Sahil Khattar has his work cut out for him, standing with a microphone on a street in the Indian city of Bengaluru asking passersby to talk about penis size. Reactions range from sheepish grins to earnest explanations to expressions of “what did I walk into?” He uses bananas of various sizes to ease people into conversations, and before long they’re sharing the word for “penis” in various dialects and candidly discussing their experiences. No two responses are the same (unless you count blushing), but in a country of 122 languages, six national religions, and 1.3 billion people it’s hard to imagine they would be.
People have watched the video, posted on the YouTube channel BeingIndian, more than 3 million times. Based on the comments, the video has helped quite a few of those viewers have dialogues they normally wouldn’t. Not on a national level, at least.
Penis size is but one of the occasionally uncomfortable conversations BeingIndian hopes to spark. “We’re so many different countries in one—what does it mean to ‘be Indian,’ anyway?” co-founder and CEO Sameer Pitalwalla asks. The answer, he believes, can be found online.
As smartphone usage grows across India, online videos (and comment threads) are changing how young people throughout the country learn about the rest of the world—and how they see India’s role within it. Teens and young adults are the first Indian generation to grow up with the Internet, and YouTube in particular has changed how they relate to each other. They may not have grown up worshipping the same gods or speaking the same language at home, but worship of Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan knows no linguistic bounds.
Pitalwalla, a 31-year-old entrepreneur from Mumbai, believes that channels like his can expand the national conversation far beyond celebrity couples and into weightier territory like homosexuality, caste prejudice, and women’s rights. By using man-on-the-street videos to provide viewers a vocabulary about delicate subjects, the channel prepares them to talk to each other about larger issues in person—and, hopefully, to recognize their own ability to change the conversation.
That conversation largely began in 2008, when India awarded 122 mobile telecommunications licenses. Suddenly, private entities could invest in cellular connectivity. Prepaid Internet became affordable, and mobile Internet subscriptions doubled in a year. “It freed up cellular access, and triggered a social revolution,” says Nimmi Rangaswamy, an anthropologist and sociologist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad. “A poor kid could pay five rupees—a few cents—for a day’s Internet.”
Now, 200 million people in India use the Internet each month. While widespread access has crystallized some commonalities of being Indian, it also exacerbated differences. “The Internet has cut both ways,” says Rangaswamy. “The biggest social differences—not just language but also caste and religion—get expressed very starkly when people come onto the Internet.” Facebook and Twitter offer young people a way to transcend traditional class markers, but also offer a novel way to reinforce them.
That’s where cultural sites like BeingIndian have a role. Pitalwalla, previously digital video director at Disney India, and Venkat Prasad, who worked on social analytics at YouTube, founded Being Indian’s parent company Culture Machine in 2013 as a way to capitalize on the rise of media access in India. “TV in India is a stifling environment—the content is highly regulated,” says Pitalwalla. Working out of a Mumbai studio with a staff of 230, the Culture Machine team earns money providing video analytics to others, and uses it to create its own content. Culture Machine also offers sites for a range of young Indian interests: Put Chutney for south Indians; Blush for women; Epified for those interested in Indian mythology. BeingIndian is the company’s answer to how to bring these groups of young people together. “We want to be the watercooler that informs how these communities talk,” says Pitalwalla.
YouTube, which is has seen 80 percent growth in India each year since 2013, is the office where those watercoolers exist. From BeingIndian to Lonely Island-style comedy collective All India Bakchod, to BB Ki Vines, where musician Bhuvan Bam offers a one-man show about online dating and preparing for exams, video channels hope to sway the accessibility of the Internet in India towards good: a platform that empowers young people without resources more than it enforces systemic prejudice.
Comedy is a common thread among the country’s YouTube stars, and BeingIndian peppers the laughs with serious issues: Alongside street interviews about drugs and “awkward massages,” the channel features first-person accounts of sexism and intercaste persecution. Host Sahil Khattar sees that balance as necessary to create a space conducive to conversation. “We’re all about relatability,” he says. “In the Indian Internet market, shock and humor are the only things that definitely work, but we also think about what young people should be talking about.” Viewers come for the clickbait, and leave with a more nuanced understanding of tricky issues.
In a country where sodomy is illegal, BeingIndian eases viewers into taboo topics with candid humor, through videos like “Things Homosexuals Are Tired of Hearing” and “Mumbai on Contraception.” Khattar says viewers must feel comfortable before starting a dialog, and laughter is an effective way of doing that. “Everybody talks about these things, but we have a microscope in our hands to examine the way we’re talking about it,” he says.
In January, PhD student Rohith Vemula committed suicide at Hyderabad Central University. He left a note calling out administrators and students for discriminating against those of the Dalit caste—the lowest in Indian society. While government policies toward Dalits, once called Untouchables, have changed drastically in the past 50 years, cultural prejudice persists. Vemula’s death prompted protests and conversations across India, where Dalits often still don’t have a public voice.
In response, BeingIndian released “ The Indian Dalit ,” a video interviewing caste members across India. “It’s not just a way into entertainment—it’s a way to reframe difficult conversations for young people.”
Those young people are paying attention. Since launching in August 2013, the BeingIndian videos have been viewed 134 million times and the channel has some 901,000 subscribers—just behind India’s premier YouTube cricket channel.
The Internet is still largely accessed by people in the big cities. Seventy-one percent of users are in cities with a population over 50,000, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The same goes for viewers of BeingIndian. But that exposure is changing rapidly. “There’s a saying here: ‘there are more mobile phones in India than there are toilets,’” says Anshul Tewari, the 25-year-old founder and editor-in-chief of Youth Ki Awaaz, which solicits content from young people across India.
That means that a channel like BeingIndian has an enormous potential to scale. Right now, some 200 million Indians are using the Internet per month; as companies like Micromax and Xiaomi market smartphones to a potential market of 1.3 billion people, that number will continue to rise. BeingIndian hopes to capitalize on that growing connectedness to provide young people with a common language. If it can help youth from inner-city slums and more remote areas develop fluency around these sensitive topics, they can speak about them—both on a digital platform like Youth Ki Awaaz, and in their daily lives.
“We start a dialogue about what India stands for,” says Khattar. “Then, we give the youth of the country a hint of where to take it.”
