Vijesh Rajan was a butcher on Gangs of Wasseypur. He was also, by his own account, watching a director behave like a child with a new toy.
“We have been on a lot of sets, and sometimes there is this awkward silence on set, you can smell and taste the authority, but with Anurag sir it is like a playground,” Rajan said in an interview with Hindustan Times published October 29. “He literally wings it. He manufactures these accidents and waits for people to surprise him.”
That is a specific memory of a specific production, and it arrives at a useful moment. Rajan and Yashoda Parthasarthy, the writer-directors behind the short film Aakhri Ride, are releasing their first film on October 31 through Oh Short Flips, the YouTube channel Anurag Kashyap curates. Both of them started their careers inside Kashyap’s crew. The promotional cycle has turned into an oral history of how that crew was run.
Rajan’s route in was accidental. He was working as a sound designer on The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project when Kashyap told the film’s director he wanted to work with the sound designer. Rajan told him he was not a professional sound designer, that he worked in VFX. Kashyap told him to stick around anyway.
“The following week, auditions started for Gangs of Wasseypur, and they asked me what I wanted to do on the film,” Rajan said. “I just told them whatever you want me to do.”
He ended up in front of the camera as one of the butchers, and behind it in the VFX unit. Parthasarthy worked with Kashyap on Raman Raghav 2.0. Between them they have spent more than a decade around a filmmaker who, in their telling, does not guard the door.
“He can spot talent from a mile away and doesn’t gatekeep. He is like my godfather,” Rajan said. “Yashoda and I owe our entire careers in the industry to him.”
The Film They Made With That Freedom
Aakhri Ride runs on a single Halloween night in Mumbai. Chandan Roy plays Aman Yadav, a ride-share driver from Bihar who sleeps in the car he drives, sends money home, and is told by his sister’s in-laws that the wedding will collapse unless another Rs 1.5 lakh appears. Faisal Malik voices Scam Raju, a fraudster on the phone coaxing him back toward old habits. Aamir Dalvi turns up late as a policeman.
The premise came out of the back seats of Mumbai cabs. Parthasarthy and Rajan noticed a pattern on long rides home from meetings: the driver carrying an entirely different life on his phone while they sat comfortably behind him.
“We began to notice an invisible social divide: we were enjoying the comfort of being driven home, while he was trying to make ends meet,” they said in a joint statement carried by Variety. “We shared a small space, but knew so little about each other’s lives.”
Vijesh told Hindustan Times about one driver in visible panic, making call after call, trying to raise money in a dialect they could not fully follow. That image became the spine of the script. The directors have also been open that the film is a deliberate riff on 1990s Hindi cinema — the honest hero, the sister’s wedding, the cop who arrives at the end — filtered through horror and comedy.
A Playground With Friction
The “no authority” memory is not the whole record of Gangs of Wasseypur, and it is worth saying so plainly. In August 2025, Vasan Bala — who is presenting Aakhri Ride alongside Kashyap — spoke publicly about a heated creative disagreement with Kashyap during that film. Bala described questioning Kashyap’s approach to intimate character moments and the argument escalating in front of the crew.
Both things can be true. A set without hierarchy is not a set without argument. What Rajan is describing is a particular absence: the silence that settles when a director’s status has to be felt before anyone speaks. Kashyap, he says, never created that silence.
Bala’s own quote about the new film is consistent with the mentorship pattern. He called Rajan the “Wiz Kid” introduced to him by filmmaker Srinivas. “We were always in awe of what he could do with his VFX skills, but there was always a sensitive and fun storyteller in him,” Bala said. “Coming on board was a nano second decision, a no brainer.”
The Distribution Channel Is the Real Story
The more consequential detail sits underneath the nostalgia. Aakhri Ride played Clermont-Ferrand’s Short Film Market Picks, then BIFAN in Bucheon, Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, Florida Film Festival, Austin After Dark, Fantaspoa and a long list of Oscar- and BAFTA-qualifying events. It won the Silver Audience Award for best Asian short at Fantasia, best film at the Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, and best Indian short at the Indo Dubai International Film Festival.
And then it goes to YouTube, free, on Halloween.
That is the model Kashyap has been building with Oh Short Flips: run the festival circuit for credibility, then land on a curated channel instead of waiting for a theatrical window that short films almost never get. For debut directors without a studio behind them, the festival run is the press kit. The channel is the release.
It also explains why Kashyap’s name is on the poster. A presenter credit on a short film is not a vanity line. It is the thing that gets a programmer to press play, and the thing that gets a viewer to click a thumbnail three weeks later.
What the Reviews Say
Early notices are split on execution, not on intent. Outlook India called it a film that “loses the way amid tonal shifts,” arguing the pivot lands more awkwardly than impressively. ETV Bharat was warmer, praising Chandan Roy’s portrayal of a migrant eldest son and noting the film’s attention to dowry pressure, wage exploitation and the isolation of queer characters alongside the scares.
Both reviews agree the technical craft holds up. Krish Makhija shot it, Shreyas Beltangdy edited, and Achint Thakkar scored it.
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For Rajan and Parthasarthy, the film is a first credit after years of working on other people’s movies. For the people who watched them come up on a chaotic shoot in Uttar Pradesh more than a decade ago, the interesting part is what they chose to remember about it. Not the scale, not the dialogue, not the film’s afterlife as a cult object. The fact that nobody on that set made them feel small enough to keep quiet.
The takeaway is simpler than the tributes: the most durable thing Anurag Kashyap built on Gangs of Wasseypur was not a film but a crew, and this week two of them finally got to sit in the director’s chair.
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