genre.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yes. I said, no, I think I can improve on it.

• 28:50PJ Vogt?

  So Ranjith cracked open his computer. At first, he just started writing down the ways he'd improved 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 Ranjith, this idea also happened to strike at about the same time he'd come into some easy money.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  I had little luck on the stock market. I was watching stock for Meta, or what is it, Facebook then?

• 29:30PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  And it dipped to below $100. So what I did, I borrowed some money from a stockbroker, and bought 1,000 of them. Fortunately, it shot up. I think it's there something $600 and up plus.

• 29:48PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  I sold some of them to finance this movie. So out of nowhere, I could raise about $300-plus thousand.

• 29:57PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so you've, you've, you've made your money in the stock market, you have an idea for a Bollywood movie, you know what you want it to be, but you've never made a film before. So like, how did you find people who were gonna help you? Like, how did you meet the director Kamal Chandra?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Just a cold call.

• 30:12PJ Vogt?

  Cold call. How did you find his number to cold-call him?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  There was this movie studio. My brother called and said, "Do you have any movie director who has experience in movie making?" So this guy answered.

• 30:28PJ Vogt?

  Wait, so how did you, but sorry, how did you find the number for his studio? Like, how did you pick that studio?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Oh, if you go online and look for the movie studios in Mumbai, and you get a bunch of them.

• 30:43PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so you went online, you found listings for movie studios in Mumbai. You, 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?"

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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."

• 31:09PJ Vogt?

  A week later, Runjath said the director told him it could be done for an initial budget of $200,000. He told Runjath 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. It would need mystery, action. They agreed to add an attempted murder plot. And with that, a deal was struck. Runjath 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.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  And we didn't even have formal agreement, just a handshake.

• 31:55PJ Vogt?

  Just a handshake, not a contract.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:58PJ Vogt?

  And who, who is he? Like, tell me about him. Tell me what he's done before this. Who is Kamal Chandra?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Oh, he's a, he is actually my profession is the engineer, but like me, he didn't go work as engineer. He got into movie industry and after a few rough years, he became a director. He made five, six movies.

• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  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 Batka Zero is 2026.

• 32:40PJ Vogt?

  Have you gotten to watch some of the movies that he made before this?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Uh, no.

• 32:47PJ Vogt?

  Why didn't you watch them?

• 32:48Speaker 03

  I had no idea.

• 32:55PJ Vogt?

  Something about Runjath 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, Runjath 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. Runjath didn't need to see all of Kamal Chandra's past work because he felt connected to this man, who said that he too could see Runjath's vision, this film that existed for now, only in Runjath's mind. As for the large amounts of money Runjath would soon be

• 33:36PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Given full detail, how much will be used for actors, how much for the food, for camera, main part 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.

• 34:09PJ Vogt?

  I see, because it felt like they were under budgeting for actors and obviously part of the quality of the movies to actors.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  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 want it. So my attitude was different. I said, you know, they're human beings and I had to respect their skill.

• 34:32PJ Vogt?

  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 they're, you're like, you're just thinking about the workers.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:46PJ Vogt?

  Runjath, concerned about money, but not in the direction his son had worried.

• 34:52PJ Vogt?

  The audition tapes began to roll in. Tape after tape of would be stars reading lines for these characters Runjath had imagined.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  300 people came in for casting different roles.

• 35:03PJ Vogt?

  Was it strange seeing this idea that had been in your head and then you have these actors who are?

• 35:09Speaker 03

  I was flabbergasted. Actually, I never thought it will be this giant.

• 35:16PJ Vogt?

  Were you having fun?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:19PJ Vogt?

  More fun than working at a pharmacy?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm addicted to it. Not really.

• 35:25PJ Vogt?

  A little bit addicted to it.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:29PJ Vogt?

  Runjath, a little bit addicted, told me he'd 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. Runjath had been there too, traveling with the crew from Mumbai over to Madhya 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. Runjath 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,

• 36:14PJ Vogt?

  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 Runjath's money was finally spent? Runjath 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?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  I think they said in the beginning of June, they said they'll string it together. Yeah.

• 36:52PJ Vogt?

