In the filmmaker’s dictionary, there is a magical, all-purpose word: “cheat.” Can’t afford that location? Cheat it. The prop isn’t quite right? Cheat it. The art of illusion is the industry’s lifeblood. But as a researcher, my entire philosophy is a rebellion against this notion. My mission is simple: to help build a world so airtight and meticulously crafted that the audience doesn’t see a cheat – they glimpse the truth. They should feel the cast and crew had actually time-travelled to shoot the thing.
So, you can imagine my cosmic irony when, after a year of backbreaking, sleep-killing work on the Netflix show Saare Jahan Se Accha, I found myself on the receiving end of the most gut-wrenching cheat of all: my name was missing from the credits. Gone. Vanished into the digital ether of the Netflix interface. The silver bullet had been shot straight at me. I wrote to the production house that made it. The ChatGPT written answer: “We deeply value your contribution” and that it was perhaps Netflix’s fault. Someone was trying to save their job: mine wasn’t the only name omitted. So, I didn’t blow my fuse. Not even after realising this was a Hollywood budget show, but what I paid was regional cinema monies.
But why does a credit matter (regular readers of my column might remember another piece I wrote on this)? It’s not ego; it’s about acknowledgement, about basic decency. It’s the official receipt for the sweat, blood, tears, intellect, and sanity you gave to the project. In an industry that often treats research as a joke, a credit for the same is like a tiny flag planted on the surface of the moon that says, “This detail? This authenticity? That was me. I did that.” To have it omitted is to be rendered a ghost in your own machine.
And what a machine I helped build. My inspiration has always been Hollywood, where a project like this would have a whole department with its own fancy catered lunches and a credit plate the size of a dinner tray. Here, it was just me – one-man research army, a VPN, and a stubborn refusal to get anything wrong (spoiler alert: I still did).
The goal was audacious: to recreate 1970s India and Pakistan (except for Episode 1, the whole show is set in Pakistan) with such precision that a time-traveller from the era would give it a nod of approval. The script, already in motion when I joined in April 2022, got a jolt of conspiracy theory from my inner amateur historian. I proposed weaving the mysterious, close-together deaths of PM Lal Bahadur Shastri and Dr. Homi Bhabha into the narrative: that both were killed because India wanted to make its own nuclear bomb (another spoiler alert: originally the show’s last bit was India’s nuclear test, the Smiling Buddha on 19 May 1974 and you realising the show was about stopping Pakistan from building it’s bomb, while India built its own with R&AW chief R N Kao as the main mastermind – it was about India fooling the world). While the Shastri thread was cut, the Bhabha angle stuck, becoming the foundational trauma for our hero, Vishnu Shankar (Pratik Gandhi).
The show’s creator and lead writer, Gaurav Shukla, was a dream collaborator, a writer who genuinely cherished details. He’d lob curveballs my way: “How did handlers communicate with field agents?” Damn Gaurav! I had no choice but to dive into a dozen books on spycraft (with a few dozen more already under my belt from a defunct R&AW project I had worked on earlier). The result? The “message in an apple” technique that made the final cut (among a dozen others that didn’t). He happily incorporated almost every suggestion I passed along, building a complex story that, for a while, was a researcher’s paradise.
Then came the real rabbit hole: 1970s Pakistan. How does an Indian researcher access archives from a country that blocks your IP? You become a digital ghost, haunting the past through a painfully slow VPN. But the payoff was immense: discovering a pre-1977 Pakistan that was vibrant, colourful, and dripping with a glamour utterly foreign to the modern imagination. That’s why our Pakistan in the show isn’t some dour, monochrome place; it’s alive, a character in itself. There were many more details that another sucker for research and Buddha masquerading as director, Sumit Purohit, had put into the show – creating Pakistan in South Bombay and Punjab that even Pakistanis today don’t know existed.
My purview was terrifyingly vast. I wasn’t just plotting spycraft; I was sourcing the very texture of reality from that time. The specific models of cars on the road. The exact make of guns used by the Pakistan Army. The design of electrical switches on the walls. The names of markets, real addresses on off-screen signboards, authentic number plates, ads in the paper and hoardings. Everything was real. We even created a replica of a real Pakistani market from the 1970s in the abandoned cigarette factory behind Mithibai College in Mumbai.
