The Desi Crime Podcast

Disturbing memories, scrawled in cursive books meant for kindergarteners: \"My mother made my sister strip in the bathroom... My mother thinks I am impotent. She wanted to see me develop a relationship. This is why she used to send a maid servant to my room to excite me.\" The inscriptions, incongruous with the whimsical books in which they were found. The mother in question is Aarati De, and ever...

DESI CRIME YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg VIDEOS DROP OCT 5TH You’ve heard us on Spotify and you’ve heard us on Gaana. But you’ve just heard us, our voices, for 2 years now, for over 50 episodes. And now it’s finally time to change that. It’s time to put a face to our voices. It’s time that we bring you India’s favorite true crime podcast on India’s favorite plat...

Countless true crime stories begin with a family. More specifically, a family gone awry -- hate, jealousy, and vengeance seeping in and tearing apart the bonds of blood. But this story is different. This isn\'t the case of a family that doesn\'t love one another; this is the case of a family that loves one another far too much. What does that mean? This is the story where you find out. It\'s a sto...

The case that we have for you today is as much about the crime as what happened next, about death as much as life. It is about morality as much as ethics, as much about the society we seek to create as much as the punishment it doles out to those who threaten it. This case will come to be discussed by generations of Indian law students. It is the story of a 25-year-old nurse just seeking to make a...

Today\'s episode comes all the way from Nepal, where a young girl had big dreams like any other. Her doting family moved across cities and states, all for the sake of their daughter’s promising future, until that young girl got a phone call that changed her life forever. Soon after, her parents got a phone call too -- a call that shattered the life they had built and all the happiness within it. T...

‘How I’m looking? Beautiful, sexy, or hot?’ One could have easily mistaken these words to be uttered by a Kim Kardashian, a Kendal Jenner or some other young woman on Instagram seeking fame, if only it was not for the broken English. The broken English, how I’m looking, not how am I looking, hides a story much deeper and significant than an appeal for likes on social media. The minor grammatical d...

When we cover these cases, the ones that hit the hardest are those with the clearest injustice: deep-rooted, disturbing, and plain to see. Cases where the very ones tasked with righting injustice — our parents, our schools, our police — are the ones who perpetrate it. It makes all of our blood boil to hear of lives destroyed, families torn apart, futures snatched over trivialities. If you feel thi...

The perfect marriage, a goal for so many of us. To find that one person that they can spend their life with. Seldom do people find such a partner, but when they do, two worlds meet in remarkable union. What happens when that one person is taken away from you? What happens when that oh-so-perfect partner is no more? Well, this is one such story. The story of union that was simply never meant to be;...

2020 was a weird and unfortunate year for everyone. Even for those of us who didn’t suffer the loss of someone close to us, death seemed like it was all around. It was unprecedented that we found ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic, locked inside our houses for months on end. By the time June 2020 rolled around with the pandemic in full swing, Bollywood had already lost two major film sta...

When you visit an Indian restaurant, from the god awfully long menu, there is one genre of food item that always stands out— us desis are in fact known for this around the world. The tandoor. From tandoori naan to tandoori chicken, and hell, tandoori paneer for all our vegetarian listeners out there, the tandoor is an integral part of any brown kid’s childhood. But this seemingly innocent cylindri...

On September 8, 2017, a 7-year-old child was found dead inside a famous school in Gurugram. Soon it became obvious that his death was no accident. The deep cut on his neck and the knife found at the scene pointed to a sinister plot. Until recently, the Haryana police paraded their murderer and declared the case closed. But did they accuse the right person? Did bus conductor Ashok Kumar murder Prad...

On September 8 2017, a loving father drove his two kids—his 7-year-old son and his 11-year-old daughter— to school just like any other morning. He smiled and waved goodbye to his children just before 8:00am, and barely 20 minutes later, his life had changed forever. His world had come crashing down in front of his eyes. This is the story of his 7-year-old child. This is the story of Pradyuman Thak...

Zainab is on the run. Her siblings are terrified. Shafia is plotting a mass murder. But how did a plan to murder Zainab and possibly Rona develop into a plan to murder Sahar and Geeti too? How did they bring Zainab back from the shelter? What went down inside that Nissan Sentra just moments before it drowned, killing 4 women? And what was it all for? Find out in part 3 of The Shafia Family Murders...