  And is it in person? Are they going to send it? How does it?

• 36:55Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I'll be, I'll be going there.

• 36:57PJ Vogt?

  You're gonna go in?

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:59PJ Vogt?

  I'm, I'm actually gonna be in India in July, I think.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  July, I think, yeah, I think you'll be welcome. It will be more than a pleasure to host you. Only thing, it'll be a little rainy and hot.

• 37:15PJ Vogt?

  I don't mind rain and I don't mind heat. The only thing I mind is cold.

• 37:19PJ Vogt?

  I booked a ticket.

• 37:31PJ Vogt?

  After the break, Search Engine, from Bollywood.

• 38:02PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out MUBI. MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's handpicked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. One of their newest exclusive titles is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by visionary writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, who you might know from I Saw the TV Glow. It's a world-expanding, genre-bending wonder starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. This story follows a

• 38:44PJ Vogt?

  young director trying to resurrect the faded Camp Miasma slasher franchise. But when she visits the original reclusive star, they spiral into this blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and sheer delirium. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at mubi.com/surchengine. That's M U B I dot com slash search engine for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 39:11PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you by Framer. We've all seen a quick landing page idea turning to weeks of back and forth tickets and painful handoffs. But Framer completely changes how teams build for the web. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work in tandem here. Agents bring speed and scale, while your team brings the taste, judgment, and design control. You can use agents to streamline real-time collaboration, generate custom code components, manage CMS content, optimize SEO, and audit your design before hitting launch. Plus, it's an enterprise-level platform with 99.99% uptime, SLAs, and top-tier

• 39:56PJ Vogt?

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• 40:19PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Quince. When you invest in high-quality basics, dressing well becomes second nature, and nobody delivers better staples than Quince. They craft timeless, durable clothes using top-tier materials like merino wool, organic cotton, and pure Mongolian cashmere. I grabbed their lightweight down jacket in matte black, which I wore on a windy night out. The warmth-to-weight ratio totally exceeded my expectations. By partnering straight with ethical factories and eliminating middleman markups, Quince keeps prices 50 to 80% lower than traditional luxury stores. That same incredible value extends to home products from hotel-style bedding and plush bath towels to elegant furniture. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to

• 41:04PJ Vogt?

  quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Search Engine. It's the best way to support the show.

• 41:34PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 41:46PJ Vogt?

  This July, I found myself in India.

• 41:50PJ Vogt?

  On a plane to Mumbai with my editor, Shruti. She'd been coordinating over the months with Rungit.

• 41:56PJ Vogt?

  The original plan had been for us to come to watch and edit of the completed film, Flower Volley. But there'd been delays. The crew was still shooting, which had created an opportunity for us. We could actually go inspect the set, witness the shooting in person, watch this director at work. Ankar, the Bollywood journalist turned screenwriter, had told us that to know for sure whether Rungit's money had been spent well or not, you'd really have to hire a film auditor to review the film's budget. But when we asked Rungit for a copy of the budget, he politely declined.

• 42:30PJ Vogt?

  So we were arriving in person, hoping to use our own eyes and common sense to answer our question.

• 42:39PJ Vogt?

  Was Rungit, Raj's father, being taken advantage of?

• 42:44PJ Vogt?

  Our flight to Mumbai arrived exactly on time.

• 42:49PJ Vogt?

  Shruti and I walked out of the terminal.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Okay, so we're looking for Rungit, who is wearing a light blue shirt.

• 42:56PJ Vogt?

  He scanned the crowded outdoor arrivals area, searching for our man.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  So he said that he's right next to the gate. Ah, there they are. Hi, Rungit. I'm gonna, we've been...

• 43:05PJ Vogt?

  Rungit. Did you ever meet someone in person and only then realize that you'd been picturing them completely wrong?

• 43:13PJ Vogt?

  I don't know why, but I'd expected 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, Jarna Khanchandani, was there too.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  Very windy. Thankfully, thankfully, otherwise it is so stifling.

• 43:37PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 43:54PJ Vogt?

  We hop in a car together, all four of us.

• 43:58PJ Vogt?

