Fasting, Feasting

Meet the Indian film-maker who made his dad’s village cooking a YouTube sensation.

- Priya Krishna

Seated on a dry patch of dirt overlooking a field in Tamil Nadu, India, a wiry, weathered man wearing a white lungi and no shoes holds up an enormous steel tray of a hundred raw chicken legs for the camera filming him. He douses them with turmeric, red chilli powder, garlic and yoghurt, and then sets a rusted wok over a fire built from hunks of bark. He fills the wok with a puddle of oil, and sets the meat bubbling with spices over the roaring fire. Farm animals whistle and bark in the distance and people mutter in Tamil offscreen. Once the stew is done cooking, the man sets glossy clumps of rice and a few plump drumsticks onto a bright green banana leaf laid on the ground. Then he devours the meal with gusto, scooping up rice with his hands and chewing on the bones as bits of chicken fall idly out of his mouth. He looks up with a stern but utterly content expression.

The video, titled “King Of Chicken Legs / Using 100 Chicken Legs / Prepared By My Daddy”, has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube. That’s about 16 times the population of the Theni district, a bucolic part of Tamil Nadu where the man, Jaymukh Gopinath, cooks huge meals en plein air, filmed by his son Arumugam, an amateur film-maker.

Like many of the people behind accidental viral sensations, Arumugam – an energetic 26-year-old who speaks only Tamil and broken English – never set out to make his father a YouTube star. Arumugam used to live in Chennai, Tamil Nadu’s capital, working as an assistant director on Tamil movies. But his salary was so low that he struggled to make a living there. In early 2016, he moved back home and decided to start filming his father cooking simply because, he told me, “I didn’t have to pay him.”