Until the lawyers arrived. We had to replace real brand names, even for long-dead companies, with fictional ones. I’d researched the genuine army insignia, but legal fears meant we had to redesign our own: a paradox that still baffles me since we were openly calling them the Pakistan Army. The ads you see in the background were painstakingly recreated from hundreds of real ones I unearthed and handed to our wizardly set design team, led by Sukant Panigrahy and the miracle workers Sandeep Kumar and Divya Ostwal. We fought, we debated, we obsessed over every minute detail, and they brought it all to life with bad breaking hard work and stunning accuracy. (A cruel irony: Sandeep and Divya’s names were missing at first, too).
This wasn’t part of my job. But I also became a journalist inside the show, drafting dozens of in-depth articles for Kritika Kamra’s character, Fatima, to have written: enough text to fill a small newspaper. This was pre-ChatGPT, remember. So, this took weeks of reading and synthesising to write with the expertise her character demanded, so that if a viewer froze the screen and read the article, they’d understand it. In the generative AI era, it’s a piece of cake. For films in the post ChatGPT era, I've used LLMs to craft stories with precise prompting to appear in screen. Freeze, read, and be amazed at the depth.
"I guesstimated using the period inflation data Google uncle threw, on how much money Bhutto would ask for to build the nuclear bomb. I researched 1970s school bags for a kid kidnapping plot. I confirmed that fax machines existed (invented in the 1840s, can you believe, commercialised in the 1970s) and that Fatima’s bulky tape recorder in episode three was period-perfect, as sleek recorders for journalists or the Sony Walkman were still years away.
The bank in the show? Based on the real Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), now defunct, but which helped not just Bhutto but allegedly even the CIA launder dirty money. The European company supplying the reactor? A nod to a real corporation that did try to do something for Pakistan in the 1970s. The politics of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Fatima cites? Meticulously researched.
A favourite pastime when watching films at home is freezing frames, reading the screen, and laughing at the text written. I didn’t want to give anyone else that pleasure on something that I was associated with.
And yes, there’s a goof-up. Actually, more than one, but I’ll recount just one (I am self-deprecating, but not nearly enough) in episode six, at 4:42, the newspaper article on Munir Khan’s breakfast table repeats text (all sensible text) because the article I had written wasn’t long enough. I wasn’t on set that day. I was paid a pittance and couldn’t afford to be there every day. That one, and a few others, still sting.
When the show was released, after horrible operations on the edit table to cut out organs that weren’t damaged, the response was overwhelming. Reviewers and viewers alike praised the research, the sets, and the undeniable authenticity. I felt vindicated. I scoured the reviews for any mention of the world we built, and every approving nod was a silent “yes!”. A payment in serotonin, in exchange for the poor cash payment.
Then I saw the credits. Or rather, I didn’t.
To curb my volcanic fury, I waited a few days to write to the producers. Like I said before, they blamed Netflix, which, I know, doesn’t micromanage such things. It was a classic cover-up for a monumental screw-up. Five days after the show, they did put my name up (and Sandeep and Divya’s, among others). My name was somewhere deep and labelled “Research Associate”. What the hell is a research associate? But I didn’t care anymore (the pirated versions of the show on torrents will never carry my name), as the bitterness had already set in – a bittersweet aftertaste to the sweet fruits of our labour. At least Sumit forced me into a cameo: you’ll see my bald pate in Episode one from seven minutes, forty-four seconds.
That missing credit is a symptom of a larger disease: the sad plight of research in Indian cinema, Bolly, Tolly, Molly – it’s missing in most films. The budget for research, even on period shows or films, is lower than that for spot boys (it was so even on Saare Jahan Se Accha). It’s too often seen as a disposable luxury, not a necessity: Cheat it, yaar – is the refrain. We are the guardians of truth in an art of illusion, and when we do our job perfectly, we become invisible. As Sumit sweetly wrote in a social media post, researchers are like spies; when they do their jobs well, you never notice. Touche.
The ultimate cheat is that our most tremendous success is making everyone forget that we – the researchers – did anything, that we were ever there at all. But we were. We are. And the truth we built inside the illusion, in every frame of the shows and films we work on, is our real, lasting credit.