Bollywood Dreams

Search Engine

A son's concern over his retired father's ambitious dream of producing a Bollywood film leads to an investigation into a suspicious online c

Key takeaways

• A retired man's late-life dream to become a Bollywood producer reveals deeper themes of identity, legacy, and the human need for creative expression.
• The father's lack of prior interest in Bollywood underscores how deeply personal and surreal his vision is—driven more by imagination than cultural familiarity.

Main topics

• Bollywood filmmaking
• Internet scams and fraud

Notable quotes

"My dad doesn't watch Bollywood movies. I've never heard him talk about Bollywood."

Conclusion

The episode ends not with a resolution but with reflection—on the fragile boundary between dream and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:25) 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? Speaker 1 (0:38) 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'd 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. Speaker 1 (1:04) 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. Speaker 2 (1:11) Can you say your name and tell me where you are right now? Hey, PJ. I'm Raja, and I'm based out of State College, Pennsylvania. Speaker 1 (1:20) 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. Speaker 2 (1:34) 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. Speaker 1 (2:20) And before we get into the most recent one, just give me a sense of what are some of the side businesses? 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. Speaker 2 (2:36) 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. Speaker 1 (2:47) 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 Kinkos. Speaker 2 (3:02) He had a photocopying 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. Speaker 1 (3:13) Kinko's also well-positioned to take on would-be disruptors like Raja's dad. However, other markets beckoned. The Speaker 2 (3:21) 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. Speaker 1 (3:38) The gel product actually got stuck in R &D. Raja said he remembers once getting it on his own hand and it burning a lot. Speaker 1 (3:50) If his dad seemed undeterred by the failure of these businesses, the rest of the family felt differently. Speaker 2 (3:55) My mom has the extremely frugal, extremely conservative, put your money into savings, put your money into investments, don't chase wild, ridiculous dreams. Speaker 2 (4:12) 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. Speaker 1 (4:37) That's how Raja 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, Raj 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. Like, can you just tell me like, how did this even happen? Yeah, Speaker 2 (5:26) 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. Speaker 2 (5:38) 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. Speaker 1 (5:53) Raja had included this Word document in his email to me, the file that began his father's journey into moviemaking. 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. Speaker 1 (6:16) 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. 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? Speaker 1 (6:54) It's all fairly meta, and as pitches go, certainly very rough. And yet, with nothing but that pitch, Raja'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. Speaker 2 (7:15) The request was coming from a regular Gmail email address. It wasn't tied to any production company. It was just... lightproductions at gmail.com. So very suspicious. If you take it at face value, it didn't seem very legit. Speaker 1 (7:33) lightproductions at gmail.com. Why would a reputable Bollywood director be using the 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. Speaker 2 (7:48) 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. Speaker 1 (8:09) 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 Speaker 2 (8:19) 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... Speaker 2 (8:36) 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. Speaker 1 (9:02) 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? Speaker 2 (9:10) Oh, absolutely. And what is the movie budget like in total? Somewhere around $300,000. Speaker 1 (9:20) $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 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 lived into. Speaker 2 (9:45) 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, did... 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. Speaker 1 (10:22) 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. Speaker 1 (10:40) 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? Speaker 2 (11:00) 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 Speaker 1 (11:09) assistant. Probably Speaker 2 (11:11) the Speaker 1 (11:11) 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. Speaker 2 (11:32) 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? Speaker 1 (11:53) And 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? Speaker 2 (12:05) 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. Yeah. At this point, I just care that there is a product. Whatever my dad has paid for, it becomes something. Speaker 1 (12:30) Okay. We're going to find out. We're going to learn more. Speaker 1 (12:35) After a short break, our investigation begins. Speaker 1 (13:13) The following conversation is brought to you by LabCorp On Demand. We're all self-proclaimed experts about something. 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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. Speaker 2 (14:16) So you're, if Speaker 1 (14:17) 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? Speaker 5 (14:22) Absolutely. Speaker 1 (14:23) And what percentage on the pie chart of our conversations are about real or imagined health issues that I have diagnosed myself with? Speaker 5 (14:32) 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%. So Speaker 1 (14:44) if I told you that I just got like a fairly like full panel. Speaker 1 (14:48) 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? Speaker 5 (14:54) As a person who's also in my 40s and thinking about my cholesterol, yada yada, I'm curious what you learned. Speaker 1 (15:04) Okay, you ready? Speaker 5 (15:06) Yeah. Speaker 1 (15:07) Here's what's very crazy. Speaker 5 (15:09) You're healthy. Totally Speaker 1 (15:10) healthy. Speaker 5 (15:14) Congratulations. Speaker 1 (15:15) 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 going to have low testosterone and I didn't. Or an Speaker 5 (15:25) iron deficiency or something like that. Speaker 1 (15:27) Well, I was convinced low testosterone. And then when I talked to my doctor, she was like, you're spending too much time on the internet. The internet is trying to convince everybody they have low testosterone. She said you have anxiety. Speaker 5 (15:37) Okay. I'm only surprised because I think I have thoughts about eating habits. Dude, Speaker 1 (15:42) my cholesterol is Speaker 5 (15:43) fantastic. Well, congratulations. You must have great genes. Speaker 1 (15:47) It's definitely nature, not nurture. Speaker 1 (15:51) If you have questions about your overall health, LabCorp OnDemand is a trusted way to get insights that can power you forward. Just visit the website and choose from a suite of more than 100 lab tests, including micronutrient, cortisol, fitness, testosterone, and more. From there, visit the LabCorp location closest to you to get tested. It takes only days to receive reliable, easy-to-understand results from Lab Doctors Trust. Ready to start knowing yourself? Visit ondemand.labcorp.com slash search engine and use code search to save up to 15 % on select tests. That's ondemand.labcorp.com slash search engine and use code search. Know yourself. Welcome back to the show. Bollywood. 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 its name from Bombay, which is what many people who live