Stand-up comedian, actor and an author, Karthik Kumar who has performed over 1,000 shows across India, USA, UK, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong talks about his journey as an entrepreneur through his book 'Don't start up' when in conversation with DC .
After having studied engineering, you are a speaker, actor, comedian and the founder of Evam. How did you venture into so many areas of entertainment and why?
All this is just a form of storytelling. At Evam, we started off as being story tellers and hence we didn't see the difference between telling stories through theatre, cinema, digital, live or even through a book right now. People listen to stories and allow stories to change them and their perspectives. It's not just entertainment, its engagement through story telling.
What are you truly passionate about?
I’m truly passionate about the spirit of starting things where the energies of people, their minds, their useful work and value come together and they create something that makes a difference.
Tell us more about the “retirement” from the film industry.
This was a very difficult decision that I made in my career. However, I had a lot of clarity pertaining to it since I had a stage as an actor where I wasn't bringing any value to the role that I was doing and I wasn’t offered any roles that I could bring value to. So it was probably a time to disengage in order to be able to re-engage later. Acting in films was something that I loved dearly and when I began to love it less dearly, it was time for me to disengage.
When you first started stand-up comedy, what were the thoughts that struck you back then?
Doing stand-up comedy for the first time made me feel the greatest adrenalin rush ever and it instilled the greatest amount of fear within me. I never felt that I could be a person who could laugh at myself and that was a serious personality setback that I had to overcome. Starting off by laughing at myself and making others laugh was a humongous change in the way I looked at life and the way my personality had emerged. It changed my life.
What have been the highest and lowest points of your career?
The highest point in my career has been at all points of time in making a team of people believing in themselves, going there and achieving something. We believe a lot in delegation to our team and giving them the ownership. Every time my team has pulled off something magnificent (much better than I ever could have!), that’s brought me a lot of highs. Additionally, every division in Evam that has pulled off a project has brought me a lot of pride.
Lowest points have been the decisions that I made which have failed my company. I had taken ownership for it but that really hit me hard and made me feel that I could have done better. We had two bankruptcy situations in the last 15 years. I was instrumental for it and it reflected upon me as a leader. Feeling responsible for it was possibly the worst feeling ever.
Tell us more about Bloody Chutney and its establishment
Blood Chutney was a comedy experiment to see if tragedy, discomfort or anything negative could be turned into something positive and good to make people laugh, think, reflect and to create a certain catharsis for myself and the audience. I took a lot of bad things that happened to me and converted them
into laughter and the experiment worked because it became a piece of tragedy that got converted into something that was ironically comedic.
