What makes Ashish Vidyarthi’s stand-up special ‘Sit Down Ashish’ in Mumbai, a laugh about life itself

Now, at 58, he is willing to share much more and with a larger audience as he makes his debut with a stand-up special titled ‘Sit Down Ashish’, which is scheduled for March 31, at Veda Kunba Theatre, Mumbai.

The title, he shares, is a play on the refrain that he has received all his life. “I love to do many things but when you are always excited about life, people often ask you to “calm down” or “take it easy”. The idea of doing a stand-up emerged from his experience of working on Vikas Bahl’s ZEE5 original web-series Sunflower (2021-) that saw him showing his comic side. “That seeded the idea of creating something in the comedy space,” he says. Vidyarthi looked around him and began capturing everyday stories.

“It is a laugh on life and at myself. It has observations about filmmaking, about eating out and cooking, about the new found ways of living, as well as marriages and their breaking and making. For me, it is a personal memoir,” he says, when we met him at his residence in Goregaon. Defying the post-lunch slump that consumes everyone, he had the enthusiasm of youth as he spoke about the “joy of holding a mic and speaking to an audience”.

Born and brought up in Delhi, Vidyarthi, an alumnus of National School of Drama, moved to Mumbai for a film which eventually got shelved. Having no backup plan, he decided to look for work and did everything from reading stock trading rates for a television channel to auditioning for directors and producers in their living rooms while they ate their breakfast. Soon the actor found his footing with Droh Kaal (1994), his first film which won him the National Film Award for best supporting actor.

“There was glory but there was no money in the bank,” he says. Then the commercial roles came. “But, I realised that I am doing the same thing again and again. And, I couldn’t say no because I needed money. So in 1999, I decided to move to south-Indian cinema and there I got better roles and did about 250 films.”

It was the dissatisfaction with life despite a lot of work and personal joys — he had recently got married and became a father — that led Vidyarthi to join a “life forum” in early 2000. Such was the impact that he decided to enable others to live a fuller life. A couple of years later, he set up Avid Miner to become a motivational speaker. “Initially companies would hire me for a talk but people there would want to hear Bollywood stories. It took some time before they started calling me for the programme that I was offering,” says Vidyarthi. This venture also gave him the privilege of being selective about the roles he was getting in films.

The pandemic introduced him to the world of social media where Vidyarthi has established himself as a food and travel vlogger with 6.65 million followers on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube combined. For him, who always enjoyed sharing his discoveries with others, this was right up his alley. “I bought a GoPro camera and started shooting my travel and food videos. I would go to lesser-known food joints and document them,” he says.

It is through vlogging that he met his second wife, Rupali. Talking about the decision to end his first marriage, he shares that it was mutual because the way they saw their future was no longer in alignment. “People were surprised because they couldn’t understand. Some even asked ‘why are you getting divorced, you guys don’t even fight’… I knew I would get married again because I believe in companionship and I had conveyed this to Piloo (Rajoshi, his first wife).”

Although not a planner or a strategist, he hopes his stand-up act will receive the applause he’s looking for and win him key and central roles in films and webseries. Like Neena Gupta, who put up a post on social media asking for work, Vidyarthi had also put out updates saying he is looking for work, even saying that if people are waiting for him to die to say what a great actor he was. “The actor’s job is not to do roles but also to get roles,” he says, adding, “I am an extraordinary actor, waiting for an amazing role. Only when they both meet will that magic happen.”