  We're driving from the airport towards an area called Mud. Rungit tells us it's where some people rent small, cheap lots to shoot in.

• 44:04Speaker 06

  Most of the studio there.

• 44:06PJ Vogt?

  There, we would meet the director, Kamal Chandra, see him at work.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  So what time does the shooting start today?

• 44:12Speaker 06

  It starts at 9 o'clock.

• 44:13PJ Vogt?

  What is the scene that is being shot today?

• 44:16Speaker 06

  Okay, this is a parody of the character from 250 years back. He shows up in a director's office, movie director's office, and he dictates, "I want this movie. This is how I want it." And he has outrageous demand for it.

• 44:38PJ Vogt?

  As Rungit 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 Volley 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 Rungit, who loved to make jokes at his own expense, was doing that again here. Is he like a parody of you? Because it's like the person saying what they want the movie to be.

• 45:05Speaker 06

  It could be me. I don't know. I wrote it.

• 45:10PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 45:24PJ Vogt?

  Rungit 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, Rungit retraces that path through various buildings where moments in his life had happened.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  Old US consulate was close to that 52 years back. I had an interview over there.

• 45:47PJ Vogt?

  When you were leaving?

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 45:50PJ Vogt?

  His journey to America had begun in that US consulate, but it had been a wandering kind of journey. It actually started this one day at the movies. Rungit ended up a pharmacist, he says, all because of a plan to catch a film at a nearby theater.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  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 over 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 opportunity to come to USA. I jumped on the board, got there.

• 46:44PJ Vogt?

  I was starting to recognize the logic by which Rungit 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.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  So what were you gonna say, Rungit?

• 47:04Speaker 06

  No, I don't have it.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  I'm a quiet guy, actually. You made me talk a lot.

• 47:19PJ Vogt?

  Just so hard.

• 47:26PJ Vogt?

  So much harder.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  It's like a full audiovisual immersion experience.

• 47:38PJ Vogt?

  Very maximalist.

• 47:43PJ Vogt?

  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 LA 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 strongly is the city's density. Some of the densest neighborhoods you can find anywhere on earth, millions more residents

• 48:28PJ Vogt?

  than New York City, crammed onto a much smaller plot of land. One neighborhood, Dharavi, 12 times denser than Manhattan. There are so many dreams here, you almost can't breathe.

• 48:43PJ Vogt?

  And now, we've arrived. At the gated entrance of a place called Bular Gardens. There's a few little sets here, a fake temple, a fake police station.

• 48:56PJ Vogt?

  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 Ankar, our Bollywood expert, who'd 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 Rungit, are you paying for that catering?

• 49:22Speaker 06

  I'm supposed to arrange for it.

• 49:25PJ Vogt?

  We get out of the car and stride towards the set that the Flower Volley crew is using today. And we're walking into the shooting place.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Do they know who you are, Rungit, when you walk in?

• 49:34Speaker 06

  Of course they know.

• 49:36PJ Vogt?

  "Of course they know who I am," Rungit 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 Rungit. When Rungit passes, people step back respectfully. Rungit is not nondescript here. How would you describe the building we're in, the interior? But there's a bunch of like 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.

• 50:20PJ Vogt?

  There's even hung on the wall, one of those boards that claps shut when they yell "Action." 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 Rungit points and says, "Here's the real director." Hi, PJ. So nice to meet you.

• 50:48Speaker 07

  Same here, same. Hello.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Hi, Kamal.

• 50:50Speaker 07

  Kamal Chandra.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Nice to meet you.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  Same here, man.

• 50:52PJ Vogt?

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

• 51:09Speaker 07

  We have shot one scene over here. This is the second scene. Abhi hum start kareenge. Aapko bilkul bhi Hindi nahi aati? No Hindi? No.

• 51:18PJ Vogt?

  Kamal asks if I speak any Hindi at all. I say no. But fortunately, Jarna, the Hindi interpreter, was here to help.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  If it's okay, we'll just follow you around and kind of record.

• 51:27Speaker 07

  We are taking first shot of this scene. We can do it at lunchtime.

• 51:30PJ Vogt?

