When the index went live as a simple HTML page — not an app, not an algorithm, just a lovingly sorted list — it gained no viral fame. But emails trickled in. A professor in Amritsar thanked him for finding Sassi Punnu (1958). A cabbie in Chicago sent a voice note: “My father’s name was in the credits of Putt Jatt Da . I never knew.”
Gurpreet’s final entry, added before Bhurji lost her sight completely, was her favorite film: Long Da Lishkara (1986). Under “Notes,” he typed: “Hero loses his buffalo. Finds his honor. Last scene shot near Harike Pattan. Bhurji remembers the clapper boy became a director later.” index of punjabi movies
Frustrated, he decided to build something he called The Last Index — a clean, searchable database of every Punjabi movie ever made. He started with Wikipedia lists, then dove into forums, old DVD catalogs, and even VHS covers from his uncle’s basement in Ludhiana. When the index went live as a simple
Bhurji was losing her eyesight, but not her memory. Every night, she would ask, “Putthar, that film with the green turban and the lost buffalo… play it for me.” Gurpreet would scramble through Netflix, Prime, YouTube, and random streaming sites. But Punjabi cinema was a ghost — scattered, mislabeled, often uploaded as “Part 1 of 12” with a spinning wheel of buffering. A cabbie in Chicago sent a voice note: