Vikram Arul Vidyapathi: Explores urban casteism in impending set

Choosing his native language over English to reach a wider audience, standup comedian Vikram Arul Vidyapathi delivers a strong expression of his ideologies through his performances 
On stage
On stage

Touring his standup show across India, Chennai-based artiste, Vikram Arul Vidyapathi readies himself to perform in the city for the first time after Pondicherry and Bangalore. He started his forthcoming solo show Vikkals of Vikram in 2021 and entertained 15 people on Zoom during the second wave of Covid-19. The following year, he slowly opened out a little more to 40 humour enthusiasts. Soon after, it became an endeared and prevalent comedy show in Tamil, selling out nearly to an auditorium of 750 people at Raja Annamalai Mandram in Chennai.  

With 809K subscribers on his YouTube channel titled Vikkals, the comedian performs exclusively in Tamil and believes that he is ‘funnier’ when acting in his native tongue. Besides, he also notes that through his first language, he delivers a stronger expression of his ideologies and arguments to initiate conversations around unscrutinised discourses and enunciate the underlying gist of the matter. “The general perception is that you can tour across the nation and beyond only if you perform in English. But then, I strongly feel that if Tamil cinema can get a national or international reception, why not Tamil standup comedy? I want people to take notice of me as a Tamil guy performing in Tamil while appreciating everything about my thought process,” he adds.

Vikram’s impending set is a form of personal storytelling wherein he debates existent discriminatory practices and social maladies, like casteism. The narrative arc revolves around a middle-class Tamil boy housing a normalised patriarchal mindset, who suddenly gets exposed to modernity. While awkward at first, he broadens his horizon and endeavours to accept his contemporaries while silently progressing towards cultural upgradation. “It’s more like a fly-on-the wall perspective and how it changes him internally,” he tells us. 

Finding his voice in 2018 as a standup comedian, Vikram immediately knew what he wanted to say. Politically, his comic medium seeks to regularise better conversations around urban casteism, related societal orthodoxies and feminism. Also, an erstwhile thespian, he defines his present art form as an embodiment of a constant trial-and-error course of action. While his early days as a theatric made him question whether it gave him the comforting and duly deserved limelight, he admits that the bygone dress rehearsals helped his comedy come a long way around that steep learning curve. “I picked up a lot of qualities from my time in theatre, for example, patience. But, I also wanted to reach out to the masses through a bigger medium,” he tells us. And so, it happened. In 2018, out of good faith, when Vikram chose to help his friend write her script for an open mic performance, he was coincidentally invited on stage. “The both of us have also acted in plays together and she knew I was funny. As asked, I performed for the first time and have fallen in love with comedy ever since,” he laughs. 

Performing on February 18 at Heart Cup Coffee in Jubilee Hills.

E-mail: chokita@newindianexpress.com

Twitter: @PaulChokita

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