  He says we can talk at lunchtime, although lunchtime would prove to be a horizon, always in sight, never in reach.

• 51:39PJ Vogt?

  Across from the fake director's desk, a love seat where the real director, Kamal Chandravil, sits, his monitor in front of him. He invites me to squeeze in beside. 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.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  What's that spray that they're spraying everything down with? Four flies, because of the rain, lots of flies.

• 52:03Speaker 07

  There's a lot of flies.

• 52:05PJ Vogt?

  The idea is to spray, kill a big cloud of flies, and then shoot quickly before the next cloud inevitably arrives. Kamal Chandravil begins directing.

• 52:15Speaker 07

  Standby. Sound.

• 52:18Speaker 08

  Silence.

• 52:19Speaker 07

  Camera. Silence, please, silence, silence. Dusra on karo na. Yeh kahan? Abuwahar. Mood, mood, mood. Action.

• 52:35PJ Vogt?

  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. Heavyset 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.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Man, producer.

• 53:00PJ Vogt?

  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 does the producer want to make? The producer unspools 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?

• 53:49PJ Vogt?

  It is so strange to watch this idea, which has gone from Ranjith'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 Chandravil, calls cut, gives his notes.

• 54:16PJ Vogt?

  And they take it again.

• 54:17Speaker 07

  Ready, roll. Action.

• 54:22PJ Vogt?

  Over and over.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  Action.

• 54:24PJ Vogt?

  Minutes to hours.

• 54:25Speaker 07

  Action.

• 54:31PJ Vogt?

  So we've been here for about three hours now. They're definitely filming. A lot of takes. Close-ups. 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 close-ups, they reset things.

• 54:57PJ Vogt?

  I think the sort of like funniest, surprising 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.

• 55:10Speaker 07

  Action.

• 55:12PJ Vogt?

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

• 55:30Speaker 06

  I was commanding the respect from everybody here.

• 55:35PJ Vogt?

  Does it feel good to be like the producer on set?

• 55:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:40PJ Vogt?

  Our interpreter, Jarna, adds that she has also noticed this dynamic.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  You know, everybody knew him. Everybody was kind of deferring to him.

• 55:49Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Because he's the guy with the money.

• 55:51Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 06

  That's what it do. If when they have a little hint and I'm running out of money, they will dump me like a hot potato.

• 56:03PJ Vogt?

  Are you worried about that at all?

• 56:05Speaker 06

  No, I have enough money.

• 56:09PJ Vogt?

  Jarna jokes about Ranjith's power here. About how, not that he would, but if he wanted to, he could make anyone on set disappear.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  You see, you, that one, out. And you know, that person will be out.

• 56:23Speaker 06

  That's some command. At least one should have it in one lifetime, right? And this is my 15 minutes.

• 56:30PJ Vogt?

  Back home, does your family understand what's happening here? Does anybody understand?

• 56:34Speaker 06

  No. Absolutely no. My wife has no idea that I'm feeding 50 people here today.

• 56:42PJ Vogt?

  She doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  That's the way it is.

• 56:58PJ Vogt?

  I'd come here wondering if Ranjith 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, Ranjith 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 Ranjith found himself, at an age when many people rest, instead, on a great adventure. I was starting to better understand what had brought Ranjith here. But what about Kamal Chandravil? He was clearly an actual director. Why was he working on this particular project?

• 57:43Speaker 07

  Action.

• 57:44Speaker 08

  Oh, you're talking like I'm producer.

• 57:49PJ Vogt?

  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 Chandravil 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.

• 58:06Speaker 07

  Action.

• 58:08PJ Vogt?

  Kamal Chandravil 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, Ranjith. 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 at flies, waiting to see if we get to ask some hard-hitting questions. While we wait, Jarna, the Hindi interpreter,

• 58:51PJ Vogt?

  had been on her own mini-quest to try to learn more about the director. And she told us she'd picked up something intriguing.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  He was saying that the director is an IIT from Kampur, IITian. They are the most educated and the most respected people over here.

• 59:07PJ Vogt?

  I have to explain. In America, an engineering school graduate like Kamal Chandravil 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 Chandravil'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 Kamal Chandravil working on this particular project?

