Courtesy:
Greg King / Wilbur Sargunaraj
YouTube celebrity Wilbur Sargunaraj performing at a concert in Toronto, Canada, in 2010
Late in the morning of 1 December, at a
postcard-perfect bayview restaurant in Mumbai, a young mother walked over to a
man a few tables away. Her son’s a big fan of his, she said. Would he allow a
picture? “Of course,” the tall man with a French beard beamed. Together, they
walked over to a side of the patio and posed for the camera-phone. One could
see that the kid looked more flustered than happy. His mother, on the other hand,
looked delighted. It was difficult to say who the real fan was.
On seeing this, a woman having a brunch of
Caesar salad with her husband at the table next to mine turned to me. “Who is
he?” she asked curiously.
He was a man I had been following for almost
three years, a man who has one of the most popular YouTube channels run by an
Indian. The answer should have been on the tip of my tongue. But how does one
condense the hysteria accumulated over years of online presence into a line or
two?
“That is Wilbur Sargunaraj,” I said. “He is
the man who teaches you how to do your business on an Indian toilet.” It was an
honest answer, but I had to reassure her that I wasn’t joking.
My answer is perhaps not a unique
introduction. And to field exactly such queries, he has made a helpful video
titled, ‘Who is Wilbur Sargunaraj’.
“Is he just the toilet man who shows people
how to use the Eastern latrine on YouTube?” the voiceover asks. The voice
refers the internet surfer to one of the most popular videos Wilbur has made
and starred in: ‘How to use an eastern latrine’. It features a 33-year-old
Wilbur, his pants well up to his waist, entering a typical Indian potty and
demonstrating the right way to squat, wash and clean. “We take some water, we
take the left hand and then we pour,” he says with a deadpan expression.
Its success is evident in over 1.3 million
views, not to mention the inspired spin-offs that describe the correct way to
use European and Japanese toilets. Some of his other videos are titled, ‘How to
tie the lungi’, ‘How to eat with the hands’, ‘How to light firecrackers in
India’, ‘How to do the shaving Tamil Nadu style’ and ‘How to drive Aston Martin
car in Oman’.
A native of Madurai, Wilbur, now 36, knows
where his appeal lies. The only child of a couple working for an NGO for the
elderly, Wilbur was schooled in several cities including Varanasi, Darjeeling
and Kolkata before he settled in Madurai. It was back in 2007, during a stint
in the hospitality industry, that he started releasing a series of videos that
he clubs under the tagline, ‘Making the common extraordinary’. It’s a broad
term and Wilbur has made a career of it. In his repertoire are tutorials that
teach you how to ride a bullock cart, pluck a coconut and even carry a baby
like Africans do (“The baby is folding!” as he puts it).
Then you have Wilbur’s music videos, ranging
from the wacky to those bordering on the sublime, like an ode to ‘Chicken 65’
or his irreverent ‘Love Marriage’, each honoured with more than a million views
on the internet. Auto-tune plays a considerable role in Wilbur’s success. As
does coconut oil.
***
The poster of Simple Superstar, a biopic that is part autobiography, part road trip and part instructional video
They say a camera always adds a few kilos. In
our simple superstar’s case, it was the opposite—unlike the lanky man in his videos,
I was face-to-face with someone well-built and broad-shouldered at the
screening. Yes, the bushy moustache was still there. He was dressed in a white
shirt, dark sunglasses and trousers ending in a pair of Bata chappals. He had
traded his black trousers for what he called ‘lungi-pants’, a pair of pyjamas
with a texture typical of a lungi.
“Everyone was calling me a superstar,” Wilbur
explained. “I wanted to do away with this notion. What is a star? A person who
is different from a common person. So I said, call me a ‘superstar’, but
realise that I am a simple person—and that simple is the new cool.”
Cinematically, the biopic is not something to
write home about. Starring Wilbur Sargunaraj as himself, it’s a journey of a
man who has built an identity for himself by reconnecting his roots and helping
others in the process. Up to that point, be it his music or instructional
videos, with Wilbur, what you saw was what you got. This movie, however, is a
departure from his wafer-thin style of narration and attempts to pick on
bullies and the pan-India obsession with fair skin, climaxing with a feel-good
message of following your own dreams.
