SINGAPORE – In India, not many comedians have the platform where they could broadcast their shows. With India’s strict cultural and religious background, it wasn’t really possible to air satirical shows mocking the government or tackling the country’s social issues on mainstream media such as the television.
So for comedian Gursimranjeet Singh Khamba and his team over at All India Bakchod, Youtube was the perfect platform to air their funny voices, “Youtube in India has started shaping public opinion. They get content that’s different from mainstream media.”
But All India Bakchod doesn’t just create these videos to make people laugh, they also do this to bring awareness to certain social issues surrounding India.
One of these is rape. According to Khamba, in India, instead of helping rape victims, people, even authorities blame them for why the act was committed. So what All India Bakchod did is create a satirical video demonstrating the various blames that are being thrown to rape victims.
This video got more international viewers than Indians themselves and was translated in five languages.
Another hot issue in India is net neutrality or making the internet available to everyone at the exact same speed and have people access whatever content they want.
Since mainstream media didn’t care enough about net neutrality, said Khamba, they took the initiative to make a video about it so people can help in spreading the call the ‘Save the Internet’.
This video aimed to reach younger audiences who are the more frequent users of the internet, audiences who may not be consumers of mainstream media.
“There is potential in using Youtube as a platform to create social engagement and to reach out to younger people who share the same sentiment and feelings about issues,” added Khamba.