• 59:52PJ Vogt?

  It's 5:00 PM now. The crew resets for a new scene. Lights are moving, cameras are moving. Fly just flew into my eye.

• 1:00:02PJ Vogt?

  The next shot is outside. It features, finally, the famous cauliflower.

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  Literally, there's a man whose job it is to hold the cauliflower. Do you see him?

• 1:00:10PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:00:20Speaker 07

  All right, roll, action.

• 1:00:23PJ Vogt?

  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 beatifically. The actor playing the director now somehow understands this is the movie he's going to make. He triumphantly casts his cauliflower towards the sky and says in English to no one in particular, "Lights."

• 1:00:50Speaker 07

  Camera.

• 1:00:53PJ Vogt?

  Action. "Cut," says the real director, Kamal Chandravil. 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.

• 1:01:08Speaker 07

  Roll.

• 1:01:08PJ Vogt?

  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 scenes and that I will never interview Kamal Chandravil. He is either a serious man who takes his work seriously or a tactical man who has figured out how to box me out.

• 1:01:40PJ Vogt?

  I petition Truthy. Let's just get him on the phone when we're back in America. Like, that'll happen. And then, a miracle.

• 1:01:51PJ Vogt?

  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. Ranjath, whose son's concern has sent me 8,000 miles from my home, has nowhere to be found. Kamal Chandra begins by apologizing.

• 1:02:14Speaker 07

  No, very busy.

• 1:02:16PJ Vogt?

  He's sorry we've had to wait this long. And then we dive in. Jarna, our interpreter, sitting next to us. I begin with the obvious question. I'm trying to understand, like, this film, Flower Valley, like, how, how did this happen? How did you end up shooting this movie?

• 1:02:33Speaker 07

  So Ranjithji ne mujhe contact kiya. Tere, ek mera assistant hai, uske toh.

• 1:02:38PJ Vogt?

  Here, finally, Kamal Chandra's recollection of events, which differed a bit from Ranjath's. Kamal says the way he remembers it. When Ranjath first reached out, Kamal'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 Kamal found himself beginning to just work it out in his mind. How would you make this movie? Over the next months, he took Ranjath's nub of an idea and converted it into a proper screenplay. Why? I think the money, the idea that this story came with a paid-for budget

• 1:03:23PJ Vogt?

  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 Ranjath had spent in America, the story's surrealness felt to him fundamentally Indian.

• 1:03:53Speaker 07

  When I met with Ranjithji, to I felt unka dream hai. Ye film unka dream hai. Jo unhone childhood se isko, I think, pata nahi kab se ispe workout kar raha hai.

• 1:04:07PJ Vogt?

  Kamal's saying here, "When I met with Ranjath, 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," Kamal says, musing about the unknowable 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 Ranjath'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.

• 1:04:51PJ Vogt?

  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 other, this man's dream from far away, but that you also relate to? He pauses for a second and says,

• 1:05:05Speaker 07

  Actually, main isko is tarik ke se dekh sakta hu.

• 1:05:08PJ Vogt?

  He says, you know, "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 Ranjathji, he realized this person was really another version of himself. But one who discovered his dream late,

• 1:05:52PJ Vogt?

  instead of early. Kamal says, "I fulfilled my dream. So I felt that it was my duty to help him fulfill his."

• 1:06:00Speaker 07

  Ki badi honesty ke saath me, is sune ko, Ranjithji ke sune ko main bhi pura kar raha hu.

• 1:06:05PJ Vogt?

  You saw yourself in him. You saw a different version of your life where you had not found what you loved as early.

• 1:06:11Speaker 07

  Yes, yes, we can say, we can say. One important thing.

• 1:06:16PJ Vogt?

  Here, Kamal adds, "One thing you should know is that Ranjath and I argue constantly." He reminds me, Ranjath is not a professional screenwriter and that he's quite emotionally attached to his story. Every change provokes real sadness. Kamal says he tells Ranjath what he tells every new producer. "You have to give your director some creative leeway or else the film won't work out." He says that he tells Ranjathji, "If I'm going to make this dream real, I need to be able to speak to you honestly."

