Parmeet Sethi says Archana Puran Singh was against his acting career, always criticised him: ‘Tu kabhi actor ban hi nahi sakta, tujhe toh smile karne hi nahi aata’

When asked if Archana ever helped him get his debut role, Parmeet said, “She is the strictest teacher you can ever come across. Usne meri jo dahijya udayi thi (she criticised me so much) when I wanted to become an actor. She used to yell at me every day. ‘Tu kabhi actor ban hi nahi sakta, tujhe toh smile karne hi nahi aata (You can never be an actor, you don’t even know how to smile.)’ I used to be in tears when she used to criticise me. But I was stubborn, I worked on myself. I was not a great actor at first, but eventually I learnt the skill.”

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Parmeet credited Archana with helping him prepare for his role in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. “I was from Bombay and she was from North, so she was well-versed with the kind of language used there. She added a lot of uniqueness to my character Kuljeet.”

He also discussed their famous YouTube vlogs, which has gained them over 671,000 subscribers in just four months. Sharing how it all started for them, Parmeet shared, “I had no idea about vlogs. It was Archana and my younger son who asked me why don’t I do YouTube and Instagram. They said, ‘During the lockdown, your videos went viral, people loved to see your fun banter with out maid Bhagyashree.’ Archana decided we should continue with our vlogs. I was never part of those conversations. I am not a very active person on my social media. It happened so that within in 2 days, three big companies approached us to do our YouTube production.”

He added, “When people approached us, Archana went and met them and then she decided to start this. I was like, ‘Kya karoge?’ She said, ‘Covid mein karti thi, we will do same stuff, kya pata chal jaye (we used to do all this during COVID, let’s try the same stuff, what if it works for us?).’ When they pushed so much, I reluctantly said okay and that’s how we started.”

Parmeet said as part of his preparation he began to watch the YouTube channels of comedian Bharti Singh and choreographer-filmmaker Farah Khan to understand how it all works. He said, “Our first episode itself hit 3 million views. Every video started to gain same sort of views. It eventually became a mix of fun and podcast when we started to invite guests on our channel.”

When asked who the brain behind the themes of these vlogs is, Parmeet shared, “We jointly decide themes and topics for our vlogs. We keep experimenting with out content. Lately, we are doing food vlogging because we received great response for that.”

So far the family has shared about 95 videos, with most of them hitting over a million views.