Hyderabadi comedy has always been a hot favourite with India, and making its own mark in the genre is the channel Shakeel Bhai. Started by three friends from Medak — Syed Asrar, Syed Bashaar Ahmed and Mohd Aseem — in June last year, the channel has over 19,000 subscribers.
“The idea came to us pretty randomly. The name too is of a fictional character but those who view our videos assume that someone called Shakeel exists who runs the channel,” says Asrar, adding, “When we started we had no fancy equipment and managed with just a phone and a laptop. For our first video we took clips from Dhanush’s Raghuvaran BTech, wrote a totally different script and came up with our own dialogues with added humour. That got a lot of views and that’s how we knew this would work.”
The team takes clips of movies, trailers or advertisements and creates a different but humourous story altogether. For example, a court scene from Jr NTR’s Temper has been dubbed to portray a story where Jr NTR (Shakeel) complains about his vehicle being stolen, adding a good amount of humour in Hyderabadi Hindi.
The three students know how to juggle between their studies and their channel, and hence make videos only on Sundays or holidays. “It usually takes us three days to come up with a video. All the money that we have earned so far from the channel, we have invested in buying new equipment such as a camera, tripod, microphones, etc,” says Bashaar.
Their most famous works include the trailer of Baahubali, with over 3 lakh views.
“We never poke fun at a star or make derogatory comments at anyone. There is no vulgarity too. Users from US, UK and the Middle East have been writing to us, appreciating our work,” says the team.
The group has also scripted a Hyderabadi character for director Raj Madiraju’s upcoming Bollywood movie Pirates 1.0 (releasing in Telugu as Aithe 2.0).
