Mera Naam Joker

Former cricketer Virender Sehwag, so used to hitting the ball out of the park, has found a new career on social media: Entertainer with a cause.

- Pradeep Magazine

Some fairly unlikely things have happened to Virender Sehwag since he retired from professional cricket. for one, he’s the proud owner of a public school in the heart of his home state, Haryana: a school known for the excellence of its sports facilities, among other things.

The other thing – and this is so out of the park that it reminds you of his creative, rule-breaking game – is that he’s become such a social media star, thanks to witty, pithy 140-character jokes on Twitter, that brands are now paying him to tweet. 

“I have, in the last six months, made around ₹30 lakh through my tweets,” says Sehwag, very pleased with himself.

He should be. after all, he signed up on Twitter the way most of us do, just for some social media fun. But unlike most of us, his tweets got funnier and funnier, and now, not only does he have eight million people following his microblogging account, but he’s also spread his wings and become a humorist on youTube, with a show called Viru Ke Funde that covers everything from how to appease your mother-in-law to how to avoid paying income tax and how to learn English as an adult. (His funda for the last was: “all cricketers who did not speak English, like Kapil, Harbhajan and i, married women who were fluent in it. in front of them, we were not shy of making mistakes, which helped us learn to speak in that language without getting embarrassed.”)

How did this happen?

LINE MAAROING

“These are all jokes we used to crack with friends and in the dressing room,” says Sehwag about his reinvention as social media royalty. “Once I took to Twitter and shared those jokes, they became a huge hit. My following grew and some of the posts got thousands of retweets. With so many shares, money from sponsors followed.”