Vikram Aur Betaal Part 19 -
"The Gambling Temptation of Gopu"

Ramesh Bhatkar as Gopu
Deepika as Ratna
Lilliput as the Gambler
Mulraj Rajda as Ratna's Father

Vikram Aur Betaal was a television programme that aired on DD National. The series contained stories from Indian mythology that aim at teaching kids life lessons while entertaining them. The concept of the program was based on Baital Pachisi, a collection of tales about the legendary King Vikram (identified as Vikramāditya) and the Vaitaala, a ghost analogous to a vampire in Western literature.

Vikram Aur Betaal is based on Betaal Pacchisi, written nearly 2,500 years ago by Mahakavi Somdev Bhatt. These are spellbinding stories told to the wise King Vikramaditya by the wily ghost Betaal.

At the beginning of the frame story, Vikramaditya king of Ujjain receives, among other visitors, a mendicant who presents the king a fruit on every visit. In the fruits are later discovered orbs of ruby. Upon this discovery, the king resolves to visit the mendicant, who arranges a meeting under a banyan tree in a cremation ground beyond the city, at night, on the 14th day of the dark half of the month. At the meeting, the mendicant requests that Vikramaditya bring him a corpse suspended from another tree, with which the mendicant might achieve occult power.

Upon Vikramaditya's doing so, the corpse is identified as Betaal, the ghost, who narrates a story to the king, concluding that Vikramaditya must answer a moral question pertaining to the story's characters, on pain of his own death; and upon his answering the question, Betaal returns to his tree.