Ritwik Pareek’s 'Dug Dug' transforms a bizarre true-story-inspired premise — a village that worships a haunted moped — into a razor-sharp satire about religion, capitalism, and public desperation in contemporary India. Shot in striking neon hues by cinematographer Aditya S. Kumar, the film explores how faith is manufactured, monetised, and sustained by politicians, priests, and ordinary people searching for hope in failing systems.
On the side of a nondescript road in Rajasthan, there is a temple where people worship a motorcycle. They garland it, offer it alcohol, and pray to it for protection on the road ahead. This is a true story about how faith operates in rural India. It is also the premise of Ritwik Pareek’s directorial debut, ‘Dug Dug’.
The film, which premiered at TIFF in 2021 and reached Indian theatres only in May 2026, revolves around a rural community forever altered by this freak accident. The police clear the scene and take his moped into custody — only for the moped to return to the site of its owner’s death every night. How does it get there? Nobody knows, and it does not matter. The local politician, the police, and the villagers find a priest to perform funeral rites to pacify the deceased’s spirit.
But the moped keeps coming back. The devout villagers take this as a divine sign. They build a shrine dedicated to its deceased owner, Thakur — the village drunkard now deified as ‘Thakursa’, a divine messenger — around the moped, which they believe can grant wishes if they pray to it and make offerings of alcohol, Thakursa’s favourite thing in life. As word spreads and prayers begin to be ‘answered’, the belief snowballs into a full-blown, commercialised religion. Soon, local priests, politicians, wealthy royals, and eager devotees all coalesce into an entire ecosystem of faith. Escalation, after all, is the only grammar of religious dogmatism.
‘Dug Dug’ is a film about how gods and deities are made in India, but, more importantly, about how gods and deities are made under late capitalism. From the priest class who see divine signs in throwaway rocks and practical jokes, to politicians who deploy religion as an electoral strategy, to masses desperate for miraculous solutions — all are, Pareek suggests, participants in this industry. Shot by DOP Aditya S. Kumar in luminous neon pinks and electric blues, the film is a razor-sharp satire of the faith industry in India, akin to Bengali satirist Shibram Chakraborty’s short story ‘Debotar Jonmo’ (The Birth of a Go), about a rock transformed into a deity by people seeking a shortcut to good karma. It’s a seemingly straightforward short story told the long way around, transformed into an origin story about religion, the commercialisation of belief, and the monetisation of spirituality.
All the small visual cues and details — from the all-seeing magician on the roadside hoarding, whose face peers over the action like a god surveilling his flock to the travelling salesman’s pink balloon, inflating in lockstep with the fungi-like growth of Thakursa’s cult till it dominates the entire screen — keep the film from ever feeling dull. It makes you wonder throughout the film if, at some point, the bubble will burst and the truth will come out. And it does, in a way. Only, it’s not the truth you expect.
Pareek isn’t interested in mocking faith. The villagers who pray to the moped, which they call ‘Luna’ after the iconic Kinetic Luna, are not fools. They are desperate people for whom the official systems and institutions have failed to deliver. The moped and its divine association offer them something the state does not: the assurance and possibility of divine intervention on their behalf. That this divine intervention is monetised almost immediately by a few is not a failure of their faith but a mirror of the capitalistic world within which that faith exists and operates. It’s almost as if, left with no other choice, they manifest a miracle out of the mundane death of an alcoholic. That even those who know the truth behind this seemingly supernatural phenomenon finally succumb to its power out of desperation is perhaps the most poignant commentary on how the faith of the many is exploited by the few.
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