Fact Check: Video of a Silambattam athlete from Tamil Nadu falsely shared as a boy elected as the head teacher of RSS in Kannur

Social media is abuzz with a video (here and here) of a child performing some kind of martial arts. It is being claimed that he is a five-year-old boy, Kartik, who was allegedly appointed as the head teacher (Mukhya Shikshak) of RSS Bala Shakha in Kannur, Kerala. We fact-check this claim through this article.

An archived version of this post can be found here.

Claim: The boy in the video, Kartik, has been appointed as the head teacher (Mukhya Shikshak) of RSS Bala Shakha Kannur, Kerala.

Fact: The name of the boy is Aarav. He is an athlete hailing from Chennai, Tamil Nadu known for performing Silambattam. Aarav’s mother and trainer confirmed to Factly that the claim is false and he was not appointed as RSS Bala Shakha’s head teacher in Kannur, Kerala. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.

To verify the claim, we performed a keyword search to find out more about this claim. However, we did not find any local news reports validating this claim. To learn more about the video, we performed a reverse image search using a few keyframes from the viral video. This search led us to the original version of the video posted on Instagram on 13 January 2025.

It was posted on a page named aarav_aj_official. The name of the boy seen in it is Aarav AJ. As per the caption of the video, he is performing a traditional Indian Martial art form called Silambatam/ Silambattam.

Further, we observed that a few of Aarav’s posts have collaboration with the ‘stickman_silambam_academy’ page, where we found many Silambatam training videos (here and here).

We then contacted the head of this academy, Aakarsh, to verify the viral claim. He told us that Aarav is a six-year-old boy from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and he has not been elected as a chief teacher of RSS Bala Shakha in Kannur, Kerala. He said this is fake news.

We then spoke to Aarav’s parents who denied the claims. His mother told Factly that he was not elected as RSS head, has no ties with Kerala, and that she has no clue about this claim and the viral video.

In the past, one of Aarav’s videos went viral with a claim that he is the grandson of Telugu Desam Party leader Nara Chandrababu Naidu, Nara Devansh. Factly published a fact-check article debunking this claim, which can be read here.

To sum up, a video of a Silmabattam athlete, Aarav, from Tamil Nadu, is falsely shared as a boy elected as the head Teacher of RSS in Kannur, Kerala.

(This story was originally published by Factly, as part of the Shakti Collective. Except for the headline/excerpt/opening introduction para, this story has not been edited by Deccan Chronicle staff.)