I used to think that I was made for the marketing research company I was working in. Well, it took me sometime to realize that I wanted to do something bigger, i.e. to make people happy.
It was the year 2011. A friend of mine, who is a copywriter, invited me to a stand-up comedy show. That show intrigued me. I really felt amazing about the fact that this form of art can make people happy. Given the testing times, being happy in today’s world should be the prime objective. This inspired me to give stand-up comic a shot. I thought it was going to be easy; I mean going up on the stage and speaking up some lines… how hard could it be. One might guess, it was going to be a lesson for me. When I did my first open mic, I was overconfident. So, I told all the jokes with that confidence… and I couldn’t hear a single person laughing in the room. I shivered. I felt sorry for myself. I could have taken a step back… But you might be aware of the fact, failure is common in this domain. It is a time-consuming process. You fall, then you rise and this makes you better. The purpose of comedy is to make people laugh and make some moments of their day better.
I brushed up my skills. In 2015, I left my job and worked as a freelancer, wrote books side by side and I pursued comedy. I have written six books covering fiction, non-fiction, and others. In the beginning, I attended several open mics and later I organized them myself. This became my learning platform. Although it is a beautiful art form, it’s quite difficult in the beginning. Making people laugh is not an easy job because there are different kinds of audiences. A joke which you find funny, the person sitting beside you may not like it. It needs a lot of preparation to make every person in the audience laugh. Speaking of myself, as of today, I almost need a year to prepare for a show for an hour. The videos that we watch where comedian crack jokes and the audience laugh out loud, is the result of almost 5 to 6 months of preparation.
Three to four years ago, I had a show in Akshira Theatre. At that time, I and a few of my friends were amateur comedians. We were not much popular then but we had done a lot of publicity. Somehow 150 people had gathered in the hall. In that show, every joke worked! Everyone present in the audience cheered! That became one of the best experiences I have had in my 6 years of my career as a comedian. In October 2019, I and one of my friends were invited to Hong Kong by an Indian community. It is my only abroad show so far and that is a very memorable one.
I started making stand-up comic videos on YouTube in 2017. My family was fine about this but not everybody approved of this as a career. Happiness is selfish and you need to accept that fact. I accepted that… I can’t make everyone happy. We are not taught to understand ourselves, we don’t follow our hearts rather we follow what society thinks will be good for us. Following our dream is a very lonely process that is quite hard. This society does not accept failures. They only welcome success but not the hard path behind it. So I want to say that choose a work in which you find joy, then the work you do will be the happiest part of your life.
Total Work Experience : 6 Years (Kantar, Nielsen, SATS, Quantum)