A brother, a mother and father are grieving their daughters\' deaths. It appears that Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti died in a bizarre accident; their black nissan was found drowned in a Lock in Kingston, Canada. But police questioning and investigation unfurls this accident more; suggesting inklings of something way more sinister. Good the grieving family be an act? Do Hamed, Shafia and Tooba know more...

Imagine you’re on a roadtrip with your family. Your father’s driving well below the speed limit, stickler for the law that he is; your mum’s insisting you eat the food she brought from home instead of the McDonald’s drive-thru meal; your younger sibling’s belligerently asking how far you have left to go. You’re tuned into your headset, staring into the horizon, when suddenly the landscape changes....

On the evening of April 14, 2008 a family of eight in in the small village of Bawankheri, Uttar Pradesh was getting ready for bed with their nightly ritual of tea. Seven of the eight of them, including a 10-month-old baby, never woke up to see another day. The sole surviving member, 23-year-old Shabnam Ali, was hysterical, her entire family gone in an instant. This is the story of a brutal mass mu...

We are naturally drawn to stories with a Romeo and Juliet archetype — forbidden love breaking through the shackles of society to ignite the sparks of passion. But let’s not forget how their Shakespearean saga ends: with their tragic death. Our protagonists today, Mithu and Jassi, bear all the same hallmarks. As passionate as their love was, it faced an even more passionate fervor to repress them....

The 29th of May looked like it would pass uneventfully until shocking news shook India: armed assailants had shot and killed Punjabi cultural icon and hip-hop star Sidhu Moosewala. The 28-year-old died after being shot 24 times. But this is no simple story of senseless violence. This is a story of revenge, politics, gangs, guns, and Khalistan. This is the story of Sidhu Moosewala, a young man whos...

We are naturally drawn to stories with a Romeo and Juliet archetype — forbidden love breaking through the shackles of society to ignite the sparks of passion. But let’s not forget how their Shakespearean saga ends: with their tragic death. Our protagonists today, Mithu and Jassi, bear all the same hallmarks. As passionate as their love was, it faced an even more passionate fervor to repress them....

It was now September 12th, a day after the world had turned upside down. In the chaos and panic of one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the history of the world, one family was reeling uniquely- their daughter, sister, wife Sneha Philip had disappeared just a night before the attack and nobody seemed to have the time to find her. When Sneha’s brother’s lie actually prompts the cops to...

On the 11th of September 2001, the world fundamentally changed. From the moment 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists boarded four American aircrafts, and one by one, planned to crash them into four of the United State’s most significant buildings, death and distruction was on the way. Working in these buildings on that morning and living in these cities on the 11th of September were hundreds of thousands of Ind...

This is a story from Pakistan, a story of a woman just like a lot of us. She was in love and living a happy life. She had a loving sister, doting parents and a relationship of 3 years. But by early 2021, something had shifted in Noor’s life. Something was wrong and the people around, the people close to her could sense it. What the people around Noor didn’t know was that she was about to become a...

By 1976, 5 people are dead within a small radius around a house in Bangkok. This house belongs to wealthy gem dealer Alain Gautier and his wife, Monique. But as of now, nobody had successfully drawn the connection between Alain and the deaths of foreign travelers on the hippy trail. But that was all going to change. Simultaneously, two couples are working to reveal the truth about Alain and the pe...

“21 year old American woman drugged and drowned in Bangkok”; “Turkish man found doused in gasoline and burnt to death near Pattaya”; “Dutch couple found drugged, strangled and burnt alive in Thailand”… and the countless news reports of dead or missing foreign nations just wouldn’t stop. This is the story of one man behind these killings, and this is the story of one man that uncovered it all. This...

After the last episode went live, we were reached out by Hiren Rathod’s wife. This story just took a crazy turn in real time. The episode that we have for you today is a follow up update on the last episode we created, The Bed Box Murder. The story is of a beautiful, young girl, Snehal Gaware, whose murder shook the city of Mumbai and led to the conviction of her boyfriend Hiren Rathod. A lot has...