Wasseypur mein ek railway contractor ko din dahade goli markar hatya kar di gayi (A railway contractor shot dead in Wasseypur in broad daylight).

This screaming headline is not real. But, it captures people's perception about Wasseypur, a small town in Dhanbad district, immortalised on celluloid in Anurag Kashyap's two-part film in 2012.

But, a young adman and film-maker with roots in Dhanbad and who's been working in Mumbai for some years now, is trying to change this perception. Raj Kumar Das, who has balanced his act by helming ad shoots with superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan and short films on orphans and rag-pickers, is now filming a five-part web series on Wasseypur which he will upload on YouTube.

"Wasseypur has become infamous for its gangs and the mafia. Things had become so bad that tuition teachers avoided the town and prospective brides and grooms shunned Wasseypur proposals. But I want to show it to the world as a normal place, where people live and work and send children to school, where youths crack UPSC exams, things like that," Das told this paper earlier this week while rehearsing for a shoot at a commercial complex at Ranchi Main Road.

"You can say I just want to portray Wasseypur as just another place," he said about his project The Reel And The Real Life of Wasseypur. "Each of these five short films is based on independent stories. They are in Hindi with English subtitles and will be no longer than 15 minutes long," he added.

Das, who has also scripted the stories, said later they could be woven into a five-part film. "The cameras I am working on will ensure the short films can be beamed on big screens too," he said.

Das and his team will shoot in and around Ranchi for 10 days from Wednesday and then move to Dhanbad for stock shots while technical aspects will be handled in Mumbai.

His star cast has some local actors from Ranchi and his "actor friends" from Mumbai such as Kuldeep Kumar, Sanjeev Pandey, Priya Mishra and Surjeet Singh Rajput. The web series is a low-budget venture, he added.

But, the sky is the limit in web, believes the young film-maker. "Everyone has a smartphone with Internet and everyone wants good content to watch anywhere and anytime," he said.