#KetchupTalks: "The exploration of broken people within broken systems is endlessly fascinating to me"- Sudip Sharma

In this excavating interview, we delve into the mind of Sudip Sharma, the creator behind Paatal Lok and Kohrra to understand how he builds such probing crime-thriller worlds that evolve and deepen with each season!

Sudip Sharma is among the few original showrunners who helped shape India’s streaming revolution. A screenwriter whose credits include NH10, Udta Punjab, and Sonchiriya, he soon became one of the most trusted voices in the long-format space, someone who could innovate within the streaming medium without compromising on cinematic depth. That vision gave us Paatal Lok, a searing examination of the country’s growing anxieties, explored through a dark and gritty crime lens that exposed what we often prefer to sweep under the carpet. The journey continued with Kohrra, where Sharma seemed to carry forward the bruised realism of his past projects, focusing intimately on one state while allowing it to mirror the fractured fault lines of the nation, something that even Paatal Lok2 followed with by expanding its geography but keeping its narrow focus on Nagaland. Making Sharma’s stature as one of streaming’s most vital storytellers only grew clearer something that Kohrra 2 further reaffirms that his idea of innovation does not lie in abandoning a genre, but in challenging himself to find something new within it each time, no matter how familiar the terrain. He then becomes not just a sought-after storyteller, but a necessary one because he refuses to look away from the baggage of a changing world. His stories emerge from smokescreens and fog, from the denial that allows us to coexist with our own hells. For Sharma, everything is personal - a state’s history, a location, a family, a single individual. Each becomes a character shaped by trauma, waiting to be excavated for the harshest of truths. 

But how does he build worlds so dense and lived-in that we are left with the deepest of gut punches, even when we think we see it coming? We sat down with Sudip Sharma to understand how he inhabits these layered universes and why his stories continue to unsettle us in ways that feel both inevitable and entirely unpredictable.

Also Read: #KetchupTalks: "We wanted to retain the same flavour of Bhabiji Ghar Par Hain but also elevate it "- Vihaan Kohli of Edit II

Here’s what he had to say! 

Would you say that Kohrra Season 2 is about pretentiously woke men trying to adapt because they can no longer get away with everything? Is that why a female cop enters the world of Kohrra?

Not really. That wasn’t the primary intention though I understand how that interpretation might come through. The decision to bring in a female cop was more about wanting to introduce a female perspective into the show. In Season 1, we explored the world through two male cops - their bond, their individual struggles, and their understanding of manhood. It examined what it means to be men shaped by a patriarchal society, operating within a rigid policing system handed down to them. We looked at how they dealt with societal and domestic pressures, and the violence, emotional or otherwise that often emerged from that turbulence. With Season 2, Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, and I felt it would be compelling to examine this same world from a woman’s point of view. What does it mean to be a female cop within a system that is overwhelmingly male? How does she navigate her own domestic challenges while functioning within this institutional structure? And how does she balance both while investigating a case? We felt that it could offer fresh insights and add new layers to the storytelling. That said, your interpretation isn’t invalid. It can certainly also be seen as a story about men attempting to adjust, perhaps even make amends. In a way, that was true of Season 1 as well. This time, Garundi is in a different place in his life. He’s married, he has a past, and he’s dealing with a woman who also has her own history. So questions of accountability, adaptation, and even what “wokeness” truly means naturally enter the narrative.

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Would you say your philosophy as a storyteller is about making the invisible visible? There seems to be a pattern in your crime thrillers - everyone appears to be a suspect, but the real criminal turns out to be someone completely unexpected. So are you more interested in uncovering the paatal loks, the hells hidden behind the kohrra?

In a way, yes. I’m not really interested in a conventional whodunit that doesn’t excite me. For me, crime is a symptom. I don’t want it to be the central point of the story. What interests me more is exploring the people investigating the crime and the people committing it and understanding what leads to that moment of rupture or insanity. I’m curious about the societal structures that push someone to that point. In that exploration, perhaps we can throw some light on how society itself manufactures crime. There’s a line in the this season -“Bandhua mazdoor banda akala nahi rakhta, uda pind ude poore naal rakhta hai” which reflects that idea. Crime doesn’t occur in isolation; society is complicit in it in many ways. I’m also fascinated by the role of the police as gatekeepers of what we call “civilized” society standing between order and chaos and how that tension affects them personally. That intersection, between society, crime, and those trying to contain it, is what draws me in. The straightforward, one-two-three storytelling - there’s a murder, we follow clues, we find the culprit that doesn’t interest me as much. It doesn’t shine a light on anything deeper within us or ask us to confront uncomfortable truths beyond the obvious act of crime.

