Gaali Deke Koi Famous Nahi Banta: Harsh Beniwal on How He Made it

From YouTube to Bollywood, this is Harsh Beniwal’s journey.

Harsh Beniwal (L)

Photo: The Quint

Camera-person: Mukul Bhandari
Video Editor: Puneet Bhatia

Meet Harsh Beniwal, a 23-year-old YouTuber and as of April 2019, a Bollywood actor whose debut with Student of The Year 2 made several headlines. And we are not sure which of the two was more Google search friendly: the movie title or his name.

When a 19-year-old boy from Delhi made a 6-second vine off of an internet meme at 2 am in the morning, little did he know that 4 years later he would have built a successful acting career from it.

Commanding a subscriber count of over 6 million on Youtube and 1.7 million followers on Instagram is no small feat and Beniwal has earned every bit of it from scratch. We caught up with him to find out his secret sauce to get videos ranked on YouTube’s ‘trending’ page almost every single time.

Funny, assertive, with a corny sense of humour and a compulsive need to swear every four sentences – if this was your image of Harsh Beniwal from watching his countless videos on YouTube, let me pop the bubble for you.

Harsh Beniwal is a cool banda?

The Harsh Beniwal you meet offline is a relatively shy boy, who takes pleasure in simple things in life, doesn’t like to ‘party out’, and is not a morning person at all.

“In parties or social gatherings, I am often mistaken as a snob or a cold person as I keep to myself and stay quiet. The truth is that I take time to open up to people. I can’t be social and hold a fun conversation right off the bat.”

Beniwal clarifies, as he drives us to a location in West Delhi where he would often shoot videos in his initial days.

It is hard to believe that he is the same man whose ‘stans’ were so crazy to have him perform in YouTube Fan Fest 2018 that the organisers had to pause the show to calm them down, lest they broke the barriers.

Youtube Fan Fest

On another instance Beniwal shares, “I am not a five-star hotel sort of guy. I prefer the street foods of Delhi. My buddies and I love getting us some ‘golgappas’ in the evening, before we head back to my place to jam for a new video idea.”

From preferring ‘golgappas’ over five-star food to finding a ‘friendly’ solution to YouTube’s copyright strikes, watch Harsh ‘PUBG’ Beniwal open up on career, movies, sexism and 'galiyan’ to Quint Neon’s Papri Das, in this episode of Offline With An Internet Star.