I stand for clean comedy says Aashqeen

Aashqeen or Raunak Pandey is an Indian YouTuber, actor, and social media influencer. In conversation with Social Samosa, Pandey gets candid.

Known for his funny skits and humorous observational videos on Facebook and YouTube, Pandey started making videos for fun during his college days and had no idea that he would become a social media star someday.

Aashqeen’s most viewed videos on YouTube include ‘Parents Teacher Meeting ft. Ashish Chanchlani’, ‘The Interview: When You Meet Your Ex’, ‘Story of Every Indian Muslim’ and ‘Life after Engineering’. We go behind the scenes.

Excerpts:

Who am I?

I’m Aashqeen and thus the social media handles name is also Aashqeen. I have been creating, comedy sketches based on relatable stories and a slice of life content since 2015. With 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube and around 3.1 Million followers on Facebook. 

My journey

This all started in the year 2015 when I was just an Engineering student who was just loafing around but back then too there was a little spark of craziness inside me that I was yet to discover. 

But the moment I discovered it, I was unstoppable. Although I took a fair amount of time to decide what to do with my tedious life. With some of my friends, I recorded and uploaded my first video. The response was fine and I was quite thrilled and pumped to do it more. Gradually I started working on more videos and the rest is history.

My family

My team is not only my team but also my childhood friends. The journey started with friends for fun. Since then nothing much has changed, it’s just that now we are doing fun with a little seriousness and with a commercial angle. I started this with Dikshant and Lakhan who still are two important pillars of the company, Dikshant is the Channel and Production head whereas Lakhan is the DOP and also our editor. Barkha joined us a bit late and she handles all the marketing and communication. It’s fun to work with your own people. 

What’s in the name? 

Aashqeen. It’s my name. My single name. And there is no rocket science behind this name. I just wanted to give a unique name to my channel, so I thought what’s better than my own name. However, Aashqeen means somebody who loves others and gets love from others. And that’s what I do with through my videos. It’s unique, Interesting and thought-provoking. Then, why not?

My mission statement

My sole purpose is to create funny and relatable content. Keeping in mind that one can enjoy my videos with their family. And I stand for clean comedy. It's a bit annoying to see how people find gallis and adult content more amusing and entertaining. In fact, at times people ask me to create content with all gallis and all. But I stand for clean and logical content. Luckily people have accepted me with my content and with time I try to give them refreshing content. My content is my king and my top-notch priority is to deliver good content to my audience. That’s all. 

I create content for? 

I’m creating content for everyone. See laughter is something that we all need today, so precisely the people who love to laugh are my target audience. Okay, let me correct that, people who don’t know how to laugh on silly things, they too are my target. Look, it’s one life, we can’t just waste it on getting depressed over silly things. So, clearly I’m creating content for everyone and that’s my solitary purpose. 

I work with...

We’ve worked with a no. of brands like Myntra, Gillette, Kingfisher, Venus, Sabhyata, Spoyl, Happn, MPL, and others. Favorably everything went well with all of them. As with time we are growing and dealing with new brands, we’ve realized that it’s not that difficult to meet the brand’s expectations. Perhaps things do go downhill sometimes. Besides, we are open to new brands and new collaborations.

I'm proud of 

Inteqam series. The character has gone popular. I also love doing it as I allow him to do crazy activities when he wins his revenge battle like riding a rickshaw, horse, and whatnot in the future. You won’t believe but more than me people are crazy about Bhaiya Ji and Inteqam Series. They relate to this series like anything. And there are always huge expectations from Bhaiya Ji, and that’s a kind of pressure on me, because Bhaiya Ji is just an ordinary guy, doing extraordinary stuff. Bhaiya Ji is known for his outlandish revenge and it takes plenty amount of time to come up with perfect revenge. But in the end, the kind of love and support Bhaiya Ji receives is overwhelming and that encourages me to do something uncommon every time.

My WTF moment 

I generally resist using social media handles for the next 2-3 hours whenever I put a video. It’s really haunting for me to keep checking audiences’ responses every second on the video. So, there’s one video of mine ‘Never Judge Too Quickly’ which we had shot in very little time and was ready to upload in a day.  But I was very skeptical before uploading that video. I uploaded it to remove it in some time if the response will not be good. I told my team members to keep an eye on the audience's response and delete the video if it’s really bad. After an hour, he called me to tell me that he has 2 phones and a laptop and he can’t read the comments all the equipment is hanging because the video had 1 Million views in just an hour and today it had 110 Million views on Facebook. It made me the only comedy creator in India with 100 Million views on a Facebook video.

Also read: Traversing the journey of Anisha Dixit as Rickshawali

Stay tuned for...

My first ever Web Series. I’m really excited to share that being an individual creator I’m launching the first web series which is all about the journey of being a creator. A lot of time, efforts and resources have been invested in this web series. It’s a total original series sponsored by Gillette. The series is launching on April 19, 2019, on my all social media platforms. Let’s hope for the best. 

Are, you hiring?

We are looking forward to expanding our team, so yes we are looking for scriptwriters, graphic designers, and production people to join our team. We’ll be more than happy to invite new and young energies. We don’t need any degree or experience. We need crazy, enthusiastic and passionate people. Rest they learn everything owns their own at our cool small office place in Delhi.