So your thrillers are less about the ‘whodunit’ and more about investigating society’s fault lines?

Absolutely. Crime emerges from those fault lines, it doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s a function of psychological issues, sociological realities, and the deep divisions that run through our society. As a writer and creator, I’m far more interested in examining that ecosystem, the forces that shape people and push them toward certain actions than simply revealing who committed the crime.

Do you think this format is also one of the most effective ways to address topics that are otherwise censored or difficult to openly talk about?

I would say it can be an effective way, yes. But more than that, it’s an effective way to draw audiences into a story they might otherwise avoid because it feels too heavy or too preachy. The thriller structure offers an accessible entry point. The pull of a whodunit is incredibly powerful. If I begin a story by saying someone has been murdered, you’re immediately hooked, you want to know who did it and why. It’s a natural human instinct to seek answers when a life has been abruptly cut short. We’re compelled to understand what happened and who was responsible. I try to use that instinct - the inherent pull of the thriller as a tool. Once the audience is engaged, you can explore deeper, more uncomfortable ideas within that framework. So yes, it can help address difficult or sensitive subjects, but for me, it’s really about using the genre in service of making a larger point.

Is that why your storytelling is structured the way it is? You don’t immediately focus on the action. You begin from seemingly random places, build backstories, and then move toward the crime, almost as if to suggest that while we’re busy living our lives, these things are happening around us.

Yes, but I’d frame it slightly differently. It’s not just that we’re busy living our lives, it’s that we’re often blinded by our own prejudices and conditioning. We look at the world in a certain way, and that very lens prevents us from seeing what’s obvious. Through storytelling, if I can gently pull back the curtain on some of those prejudices, if I can make us look at something in a way we hadn’t before, that's exciting to me as a writer. The structure follows that idea. The crime isn’t just an event; it emerges from layers of lived reality, and those layers need to be uncovered gradually.

But that also makes your shows quite dense. At a time when conversations around shrinking attention spans and second-screen viewing are common, do you ever worry that this narrative density might work against you? That audiences may not follow or might tune out?

I try not to be bogged down by that fear. Because if you start thinking along those lines, where do you stop? Then we should all just be making reels (laughs), because that’s what current consumption patterns seem to favor. At some point, a storyteller has to trust their craft and their audience. You have to believe in your ability to draw people in and hold them there for the duration of the story. It’s definitely becoming more challenging, I won’t deny that! But it’s an honorable fight, and one worth fighting for as long as we can. Personally, I don’t get distracted too easily. I believe in the human ability to hold on to an important thought, to sit with something meaningful. I’d rather trust that instinct than give in to the easier impulse of simplifying everything out of fear that the audience might drift away.

So you work from instinct rather than audience demand?

Yes, I think so. When we talk about “audience demand,” we often forget that the audience isn’t a single, uniform entity. There are many kinds of viewers with different tastes. It’s not as if people are demanding that shows like Paatal Lok or Kohrra shouldn’t be made. People love watching them. At the end of the day, if you tell a story well, audiences will engage with it. That has been true since the dawn of storytelling. But it requires trust and craft. And craft becomes more challenging as attention spans shrink and competition for time increases. As creators, writers, filmmakers, platforms -  we need to trust our own ability to hold an audience. If the story is compelling, they will stay with it. But that also means taking risks. It means saying, “I’m going to follow my instinct and have faith in the audience.” Time and again, not just in India but across the world, audiences have proven that pace or density isn’t a problem, as long as the story is engaging, entertaining, and consistently surprising. And those surprises don’t have to be loud cliffhangers or unearned twists. Sometimes, it’s simply about good, honest storytelling done with conviction.

You often pair two very different cops - one seasoned and world-weary, the other young and curious. It’s also reflected in your casting choices. Why do you return to this dynamic?

