Karan Vyas

Wrong Side Raju reached cinemas on 9 September 2016 and the writing credit reads Karan Vyas, Mikhil Musale, Niren Bhatt, in that order. The producer list is what tells you how unusual the film was for Gujarati cinema at the time: Nayan Jain for CineMan Productions alongside Vikas Bahl, Vikramaditya Motwane, Madhu Mantena and Anurag Kashyap for Phantom Films. A Gujarati script had pulled in the most talked about production house in Hindi independent cinema.

The story came out of a hit and run in Ahmedabad in 2013. Raju drives for an industrialist by day and moves illegal liquor by night in a dry state, which means the police own him before the plot starts. The second half is a courtroom, and the case is not really about who was behind the wheel. It is about a police force that takes a bribe from one side and an offer of two crore from the other, and a chargesheet that the court eventually throws out. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 64th ceremony.

Ventilator came out on 14 September 2018, directed by Umang Vyas, adapted from Rajesh Mapuskar's 2016 Marathi film of the same name, and written by Niren Bhatt and Karan Vyas. An eighty year old patriarch of the Mandalia family falls in a bathroom in Chorvad three days before Navratri and ends up on life support in an Ahmedabad hospital. His nephew, a Bollywood star played by Jackie Shroff, arrives to find seventy relatives in a corridor, half of them worried about the man and half worried the funeral will ruin the festival.

Read his two Gujarati scripts next to each other and the shape is identical. Both put an ordinary family inside an institution that runs on its own logic, a courtroom in one and an ICU in the other, and both let the institution do the damage while everybody argues about money. Neither film has a villain. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the choice that made his next decade possible.

Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story premiered on SonyLIV on 9 October 2020, with the screenplay and dialogue credited to Sumit Purohit, Saurabh Dey, Vaibhav Vishal and Karan Vyas. Hansal Mehta had spent three years on a script that ran to 550 pages, shot across 200 locations in Mumbai in 85 days. It took 14 nominations at the 2021 Filmfare OTT Awards and won 11 of them, including Best Drama Series, and became the most watched series on the platform.

Then came the part that settles the argument about whether he was a passenger. Scam 2003: The Telgi Story arrived on 1 September 2023 with a different director in Tushar Hiranandani, a different lead in Gagan Dev Riar, a different crime and a different decade. The writing credit reads Karan Vyas, Kiran Yadnyopavit, Kedar Patankar. His name leads it. Of everyone who worked on the first series, he is the one the franchise kept.

Set the credits side by side. Raju, framed for a death he did not cause. Harshad Mehta, prosecuted by a state that had happily watched him rise. Abdul Karim Telgi and thirty thousand crore of counterfeit stamp paper. Jigna Vora, the crime reporter accused of arranging the murder of a rival journalist, whose dialogues he wrote for Scoop in 2023. Then Raid 2 in 2025, a tax officer on his seventy fifth raid, from the other side of the same table.

Pratik Gandhi played Raju in 2016 and Harshad Mehta in 2020, and Vyas wrote both. That is not a coincidence of casting so much as a coincidence of appetite. Both men are ordinary until an institution decides to make an example of them. Most writers who leave a regional industry spend the next decade proving they can do anything. Vyas went the other way and narrowed, which is why the work is recognisable.