Not everyone who is inclined towards performing arts needs a film or a web series to showcase their talent. Some people like Ashish Chanchlani and Yash Raj Mukhte start YouTube channels where they let their work speak for itself. Two twentysomethings from Maharashtra have amassed huge following with their witty, viral videos.
Chanchlani started Ashish Chanchlani Vine seven years ago (26.4 million followers) with the intention of taking his “class clown” act to a larger audience. His approach was simple: Be yourself, bringing up your experiences as a student, son, brother, friend, lover, gamer and many more avatars. Chanchlani says of his artistic process, “We take a subject that is relevant and then exaggerate the hell out of it. This fits in with the kind of humour, he feels, that Indians tend to have “loud, over the top, emotional and sarcastic”. The approach has paid dividends with parents writing about how their kids are addicted to her videos and women congratulating Chanchlani for being “chubby and cute”.
Son of a single screen cinema owner in Ulhasnagar, Chanchlani grew up watching both good and bad movies and dreamed of becoming an actor. After completing his engineering, he was going to take over his father’s business when his YouTube videos started getting clicks and likes. “I realized that I don’t need to go to Mumbai and give auditions. I was already gathering the audience,” says Chanchalani. “The difference is that it comes from the small screen [mobile] And that’s even better, considering it reaches everywhere. ,
Bollywood now comes to him with the makers of Rohit Shetty’s Sooryavanshi hosting him for the trailer launch of the action drama. This is because Chanchlani has the strongest reach among the youth. The 28-year-old makes sure she maintains connections by keeping Gen Z members on her team. “I make sure there is relatability when making jokes, changing perspectives and tendencies,” he says. Another change is cutting down on offensive language. “If the world stops, I will stop abusing,” says Chanchlani. “But in real life, everyone does. That disappointment comes in our content.”
Meanwhile, in Mukhaate’s video (4.8 million subscribers), viewers get a catchy tune along with humor that they can’t help but share with friends and family. A YouTuber since 2011, it was in September last year that Mukhte, working in the studio from a parking space, played with a melodramatic scene from a Hindi saas-bahu show to make ‘Rasod Mein Kon Tha’. It broke the internet immediately. Since then, she has made it a quarterly habit with videos like ‘Bigini Shoot’, ‘Twada Kutta Kutta’ and ‘Pawri Hori Hai’ which have garnered lakhs of views and Taapsee Pannu, Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh have joined her. has danced. tune
After initially covering, Mukhte realized that it was fun, light material that was getting him more attention and subscribers in a year when people were dealing with the pandemic blues. “The video should be musically sound, well produced and edited, and if it makes people happy, even better,” Mukhte says of his tunes. He has been so successful that he is beginning to feel the pressure of being the provider of laughs. But the self-taught musician from Aurangabad is conscious not to let his audience down. “It’s so easy to take a dialogue, twist it and make a few beats,” he says. “I can do it every week, but it doesn’t work that way. If it’s not fresh, people will get irritated.”
Unlike Chanchlani, Mukhte doesn’t see himself as an innately funny person. “You can call me an idiot,” he says. “I’m really interested in the gadgets and the technical part of the music—the production style, the beats.” What he loves to do is going through his Instagram feed. “I don’t look for words,” he says when asked how he manages to consistently deliver the viral phrase-tune. “I never find anything good enough if I’m looking for it.” Like most artists, instinct is what drives Mukhte’s creativity. And it is getting work from the youth from major brands and also praises from music icons including AR Rahman. “You are making a lot of people happy, and they are all smiling. I think it is a great thing to do,” Rahman recently told Mukhte. There is no plan.
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