It creates a very interesting dynamic. I’ll admit, it’s a trope and that’s the thing. When you’re telling a genre story, certain tropes naturally come with it. Kohrra is a genre piece. So was Paatal Lok. And every genre brings its own familiar patterns. The challenge as a writer is to respect those tropes while refreshing them, so it doesn’t feel like something audiences have seen a hundred times before. Two cops solving a case is not new. So the question becomes - what’s different this time? You look for unexplored emotional or relational dynamics between the characters. In the previous season, we had two male cops - a senior and a junior and that relationship had its own rhythm and energy. But if we simply repeated that dynamic again, it would feel repetitive. So we asked ourselves - how do we make it feel new? What if this time it’s a male and a female cop? What if they don’t get along initially, unlike the previous pair who shared easy chemistry from the start? What if their relationship evolves organically over six episodes to a point where, by the end, they truly have each other’s backs? That evolution felt exciting to explore. Ultimately, it’s about respecting genre conventions while introducing freshness through writing, casting, performance, and even the way you shoot the material. The goal is to make something that feels alive each time, even within familiar frameworks.

When I spoke to Suresh Triveni, he mentioned that being too self-aware of your own patterns can be dangerous because then you start copying yourself. When you talk about tropes, do you approach them instinctively, or are you consciously aware that you’re working within a pattern?

I really admire Suresh’s work, but I have a slightly different approach. I tend to work with a strong sense of awareness. I look at it as: these are the tools available to me. These are the ones I’ve used before. Now how do I avoid repeating myself? And if I do return to something familiar, how do I make it feel fresh? My writing process is fairly methodical and self-aware. I try not to get carried away by instinct alone, because instinct can sometimes lead to complacency. It’s easy to think, “This worked last time,” or “People say this is what I do well, so let me do it again.” That can quietly push you towards laziness. I try to resist that temptation. For me, the first audience is myself. Before I think about viewers, I ask - would I enjoy watching this? Would this story excite me? Would it give me that thrill as an audience member? Of course, you hope there are enough people out there who share your taste. But the primary goal is to tell a story that satisfies you first. That internal satisfaction, that feeling of, “Yes, this works for me” is the guiding light for my work.

Why do you often put your characters through intense emotional and physical trials? They’re deeply fractured, even Garundi this season seem to operate in the same emotional space as Hathi Ram, Balbir, or even Dhanwant. Are you suggesting that life inevitably catches up with all of us in brutal ways, like it does with him this season?

It does. If you live long enough, life eventually catches up with you; that's simply its nature. You’ll experience loss. You’ll see loved ones die. You’ll go through grief, suffering, pain. That’s unavoidable. What interests me is how my characters deal with what life throws at them. For me, that’s where a character is truly formed at pressure points. The decisions they make at crucial junctures define them. A character isn’t defined by surface details like age, marital status, or profession. Those are superficial. A character truly emerges when you see them make difficult choices, whether you agree with those choices or not and then you see what becomes of them because of those choices. That exploration interests me, whether it’s Hathi Ram, Garundi, or even Dhanwant. She believes she has control over her life. She pretends she no longer loves the man she’s with and is only staying out of duty. But eventually, that façade cracks. Vulnerability seeps through the veneer. And in those moments, when your illusions fall apart the decisions you make define who you are.

Why do you think you and perhaps audiences too are drawn to this brokenness? As most of your criminals by the end become part of a broken system and you can’t simply stereotype them as “the bad guy.” So what draws you to broken individuals and broken systems?

Because, aren’t we all broken in some way? And if we aren’t yet, we will be sooner or later. That’s life. I’m not trying to impose a philosophical lens on a crime thriller, but ultimately, that’s what life is. And yes, perhaps the ending becomes philosophical in some ways. If you look around, the world is full of grief, poverty, fractured systems, broken societies. I respect stories about happy people in happy environments. But personally, I’m more drawn to the fractures. There’s that Tolstoy line and I’m paraphrasing here that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It’s those unique fractures that interest me. The specific pressures an individual faces. The particular grief they carry. And most importantly, how they respond to it. Through those responses, you not only understand the individual, but also the society that shaped them. That exploration of broken people within broken systems is endlessly fascinating to me.

You often return to Punjab as a setting. Is there a personal reason behind that?

