Ashish Vidyarthi during one of his stand up shows | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Ashish Vidyarthi shares how GoPro and he found each other during a pandemic and how they started a journey of telling stories together. This forced them to observe people more closely and stories started to form. Today, the National Award-winning actor has 1.93 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, Actor Ashish Vidyarthi Vlogs and 1.5 million followers on his Instagram handle.
Ashish was in Kerala after the monsoon as part of his ‘project’ Raining Smiles and spreading smiles or laughter on people’s faces by performing stand-up comedy across the country. Under this, he would perform impromptu shows in cafes and restaurants. He started from Kanyakumari, then moved to Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam and Kochi. As a stand-up comedian, he has performed Sit Down Ashish across the country, most recently at Habitat, Mumbai and Black Cat, Kolkata.
While Sit Down Ashish, as he puts it, is a ‘formal thing’, Raining Smiles is informal, unrehearsed and organic. As part of it, “I will come to places where performances don’t normally happen. I will meet people and also perform.”
He is exactly as he appears in his vlogs – warm and friendly. When he sits down for a chat, there is a laid-back aura about him. His wife Rupali is travelling with him.
The actor who won the National Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in treasonous time, Handles mainstream and art films with equal ease. Malayalam audiences last saw him in a cameo surge. It’s not difficult for him to balance his many roles, which is evident in how he talks about them. He loves traveling around the country, constantly… “I go to bed completely exhausted, I’d rather go to bed tired than bored. And I’m not bored!”
Ashish Vidyarthi | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
His vlogs posted on IG and YouTube also include food and drink. Before food and drink, he posted interviews of lesser-known but extraordinary people.
Talking about how he got interested in content creation, he says, “It was an interesting phase in my life when I was going through a tough time. It is said that the more you look at yourself, the more depressed you get. Things don’t go as planned and it’s hard to control your thoughts. [vlogging] He confessed that he didn’t know much about vlogging at that time, although he had been blogging.
He said vlogging helped him get through the tough times, adding “it was therapeutic.”
Food stories that take him to lesser-known eating places with the locals are particularly popular. He remembers his first food reel, in which he ate vada pav in Mumbai, which was shot by one of his colleagues. He opens up about the numbers initially on YouTube and IG – “I had zero subscribers on YouTube and about 20,000 on IG.” The current stats speak volumes about his popularity as a vlogger/content creator.
This ‘new’ role is not by what he calls ‘purposeful design.’ “I’m combining my two loves – travel and food. I’m expressing myself in ways that aren’t expected of me as an actor.”
In the other avatar, he is a motivational speaker, he has been a motivational speaker for the past 13 years, for which he travels regularly. “That was my first new avatar… the vlogging part is new. And the stand-up comic is the newest. For me, it is an extension of my personality. The content comes from my life, I can laugh at myself… which again is therapeutic,” says Ashish, 58. Ashish has another YouTube channel, Fifty Plus Zindagi, and a podcast, Ashish Vidyarthi Podcast.
The films are being made simultaneously, but he picks and chooses them. With over 350 films in 11 languages, he has earned this privilege as an actor. “So, I look for those amazing roles and when I say amazing I mean the one that is the centrepiece of the film. As an actor, it is interesting to wait for things to happen.”
His busy schedule begs the question, how does he find time for everything?
“I have time for everything because I wake up really early. On days when I have shoots, I record my vlogs before and after!”
