The Desi Crime Podcast

In September 2003, three young Singaporean students were sharing an ordinary apartment in Sydney. They were far from home, studying in Australia, living the kind of life that many international students know well. But one morning, inside their apartment, everything changed. Two of them would never make it out alive. At first, the case seemed to point outward-- to strange sightings and possible int...

In a quiet neighbourhood in The Hague, a woman disappeared without warning. Her name was Sharmila Shinde. She was a wife, a mother, and an Indian woman living thousands of kilometres away from home, until she was nowhere to be seen. When investigators entered her home, what they found inside would turn this disappearance into one of the most chilling cases connected to the Indian community in the...

A boy from a big Pune business family, a girl about to marry into it, and a wedding being built on a scale that barely sounded real. Then Ketan Agarwal went over the edge of Lohagad Fort near Lonavala, and for 5 days it stayed exactly what it looked like: a tragic trekking accident. But his fiancée Siya Goyal, a man in a hoodie named Chetan Chaudhary, 2004 phone calls, and a string of earlier atte...

For years, men were disappearing from Toronto’s Gay Village. Some were immigrants. Some were refugees. Some were South Asian or Middle Eastern men living complicated, private lives in a city that was supposed to offer them freedom. They moved through bars, dating apps, friendships, and chosen families — until, one by one, they seemed to vanish. At first, there were rumours. Then there was fear. Pe...

A secret affair. A blackmail threat. And a mother-daughter duo willing to do the unthinkable to keep it all hidden. In this episode of Desi Crime, we unravel the shocking case of TikTok influencer Mahek Bukhari and her mother, Ansreen Bukhari, who were convicted of orchestrating the deaths of 21-year-olds Saqib Hussain and Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin after a relationship threatened to become public....

Watch Brown on Zee5 TODAY!https://www.zee5.com/web-series/details/brown/0-6-4z5968730 For a village in the suburbs of Ernakulam, the morning of October 3rd, 2006 arrived with a smell of kerosene and a scene so brutal that the whole country would soon be talking about it. In the weeks that followed, a name would surface. A name that became folklore, the kind of name parents used to frighten childre...

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 f...

On April 13, 2026, somewhere in Tampa, Florida, a 26 year old American man typed a question into ChatGPT. What happens if a human has put a black garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster. The chatbot told him it sounded dangerous. He typed back. How would they find out. Three days later, two Bangladeshi doctoral students at the University of South Florida — two young people who were quietly planning t...

In 2016, a man who was equal parts survivalist and seeker, a man who traded a six-figure tech career for a life in the wilderness, a man who was phenomenal at surviving in nature, disappeared in it forever. This is the story of that man. But this is also the story of the Parvati Valley—a sliver of the Indian Himalayas so staggeringly beautiful and so consistently deadly that the list of people who...

On October 28, 2023, the world woke up to the news that one of the most beloved sitcom actors in television history was found face-down in his hot tub. Matthew Perry. Chandler Bing. 54 years old. The initial assumption was simple: a troubled man, a long battle with addiction, a tragic but unsurprising end. But the investigation that followed pulled at a thread that unraveled something far bigger t...

In a small village in Tamil Nadu, three people walked into a house in 2008 and were never seen again. No missing persons report was ever filed. No investigation was ever launched. For four years, the world moved on and a family ate dinner every night literally above the truth of those 3 missing people. What finally brought it to the surface wasn't a detective or a tip or a breakthrough in forensic...

We first covered the brutal custodial killings of Jayaraj and Bennix in 2020, and then again as an update in 2022. In light of the recent updates on the case that have shaken the country, this episode is a compilation of all Desi Crime episodes on the story, followed by a segment on what we know now as of April 2026. For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patre...

February 23, 2026. Fairfax County, Virginia. It is 5 in the morning and it has been snowing. A young police officer, Nicholas Brazones, is walking toward an apartment building in the suburbs. Dispatch has told him almost nothing: domestic assault, 2 victims. He has handled these calls before. You show up, you separate the parties, you take statements, you file a report. Most of the time, the situa...

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...

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 M...

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 f...

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 kit...

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's 10 p.m. on May 16, 2012, and Havelock Town pulses with the electric hum of Colombo's nightlife, a cold breeze from the Indian Ocean fans across Sri Lanka’s capital city. Inside El Greco nightclub, Wasim Thajudeen, 27 and built like the rugby captain he is—broad shoulders and an easy smile—holds court at a corner booth. The clock ticks 11:30 p.m. "Gotta bounce, lads," he says...

On an October night in 1974, Stanford University was quiet in the way elite campuses often are after dark—orderly, confident, almost untouchable. Students slept behind locked doors, bells stood silent, and the church at the center of campus felt like the safest place imaginable. Inside that church, a young woman sought nothing more than solitude, reflection, and rest. And by morning, she was dead....

In the mid-1980s, families across North Kerala began dying inside locked homes, attacked while asleep, with no signs of struggle and no witnesses. This episode unpacks the Ripper Chandran case — the fear that gripped entire districts, the investigative blind spots of the time, and the moment India was forced to understand serial crime for the first time. For extra episodes, early access, silly blo...

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/0KUJKS3SFBKRU9K87JENILIPYC To send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com. For extra episodes, early access, silly bl...

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...

Welcome to Moment of Silence x Desi Crime: The Last Sleepover. Remember those sleepovers where you stayed up way too late; swapping rumours, gossiping, and trying to spook your best friends with scary stories? This is our attempt to take you back to that feeling.  Hosted by Aishwarya Singh, Aryaan Misra, Naina Bhan and Sakshi Shivdasani, this crossover slumber party takes you on a ride: Do ghosts...

On the night of November 25, 1981, an Air India Boeing 707 descended toward Mahé in the Seychelles expecting a routine refuelling stop—and instead flew straight into a war zone. Below, a coup was unfolding. As tracer bullets and mortars lit up the night, Captain Umesh Chandra Saxena circled overhead with dwindling fuel, receiving only cryptic warnings from a control tower that had already been sei...