A Roast Well Done

Tanmay Bhat, Co-Founder of All India Bakchod, believes being bold changed the way the country looked at the comedy collective.

- Kathakali Chanda

By his own admission, both Tanmay Bhat, 29, and All India Bakchod (AIB), the comedy collective Gursimran Khamba, 31, and he co-founded, were neither too entrepreneurial nor ambitious. The two started with a podcast in March 2012, and from episode 3 were joined by friends Rohan Joshi, 34, and Ashish Shakya, 32. Initially, all they wanted was to get 200 people in a room for a show. Then, as the numbers began to grow, from 200 to 500 and more, they decided to start a YouTube channel in 2013 that, they thought, would have a 100 thousand subscribers in a year. At the end of that time span, AIB reached a million subscribers. That’s when they realised they were on to something big. “Every time we’ve decided to do X, we’ve been super-modest in our heads and the idea has just ballooned while execution. That’s why we have managers and friends who constantly ask us to get out of the middle-class