<img style="float: left;" src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/may/Mayank-Shekhar-new_e.jpg" alt="Mayank Shekhar" width="150" height="76" />As opening sequences go, I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve seen anything trippier than <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/kaante-khile-hain-gulshan-gulshan-23627959" rel="nofollow">Ritwik Pareek&rsquo;s</a> Dug Dug among desi movies, lately. The film opens in theatres, May 8.
The odd title, Dug Dug, comes from the thumping sound of a heavy motorbike as it audibly announces its presence, navigating the roads it confidently claims to own.
Which is how Dug Dug starts off, with the rural, drunk protagonist, in a dhoti-kurta, setting off on his bike, albeit a Luna &mdash; having downed his drinks, satiated his smoke/nicotine urge, at a Rajasthani roadside dhaba, with red-blue lights.
There&rsquo;s a very spaghetti-western feel to it all. And he&rsquo;s just riding, and riding&hellip;&nbsp;
This sequence carries on for quite a few minutes, with psychedelic rock, and deep Hindi poetry on life for background score &mdash; plus miles of a spotless, deserted highway ahead.&nbsp;
This film&rsquo;s hero, Thakur (Altaf Khan), has no dialogues in Dug Dug. He dies shortly after, in a merciless road accident. &nbsp;What follows is a low-budget, indie movie about religion/faith, based on news, dressed as fiction. It premiered on an IMAX screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), back in 2021.&nbsp;
While nobody encourages drunk driving/riding, of course &mdash; what Ritwik, 34, tells me he was attempting to achieve with that sequence is that free-as-a-bird sensation, &ldquo;after you&rsquo;re two-three pegs down&rdquo;, on the road, but under control, yet &ldquo;up in the air!&rdquo;&nbsp;
His inspirations ranged from <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/ray-of-inspiration-perhaps-23627779" rel="nofollow">Bajaj Avengers</a> &lsquo;Feel like God&rsquo; ad (featuring Sidharth Shukla), and the long, dialogue-free &lsquo;Stargate&rsquo; finale sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that he&rsquo;d once watched on YouTube, set perfectly to Pink Floyd&rsquo;s 23-minute track, Echoes.&nbsp;
As it is, he believes the best introductory sequences belong to Easy Rider (&lsquo;Born to be Wild&rsquo;), and Top Gun (&lsquo;Danger Zone&rsquo;).&nbsp;
Dug Dug is Jaipur-born Ritwik&rsquo;s debut feature. It somewhat relates to a strangely religious shrine that anybody on the Pali-Jodhpur highway (NH-62) in Rajasthan would&rsquo;ve surely stopped by, for a minute, to notice/worship a 350 cc Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle, parked/placed on a pedestal.&nbsp;
Devotees regularly offer flowers, even bottles of booze for prasad to this Enfield Bullet! For a Rorschach Test, a motorbike with the headlight pointed sideways could well pass off for an animal in the wilds. The motif feels complete.&nbsp;
Legend has it that a young man in 1988 died by accident on that bike, which was seized by cops. Except, that no matter what the cops did to protect/chain the machine &mdash; that bike would inevitably disappear from the local police station, and find its way, on its own, back to the <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/safety-trust-are-as-vital-as-language-23627392" rel="nofollow">accident</a> site. People believe the spirit of the said rider, now known as Bullet Baba, aka Om Banna, resides in that spot, deemed a &lsquo;dham&rsquo; (sacred abode).&nbsp;
Through this germ of an idea/story, Ritwik builds exquisitely shot, sassily-lit scenes &mdash; even if an overstated film, full of stop-motion and montages &mdash; on the seamless, universal emergence of a religion/cult.&nbsp;
The lens still isn&rsquo;t overtly cynical, let alone atheistic. In my conversations, Ritwik comes across as a believer himself. I&rsquo;m sure everybody has a view on religion.&nbsp;
To me, luck equals God. Since we can&rsquo;t explain the former, the latter will always exist. Isn&rsquo;t most of our lives, luck, anyway. Also, what&rsquo;s religion, if not stories we tell ourselves.&nbsp;
Ritwik argues, &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t want to get into superstition. We manifest, once we wholeheartedly [subscribe] to a belief system.&rdquo;&nbsp;
That said, he mildly shows how religion can be manipulated by politics, business, inevitably meddling/mediating between faith, and its followers.&nbsp;
At the film festival in Kerala, Ritwik met with <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/because-your-six-can-be-my-nine-23626879" rel="nofollow">Anurag Kashyap</a> who, in turn, brought on board filmmakers Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikkhil Advani, Vasan Bala as executive producers for Dug Dug.&nbsp;
Pretty much the same lot, along with director Kiran Rao had, likewise, lent their names to debutant Karan Tejpal&rsquo;s thriller, Stolen (Prime Video), that had competed at Venice film festival earlier.&nbsp;
I suppose it helps with veteran names backing a film beyond blurbs or festival/critical acclaim on posters.&nbsp;
Kiran had similarly pushed/produced first-timer Aranya Sahay&rsquo;s Humans in the Loop (Netflix) &mdash; finest Hindi film debut of 2025 &mdash; about AI; exposing the global North-South divide, through the simplest story of a woman and child among the Oraon tribe in Jharkhand.&nbsp;
Dug Dug is just as sweaty, spiritedly indie &mdash; own money, self-produced, with locally sourced actors from Rajasthan, and post-production meetings held over Zoom.&nbsp;
Ritwik tells me he read design at NIFT, Hyderabad, and learnt a lot of his <a href="https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/can-great-acting-be-an-impediment-23625775" rel="nofollow">filmmaking</a> from Peter Jackson&rsquo;s vlogs and production diaries on the making of Hobbit.&nbsp;
If at all, his debut would&rsquo;ve directly dropped, and sunk on an OTT, after premiering at TIFF. So glad, I caught it at a regular, mainstream theatre, which is where it belongs.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com The views expressed in this column are the individual&rsquo;s and don&rsquo;t represent those of the paper.

I guess it’s rare that a spiritedly independent film about religion has secured a theatrical release, isn’t it?

Dil Dug Dug karne laga? Well, kinda!

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Dil Dug Dug karne laga? Well, kinda!

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