Earlier this year, we all watched Delhi Crime, which is about the 2012 Nirbhaya rape case, and were left overwhelmed. We were also, to a certain degree, amazed that something like this could happen in real life. Or Mindhunter, in which the FBI's behavioural science unit goes to meet serial killers to know what lies beneath a killer's mind. And, we discovered that the cliche is true: fact is stranger than fiction. It's this old adage that the OTT platform ZEE5 is banking on, by focusing on content based on true events. Be it Kaafir, in which a young Pakistani mother, who comes to India, is accused of being a terrorist; Gondya Ala Re, the story of the first armed revolution by the youth of the country, led by the Chapekar brothers; Barot House, about a child serial killer; or Rangbaaz, based on gangster Shiv Prakash Shukla: all stories are ones that require intense research.

For Gondya Ala Re, a show on Damodar Hari Chapekar, Balkrishna Hari Chapekar and Vasudeo Hari Chapekar, director Ankur Kakatkar took almost two years to research. The story of the Pune brothers, who were involved in the assassination of WC Rand, the British plague commissioner of Pune, was a vast one. "I knew them from my school books, but later they vanished from the MPSC syllabus. Then, in 2017, the prime minister mentioned them in the Lok Sabha and my interest piqued again," says Kakatkar, who is also from Pune. He started reading about them, including getting his hands on out-of-print autobiographies and hard-to-access court documents. "It was all jugaad, as it was very hard to get those documents from the court," says the 35-year-old filmmaker, who has also written the show. "Once I started making the show, their fourth generations got in touch, so we talked to them as well. But, eventually I knew more about them than anyone else. They were unsung heroes. Freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh and Veer Savarkar followed their cue. I wanted to make them more than just a paragraph in a history book." The writer traced their journey from 1892 to 1899 in the show, which stars Bhushan Pradhan, Anand Ingale and Sunil Barve.