Not really, at least not in a consciously personal sense. For me, Kohrra was always imagined as a story rooted in Punjab. From the very beginning, that landscape - social, cultural, emotional was integral to the DNA of the series. So when we completed the first season, it didn’t feel like we were done with Punjab. It felt like there was still more to uncover both within us as storytellers and within the world of the show itself. In fact, the platform did ask us whether we wanted to shift the second season to a different location. It’s a valid question as anthologies and crime dramas often move geographies to keep things fresh. But the three of us - Gunjit, Diggi, and I felt quite strongly that Punjab wasn’t exhausted. There were still layers we hadn’t peeled back, still corners we hadn’t explored, still emotional and social tensions that felt dramatically rich. Punjab, as a setting, is incredibly compelling. Beyond the obvious markers of the energy, the humor, the rugged masculinity, the musicality, it has a very distinct identity. In many ways, it’s an outlier within North India. It has its own linguistic identity, its own dominant religious framework, its own pop-cultural ecosystem. There’s a specificity to it that allows for endless narrative exploration. And that specificity doesn’t get depleted easily. The more you look, the more you find.

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The class divide there also feels very stark in your storytelling from the glossy NRI culture, the aspirational pop imagery of singers and reels, versus a much more rooted, grounded Punjab. Is that contrast something that interests you?

Very much so. Apart from Kerala, Punjab has had one of the highest rates of migration for over a century. Punjabis have been moving abroad to Canada, the UK, the US for generations now. That outward migration has shaped its aspirations, its economy, even its imagination. At the same time, there’s inward migration too. People from other parts of India come to Punjab to work in the fields, to build a livelihood. So you have this fascinating social mix of global exposure on one side, and deeply local struggles on the other. That creates a very layered societal dynamic. In one sense, Punjab is cosmopolitan as it is globally connected, culturally exported, economically aspirational. In another sense, it remains deeply traditional, bound by land, honor, religion, and family structures. That dichotomy of modern yet rooted, wealthy yet economically anxious, outward-looking yet insular is dramatically fertile ground. And within that, the class divide becomes very visible. You see the flashy, performative side of the NRIs, the music videos, the social media personas and then you see the lived reality of people negotiating land disputes, generational trauma, migration pressures, systemic cracks. That tension between aspiration and reality, between performance and truth, between global dreams and local constraints that’s incredibly interesting to explore. Punjab allows you to hold all of that in one frame. And that’s why, for now at least, it continues to feel alive as a storytelling space.

As someone who has been part of India’s long-form storytelling space from its early days, how do you see it changing now? Do you feel something brave has been lost, or is it simply evolving into a new form?

I think it’s definitely evolving. What exactly it will evolve into, I’m not entirely sure. Things are moving very fast. The ecosystem is changing rapidly, and it’s difficult to predict where it will settle. If you think about it, long-form OTT storytelling has only really existed in India for less than a decade. We’re still very early in the learning curve. In the initial years, there was a certain shine, a certain euphoria. There was a lot more experimentation. People were taking bigger risks. We were all trying to push boundaries because we were exploring what this medium could do. At that time, it felt liberating. Popular cinema, in many ways, had its own constraints with the expectations of song-and-dance routines, certain formulas, star-driven narratives. OTT freed creators from many of those limitations. It opened up a new space where we could tell stories differently - tonally, structurally, thematically. Now, some of that early excitement has settled. Platforms are more certain about what they want. They’re perhaps less open to experimentation than they were in those first few years. The wild-west energy has reduced. But I don’t think that means something brave has been permanently lost. I think something new will emerge. I don’t know what form it will take or what kinds of stories will define it, but I believe there will always be room for nuanced storytelling in long-form. That’s the very idea of OTT as it’s like a carousel. It promises something for everyone. The mistake we often make is saying, “This is what the audience wants.” There isn’t one singular audience. The OTT audience is fractured. There are viewers for young adult dramas, for horror, for thrillers, for intimate character studies. It’s very different from the more monolithic mass Bollywood audience of the past. As long as we respect that diversity and continue offering varied genres and tones the medium will remain healthy in the long run.

And do you see yourself stepping into feature films again?

I began with films, and I love films. I still watch more films than shows. So yes, at some point, I would like to return to making a feature. But it would have to be on my terms. OTT has given me the freedom to tell stories the way I want to. If I can find that same creative freedom in the film space, I would happily make a film. In fact, right now, a feature almost feels like less work compared to a long-form series (laughs). Shows are backbreaking with the scale, the writing, the production, the duration. So yes, why not? If the right opportunity comes along, I’d definitely consider it!

Kohrra 2 is currently streaming on Netflix!

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