• 1:06:46Speaker 07

  Mujhe pura karke dena, meri bhi duty hai, ki main tumhe reality batau. Ki bhai, ye yahan aap galat hai, yahan sach hai, wahi.

• 1:06:55PJ Vogt?

  None of this is the relationship I'd pictured between Kamal and the person he respectfully calls Ranjathji. I tried 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 gonna make a movie. And he starts 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 you're a person with a career and a job. You got this, you know? And you were like, "I'm gonna help this person

• 1:07:39PJ Vogt?

  because I think it's the right thing to do."

• 1:07:41Speaker 07

  Actually, humko bhi bahut saare producers milta hai.

• 1:07:44PJ Vogt?

  Kamal said that from his point of view, he meets with a lot of producers.

• 1:07:49Speaker 07

  Time wasting, kuch nahi hona hota hai.

• 1:07:51PJ Vogt?

  And he also has to worry about who's real. Most producers just waste his time. But Ranjath, 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.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:08:35Speaker 07

  Hamari industry me, hamari line me, har film ka ek future hota hai.

• 1:08:39PJ Vogt?

  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 fail. But just like every person has a destiny, he says every film does too. Kamal says that for his part, the team has worked very hard on the movie. And that very soon, they'll have to leave it to its fate. We've talked for about 30 minutes, and his break is now over.

• 1:09:12Speaker 07

  Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

• 1:09:15PJ Vogt?

  It's 7:00 PM, which means he has to get back to work. There's still some daylight. They're gonna shoot a little more. We go to the car to wake up Ranjath, but it turns out he's no longer there.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  What do we do? We've lost?

• 1:09:29PJ Vogt?

  Now it turns into a different kind of story. We finally find him. We lost you. Where did you hide?

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  Oh, no, I didn't have it.

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  She had to pay everyone.

• 1:09:40PJ Vogt?

  You had to pay everybody over the end of the day?

• 1:09:42Speaker 06

  Every spot. Okay, so we should go.

• 1:09:47PJ Vogt?

  Turned out, while we'd been recording, Ranjath 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. Ranjath 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 were?

• 1:10:12Speaker 06

  Oh, no, this is it.

• 1:10:14PJ Vogt?

  Why not another one?

• 1:10:15Speaker 06

  I'm too old.

• 1:10:18PJ Vogt?

  How did you decide that?

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

  Oh, I know it. Time to go and play with grandkids.

• 1:10:27PJ Vogt?

  That's a great idea.

• 1:10:42PJ Vogt?

  I fly home. I think about what I'll say to Ranjath's son, to Rajah, 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 Rajah'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 Ranjath 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.

• 1:11:24PJ Vogt?

  Here, in the end, is what I do feel confident about. About 50 years ago, a trip to the movie theater sent Ranjath 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 strangers. And at some point, it will be.

• 1:12:08PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 1:13:38PJ Vogt?

  That's our story for you this week. Stories like the one you just heard, which take months of research, international travel, original music, obviously costs much more time and money, but we're able to do them thanks to the financial support we receive from our incognito mode subscribers, the people who pay for an ad-free version of the show with extra episodes. Next week on the incognito mode feed, we have an interview with Anker Patajk, our Bollywood expert. I learned a ton from him, but he also kept cracking me up. It was a good conversation. If you're not already a member and would like to support our show, please head over to searchengine.show 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.

• 1:14:30PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnanani, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malter is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. 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 Bazarian and from Phoebe Bridgers. Fact checking this week by Natsumi Ajisaka. Hindi interpretation and translation by Jarna Khanchandani. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Special thanks this week to Supriya Drabhan. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin

• 1:15:13PJ Vogt?

  Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkotti, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a question for the show, please send it to us via email, [email protected]. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, send requests to that email address as well, subject line, "Advertising." Also, if you're looking for a cheaper way to support us, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or following us on Spotify. Those are the behaviors those platforms' algorithms seem to enjoy. Thank you as always for listening. We'll see you next week.

• 1:15:51PJ Vogt?

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• 1:16:36PJ Vogt?

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