“Don’t you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever,” once said Sarah Allison, and the legend, Jagjit Singh, sung this beautifully “Magar mujhko lauta do bachpan ka saavn, woh kagaz ki kashti, woh baarish ka paani…”: a song that we along with our parents continue to reminisce.

This is how we started our journey to Desi Charades – Bollywood & Hollywood Flip Trivia. After moving to Canada at an early age, my brother and I often found ourselves co-mingling the two cultures, Western and Indian (or perhaps “Desi”). We grew up playing board games and charades with our friends and family at social gatherings/events with the challenge being to come up with the “toughest movies” to act out (often without saying a word), and of course sabotage the other team by a countdown “tick tick 1… tick tick 2… tick tick 3…”
You remember.

Soon enough, technology took over and apps such as Heads Up promised to “reinvent charades” for the millennial generation in the world of Hollywood. But the DESI part of us could still feel the gap. We needed something closer to home, given that most of us were still so far away.
To fill this void for everyone, we decided to bring Desi Charades to life. With a background in computer engineering (trying to fulfil the quintessential Indian dream and all), we got involved in the app world just about 3 years ago. With our team always working on new creative ideas, the outcry for Desi Charades was taken very seriously.

Designers got on the drawing board, Bollywood enthusiasts started making an exhaustive list, cricket lovers got a chance to re-live their passion, and the bathroom singers soon joined in to add towards our extensive selection decks. Designers and programmers prepared the beta-app, and our team launched few themed decks (categories) to run the test. With an overwhelming response after our initial test, we expanded our decks to serve a population of over one billion.

Decks include, but are not limited to “Bollywood Blockbuster” (Raees, Dangal, Silsila, Andaz Apna Apna…it has it all), “How’s That?” for Cricket fans, “Millennial Generation” is for the population that was introduced to the 300 crore+ blockbusters,  “Old is Gold” for the Rajesh Khanna and Rekha’s fan club. Music decks from every decade promise to take you down a memory lane, and then “Rajneeti” deck is for our “mitron” who can enact Donald Trump or Arvind Kejriwal. That’s right — all bases covered.

This app also caters fans of Telugu movies (“Tollywood Blockbuster”), Tamil movies (“Kollywood in Action”), and Punjabi movies (“Chak De Phatte”).
The rules are simple…that is, there are no rules. We let you decide how good you are and how competitive you want to be. For starters, use words or sing to describe the term on the screen but avoid any rhyming terms. If you think you are good, act them all out without using any words. As we continue to add new movies, songs, players, actors, actresses, and expand our decks, Anushka Sharma would like to invite you for a Desi Charades war with her golden words “apne andar ki sarasvati ko chupao aur madhuri ko jagao”!

Website: www.desicharades.com

iOS Apple Store app: https://goo.gl/z1kESH

Google Playstore app: https://goo.gl/blKRzw