The Charming Appeal of Ashish Chanchlani

As one of the first content creators to pick up on homegrown humour, Ashish Chanchlani paved the way for a lot of what we enjoy on the internet today — and plans to take it to Bollywood too

- Nilesh Goswami

The first two minutes of my Zoom meeting with the insanely popular YouTube sensation Ashish Chanchlani are enough for me to decode his appeal and his unending love for his fans. He is warm, friendly, and nice enough to put me at ease. Chanchlani’s boy-next-door, down-to-earth attitude is his magic trick, and it’s pretty much in plain sight, but it’s one that captivates anyone who runs into him.

Ashish Chanchlani belongs to the breed of content creators who started out sometime in the mid-2010s, in an attempt to provide humour that was purely homegrown, and relatable to the people of the Indian subcontinent. The early 2010s was the time when one had to turn to a foreign channel like a Pewdiepie or a Smosh for getting one’s funny bones tickled. Then, AIB, EIC, and TVF entered the scene and proved to be quite game-changing. However, the idea of becoming popular on the platform by being an individual creator was still not known, and not really tested. So when I first discovered Chanchlani, through a lot of insistence by my peers at a time when I was still navigating high school, I instantly became a fan. Here was a creator who wasn’t a part of the 'cool comedy crowd', but was making content that was as wild and insanely funny as any other channel on the platform.

Chanchlani was supposed to become a civil engineer, but fate had other plans for him. An aspiring Bollywood actor and a hardcore film buff, Chanchlani accidentally stumbled upon Twitter’s Vine one day and started exploring the medium. After getting some success on the platform, he soon turned to YouTube and started making content there. The rest, as they say, is history. In no time, Chanchlani became one of the most recognisable faces of the Indian YouTube scene.