And for the first time, Gurpreet understood: an index isn’t just a list. It’s a lighthouse for memory — row after row of films that never needed to be great, only remembered.
Gurpreet Singh, a 19-year-old computer science student in Brampton, had never watched a Punjabi movie in a theater. To him, they were background noise at weddings or memes his cousins shared. But when his grandmother, Bhurji, moved in with his family after his grandfather’s passing, everything changed.
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.
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.