Actor, stand up comic, content creator... the many roles of Ashish Vidyarthi

National Award winning actor Ashish Vidyarthi shares his journey of storytelling through vlogs, stand-up comedy, and motivational speaking.

Ashish Vidyarthi talks about how GoPro and he discovered each other during one of the phases of the pandemic and how they embarked on a journey of telling stories together. It made him look at people more closely, and the stories started happening. 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 as part of Raining Smiles, his ‘project’ following the monsoon and spreading smiles or rather laughs as he performs stand-up comedy across the length and breadth of the country. As part of it, he will perform impromptu gigs in cafes and restaurants. He started at Kanyakumari, before moving to Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam and Kochi. As a stand-up comic, he has performed Sit Down Ashish across the country, the most recent being at the Habitat, Mumbai and Black Cat, Kolkata.

While Sit Down Ashish is, as he calls, ‘the formal thing’, Raining Smiles is informal, unrehearsed and organic. As part of it, “I will come to a place where performances are not usually held. I will meet people and perform as well.” 

He is exactly like how he is on his vlogs — warm and friendly. There is an unhurried air about him, as he settles down for a conversation. His wife, Rupali has been travelling with him. 

The actor who won the National Award for the Best Supporting actor for his role in Drohkaal, handles mainstream and arthouse films with equal ease. The Malayali audience last saw him in a cameo in Aavesham. That balancing his multiple roles is not hard for him is evident from how he speaks about them. He enjoys crisscrossing the country, constant travel… “I go to bed completely tired, I like to go to bed tired rather than bored. And I am not bored!” 

His vlogs, posted on IG and YouTube, cover food too. Before the food content, he posted interviews with little-known but extraordinary people. 

Of how he got into creating content, he says, “It was an interesting period of my life when I was going through stuff. It is said that the more you keep looking at yourself, the more you get depressed. Things don’t go according to plan and this [vlogging] too was not planned.” At the time, he confessed, he did not know much about vlogging though he had been blogging.