4 min readPuneFeb 26, 2025 12:18 PM IST
First published on: Feb 26, 2025 at 12:18 PM IST
One dark night, a young man on a motorcycle loses his way on a lonely stretch of road. Too late he realises, “Yeh toh woh churail wala raasta hain. (This is the road haunted by the witch). I should never have come this way. But I cannot turn back either.” Even as he sweats in fear, the man spots an old woman who seeks a lift on his motorcycle. As he allows her to ride pillion, his life begins to take a turn.
What happens next forms the core of the horror story, Kaaveri. This is the first episode of a web series, Aks, by Pune-based director Amar Deokar whose debut feature film, Mhorkya, won three National Awards in 2018. Aks marks his entry into the YouTube web series space.
In 2020, Deokar had famously dressed up as a madman on Republic Day and gone around the city with a Tricolour, saluting and shaking hands with people to draw attention to the questions of democracy and patriotism that Mhorkya dealt with. For him, films are a means to express sociopolitical realities. This time around, Deokar is using horror as a gateway to explore the deep recesses of the mind.
“Whenever I look at myself through a character, I find many shades. How does one explain the multiple layers of the mind to society? Modern psychology has explored only the tip of the mind’s workings,” he says.
“In primitive times, we came up with entities such as ghosts and pishach to explain negative energies. There were gods who represented positive forces. Through fantasy and supernatural beings, what I really talk about in the five episodes of Aks are the dark areas of our minds. Every story is also an investigation of my mind,” Deokar adds.
The second episode, Main Aaun?, revolves around the daughter-in-law of a zamindar household who is burnt to death by the family. Her ornaments are taken away. Soon, the village receives a notice that they must leave as the land would go underwater to construct a dam. Since then, in a haveli submerged in the deep water, the spirit of the dead woman guards her jewellery and destroys all who venture near. Now, many years later, a man, whose family has fallen on bad times due to the Covid-19 pandemic, decides to take a boat into the water to retrieve the gold.
“As a man, I have the male ego and the tendency of male domination works inside me. In the film, the water represents the mind, the boat is the conscious mind, the submerged village is the subconscious mind and the gold is the male ego,” says Deokar. The series is getting good response on YouTube, having crossed 5.7 lakh views.
Deokar would like to point out that the web series does not carry a disclaimer. “I did not see it necessary to carry a disclaimer that we do not believe in ghosts or gods. In our country, we carry disclaimers about cigarette and alcohol consumption as if audiences do not know that these things are harmful to health.”
“On the other hand, a film showing a murder will not carry a disclaimer about it. I decided to do away with the disclaimer, but I do trust in the superpower that exists in our hearts and minds and can accomplish anything,” he says. “Aks is a small way to understand ourselves,” Deokar adds.
Pune-based director Amar Deokar's debut feature film, Mhorkya won three National Awards in 2018. 
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