Madly Bengali

Anirban Dasgupta

By Sneha Dey

An engineer-turned-salesman, Anirban Dasgupta decided to make peace with his mundane corporate life and put an end to the monotony before he committed to that one thing where his heart belonged — comedy. “Clearly, I am a great decision-maker. I hated my job, just got married, and I have always wanted my future children to grow up in poverty. Also parallel to all that, the comedy scene in Kolkata was slowly picking up,” says Dasgupta.
Quirky yet focused, Dasgupta knew that just the drive towards comedy wouldn’t be enough if he had to survive amid some of the best stand-up comedians in the country. Coincidentally, that is when he met Vaibhav Sethia, a IIT-ian who pretty much, like Dasgupta, had quit a high paying job to do comedy on a full-time basis, and before they could realise, an amalgam of two like-minded engineers, Kalkutta Komedians was born out of impulsiveness and the sheer hunger of making people laugh till they cry.
While Dasgupta plays around with his personal stories and social issues such as politics, social network addictions and Bollywood flicks, Sethia, on the other hand, tends to remember funny instances from his life and share a rendered version of those anecdotes on stage, which he terms as the “bookmark moments”. The journey from IIT to the central stage was not a cakewalk for Sethia. Sharing a part of that journey, he says, “I loved architecture and I was pretty good at it.
In fact, I got the best thesis award in my final year. It’s just that I love doing comedy more. I did not know English stand-up had begun in India. Then I saw a show in Mumbai and was really drawn to it. I prepared a 10-minute set and performed it at a friend’s party. They loved it. It was only a year later that Kolkata had its first open mic. Since then, I’ve just loved every bit of it.”
For any comedian, instilling interest into his audience and making them laugh is the ultimate challenge. As the saying goes, there is no midway in comedy; it’s either a good show or a brutal disaster. Commenting on similar lines, Dasgupta agreed that enticing the crowd is tough, however, the joy of receiving a positive reaction is a satiating feeling at the end. “The audience commands respect because they have taken time out from their busy schedule to watch a comedy show. To keep the audience captive, we try to involve them in the act as much as possible by interacting with them. We combine that with our best material to make a show work,” says Dasgupta, whose primary aim is to develop the comedy scene in Kolkata and to keep his pockets tightened enough to pay off the home loans.