The Desi Crime Podcast

April 2006. Pramod Mahajan is 56 years old. He is the organizational brain of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The man who brought the BJP into the digital age. The man who brokered the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance that conquered Maharashtra. The man who organized Advani's Ram Rath Yatra. The man who, as India's Telecom Minister, helped put a mobile phone in every Indian's pocket. Corporate India courts him. Delhi's power corridors bend around him. He is being spoken about, in hotel lobbies and drawing rooms across the capital, as a future Prime Minister. And for the last 6 months, astrologers have been calling him. One after another. All of them with the same warning: your life is in danger. From someone close to you. An insider. Pramod Mahajan ignores every single call.On April 22, a Saturday morning in Mumbai, Pramod sits in his Worli apartment with the morning newspaper. The doorbell rings. It is his younger brother Pravin. He is let inside. Tea is offered. And in 15 minutes, the most powerful political operative in India is on his living room floor, 3 bullets in his body, asking one question to his brother-in-law Gopinath Munde on the phone: "Mee asa kay gunha kela ki Pravin ne mala golya marlya?" What crime had I committed, that Pravin shot me?

Every year, on a Thursday in December, the best badminton players in the world, from China, Indonesia, Japan, Denmark, arrive in Lucknow to compete in a tournament. Flags go up. Stadiums fill. A name echoes across the announcer's PA system, repeated hundreds of times over several days, until it becomes just background noise to the people who have heard it their whole lives. That name is Syed Modi. What the crowds in those stadiums rarely talk about--what the gleaming trophy and the BWF World Tour branding don’t mention--is that Syed Modi was twenty-five years old when two men shot him dead outside a stadium gate in Lucknow on a July evening in 1988. He was India's greatest badminton player of his era. He was a Railway employee's son from a sugar mill town nobody had ever heard of. He was a husband who was betrayed. He was a father--of a two-month-old daughter he would never see grow up. And then, one evening, he was a body in a pool of blood. This is the story of Syed Modi. And it is also the story of everything India let get away.

Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading: To send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com.For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios or join our YouTube family https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg/joinFor fastest updates, follow our socials at: https://www.instagram.com/desicrime/Aryaan https://www.instagram.com/aryaanmisra/Aishwarya https://www.instagram.com/aishwaryasinghs/To buy Desi Studios merch, visit: https://kadakmerch.com/collections/desi-studios

West Chester, Ohio. A clean, quiet suburb where Indian families build their “American dream” one grocery run, one school pickup, one festival at a time. But on April 28th, 2019, that dream turned into a crime scene. Inside a single apartment, four adults from one Indian family were found shot dead— not together, but scattered like someone had moved through the home with purpose. A woman on the kitchen floor. An elderly aunt lying in the hallway. A mother-in-law in the living room. And the father-in-law inside a bedroom. There was no broken door. No struggle loud enough for neighbors to hear. Just a story that would shock an entire community and embroil a state. This is the story of the Westchester quadruple murders.For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudiosJoin our YouTube family: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg/joinFor fastest updates, follow our socials at: https://www.instagram.com/desicrimehttps://www.instagram.com/aryaanmisrahttps://www.instagram.com/aishwaryasinghs/To buy Desi Studios merch, visit: https://kadakmerch.com/collections/desi-studios

On a quiet evening in September 2006, something horrifying happened in the small village of Khairlanji. By morning, four members of a single family were gone — and the village was silent. At first, the story seemed unclear, almost deliberately so. But as details slowly surfaced, the crime revealed something far darker than a simple act of violence. What happened in Khairlanji wasn’t just brutal — it exposed wounds that ran deep within Indian society, and sparked outrage that would shake an entire state. This is the story of the Khairlanji Massacre.

A national rugby star disappears after a night out and his burned BMW raises urgent questions. Conflicting autopsies, missing bones, and signs of pre‑fire violence complicate the mystery. Phone records, CCTV and links to powerful figures suggest a possible cover‑up. Investigations, arrests and unexplained deaths of accused individuals leave many threads unresolved.

A decades-old murder at a university church and the eerie scene investigators found. A mysterious sandy-haired stranger sighting and early theory of cult involvement. Forensic limits of the 1970s, a mislabeled piece of clothing that stalled the case, and a later DNA breakthrough that changed everything.

A chilling string of locked‑house night murders that terrorized North Kerala in the 1980s. The discovery of a bloody pickaxe and a survivor’s accent clue that cracked the case. Cross‑state killings that exposed investigative blind spots and a suspect with multiple aliases. Court battles, psychiatric reports, and the grim finality of a death sentence.

Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading: Watch Daldal: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Daldal/0KUJKS3SFBKRU9K87JENILIPYCTo send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com.For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios or join our YouTube family https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg/joinFor fastest updates, follow our socials at: https://www.instagram.com/desicrime/Aryaan https://www.instagram.com/aryaanmisra/Aishwarya https://www.instagram.com/aishwaryasinghs/

A moonless night in the Rocky Mountains. January 6, 1982. Snow has been dumping for hours over Colorado as temperatures plummet. Far above the ski lights of Breckenridge, on a remote mountain pass, tragedy had already begun. That night, in the cozy bars of Breckenridge, as locals were huddling together to seek refuge from the storm, little did they know that two members of their community had just vanished. This is the story of that snowy night, that otherwise peaceful town, and those two victims tied together by a single clue. This is the story of the orange sock murders.00:03:35:23- chapter 1 SOS IN THE ROCKIES00:13:06:16- chapter 2 ANNETTE IS MISSING00:31:10:18- chapter 3 DEAD ENDS00:41:50:16- chapter 4 THE GENEALOGY GAMBLE00:51:47:23- chapter 5 DAY IN COURTFor extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudiosJoin our YouTube family: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg/joinFor fastest updates, follow our socials at: https://www.instagram.com/desicrimehttps://www.instagram.com/aryaanmisrahttps://www.instagram.com/aishwaryasinghs/To buy Desi Studios merch, visit: https://kadakmerch.com/collections/desi-studios