He is no Oprah,
but the Wilbur package comes with helpful nuggets on life. My favourite is his
spontaneous discourse in a video released last year that probes poverty. After
trawling through slums and sewage canals, speaking to everyone from roadside
shopkeepers to pavement dwellers, Wilbur lands at the house of a farmer in a
small village. But this time, he is not interested in vox pop. “Many people are
striving to be very very rich. Even poor people want to be rich. The rich want
to be richer,” he begins, before the camera faces a couple of goats tied to a
pillar, bleating merrily. “But in life, you should be content as these two
goats. See how content they are. They are happy with their life, happy with
their food, happy with their house right here. So be like a goat.”
It’s not easy to put a finger on why Sargunaraj attracts such a vast
following with his thick accent, amateurish videos and lyrics that usually take
a line and flog it throughout the song (the track Please Check My Blog repeats this plea 63 times over four
minutes). But it doesn’t matter in Wilburville, where everything is ‘very very
first class’, be it the lives of people living in slums or the Mediterranean
cuisine he has had for breakfast.
***
In person, Wilbur is nothing like the buffoon
one is led to picture by his antics on the web. His fortunes took to the sky
when he decided to go online. Since then, he has accumulated over 29,400
followers on his Facebook page. He is, of course, a YouTube view millionaire.
Outspoken and articulate, he underlines the mantra to his success lucidly: “I
really don’t think too much.”
“Nothing gets shelved,” he says. “Something
will just hit me and if I think I can do it, I will. If I look at a theme and
go, ‘Oh, that’s funny’, I go ahead and do that. It’s all about having fun.”
This results in random flights of fancy leading his way. When he thinks
of a concept, he sees it through. There is no script to his self-help videos,
only the seed of an idea. That’s how he decided to make a video on how to tie a veshti (the Tamilian dhoti), a
“tube-like structure”, in the middle of Times Square in New York. The idea of
juxtaposing rural Indian life with hi-glam Western modernity was irresistible,
and he flew to the Big Apple to execute it.
His tutorials are the products of one man
flying solo. But who manages the camera? “Common people on the street shoot the
videos. I randomly go up to them, put [the camera] in their hand and say,
‘Please shoot them.’ I don’t even have a tripod. My mother shot ‘How to eat
with hands’. She had to hold the camera for six minutes.” Apart from being a
one-take artist, Wilbur is an auteur of sorts—conceiving ideas, editing
footage, composing music and posting videos, albeit minus a team of minions to
get him his filter coffee shaken not stirred.
It would be misleading to say Wilbur makes a
living of peddling Exotic India. He also uploads clips with instructions on how
to navigate an aeroplane or negotiate some mean Michael Jackson moves. A
cursory glance at his YouTube channel reveals people crowding his comments box
with criticism for perpetuating Indian stereotypes. For Wilbur, however, it is
about adapting to a new life without losing pride in one’s identity.
“It’s not like I have set out to take Tamil Nadu to the world,” he says,
“My roots inspire me to write the songs I sing. In my childhood, I used to
visit coconut plantations. There used to be lots of cobras there. That’s where
I got the song Cobra
Cobra from. Then one
day I thought of making a video on climbing such trees to pick a coconut, so I
did.”
Robert Stephens, a friend and the co-producer
of Simple Superstar,
is a Canadian architect who now lives in Mumbai. It took all of three hours for
Stephens to decide that he wanted to fund the biopic. It was an investment
without any hope of financial returns, he confesses. “Wilbur Sargunaraj is a
nobody,” he says. And yet, Stephens dipped into his life savings to fund the
entire post-production process. “Before I met him in person, all I knew of him
was through his videos. I didn’t know the script of the movie. But I knew that
this man had a message that can change a life, a confidence that is out of this
world.”
It is this confidence that has taken Wilbur from
his debut concert atop a truck in Madurai to packed auditoriums in Toronto. And
throughout the journey, he has kept up his campaign to promote cultural
intelligence. Years after he made his most famous video, it’s common for people
to approach him and ask how to use an Indian-style latrine.
‘What if we are left handed, Wilbur?’ said a
recent comment on his ‘How to eat with the hands’ page. Trick question. Wilbur
has already said that it’s impolite to wash yourself with your right hand as
that’s what you use to greet people. Pat came his reply, ‘Use the gloves ;)’,
smiley wink well in place.
