NE vloggers break the mould on social media, one video at a time
NEW DELHI: It was said of Anthony Bourdain that for someone with ‘No Reservations’ about eating anything offered to him as a guest, he would draw the line at airport food, and cat and dog meat.
Alo K Kemp, aka The Roving Naga, seemingly eats anything that can be legitimately eaten. “Bohut tasty hota hain,” he says of a stag beetle in a recent YouTube vlog titled “Eating most expensive food in the world”.
Some frames later, he is chomping on a fried black specimen that some comments on the video would have us believe is worth Rs 75 lakh each. Alo never bothers to clarify. He is too busy making a mean chutney, complete with fiery bhut jolokia, of the remaining stag beetles he’s collected for the day.
The creepy-crawlies are, as he points out, a yummy accompaniment to his meal of rice, beef and bamboo shoot curry, cow brain wrapped in leaf and cooked in embers, and a slab of pork lard. On another occasion, he shows hornet stings all over his body before the camera pans to two platefuls of hornet larvae and giant wood worms that he relishes with rice.
Bear Grylls’s Man vs Wild may be more his aspirational identity than Bourdain, but Alo often evokes the unaffected philosophical spirit of one of the world’s most adored travellers with his approach to his travels through the jungles, hills and rivers of his native Nagaland.
“When I go to the jungle, I must be happy,” he says in an interview on a vlog called My Dad’s Office. “When I was young, my father would take me hunting and say, ‘You can eat these things, and you can’t eat those. Those learnings have stayed with me.”
While he goes about surviving on whatever’s available, Alo is conscious and respectful of his viewers’ sensibilities. He mentions that many people don’t eat beef for religious and other reasons, while being a Christian allows him to “eat everything”.
With over 1.2 lakh subscribers at last count, The Roving Naga is blazing a trail for vloggers from the region.
YouTube abounds with similar accounts of camping, hunting, cooking and eating in the back of beyond somewhere in the NorthEast. Some are in the genre of mukbang, an online fad with origins in South Korea that involves the vlog host digging into food of all kinds — and in large quantities — while staring into the camera from up close.
There are also silent, Japanese-style vlogs like Asha Cooks and Camp, which currently has 35k subscribers. Not for her the drama of survival in the wild or hunting for the weirdest things to eat as The Roving Naga does. Neither does she speak a word. Instead, what the viewer gets is a riveting audiovisual symphony of nature and its sounds as the young woman quietly goes about rustling up a rustic meal.
Sometimes, it’s fried grasshopper, pork curry and roasted maize. If the mood suits her, she would be a tad more adventurous with her choices, such as pork with snail and mushroom.
Toni Ventures, who calls himself a “solo rural lifestyle vlogger” from Arunachal Pradesh, has gathered 75.2k subscribers with his rough-hewn video tales of catching a giant eel after a month of trying, finding a rare wild fruit, hunting mountain crabs, or even building what he calls “a traditional pig hut”.
“I don’t go out of my way to do anything different. My vlogs represent how I grew up in a village surrounded by jungles,” Toni says during a Q&A with his subscribers.
The Mom’s Vlog, a channel featuring a mother of five from Nagaland, continues the trend of documenting ethnic lifestyles without pretence. With 60.2k subscribers, her everyday stories have an audience that finds its engaging enough to return every time she posts a new video.
Her most recent vlog details “how a village mother handles 5 kids”. The lady talks of being so tired of handling everything, yet having to drag herself to the kheti (farm) that she hasn’t tended to in days. It’s as if she’s having a conversation with herself. But the comments below suggest everyone is part of her journey. The power of projection.
In Meghalaya, Russian Marina-Kyntiew Kbani documents life and learnings with her Khasi husband and in-laws through the lens of a foreigner. The content varies from “Khasi mother scolded jobless son” to “1st time feeding pigs – Life in an Indian village”. Marina’s 164 videos have already fetched her 230k subscribers.
People in many parts of India may still be asking questions like “Can you see China from Kohima?” or “Is Assam hilly?”, but vloggers from the many-splendoured NorthEast are changing perceptions, one video at a time.
Alo K Kemp, aka The Roving Naga, seemingly eats anything that can be legitimately eaten. “Bohut tasty hota hain,” he says of a stag beetle in a recent YouTube vlog titled “Eating most expensive food in the world”.
Some frames later, he is chomping on a fried black specimen that some comments on the video would have us believe is worth Rs 75 lakh each. Alo never bothers to clarify. He is too busy making a mean chutney, complete with fiery bhut jolokia, of the remaining stag beetles he’s collected for the day.
The creepy-crawlies are, as he points out, a yummy accompaniment to his meal of rice, beef and bamboo shoot curry, cow brain wrapped in leaf and cooked in embers, and a slab of pork lard. On another occasion, he shows hornet stings all over his body before the camera pans to two platefuls of hornet larvae and giant wood worms that he relishes with rice.
Bear Grylls’s Man vs Wild may be more his aspirational identity than Bourdain, but Alo often evokes the unaffected philosophical spirit of one of the world’s most adored travellers with his approach to his travels through the jungles, hills and rivers of his native Nagaland.
“When I go to the jungle, I must be happy,” he says in an interview on a vlog called My Dad’s Office. “When I was young, my father would take me hunting and say, ‘You can eat these things, and you can’t eat those. Those learnings have stayed with me.”
While he goes about surviving on whatever’s available, Alo is conscious and respectful of his viewers’ sensibilities. He mentions that many people don’t eat beef for religious and other reasons, while being a Christian allows him to “eat everything”.
With over 1.2 lakh subscribers at last count, The Roving Naga is blazing a trail for vloggers from the region.
YouTube abounds with similar accounts of camping, hunting, cooking and eating in the back of beyond somewhere in the NorthEast. Some are in the genre of mukbang, an online fad with origins in South Korea that involves the vlog host digging into food of all kinds — and in large quantities — while staring into the camera from up close.
There are also silent, Japanese-style vlogs like Asha Cooks and Camp, which currently has 35k subscribers. Not for her the drama of survival in the wild or hunting for the weirdest things to eat as The Roving Naga does. Neither does she speak a word. Instead, what the viewer gets is a riveting audiovisual symphony of nature and its sounds as the young woman quietly goes about rustling up a rustic meal.
Sometimes, it’s fried grasshopper, pork curry and roasted maize. If the mood suits her, she would be a tad more adventurous with her choices, such as pork with snail and mushroom.
Toni Ventures, who calls himself a “solo rural lifestyle vlogger” from Arunachal Pradesh, has gathered 75.2k subscribers with his rough-hewn video tales of catching a giant eel after a month of trying, finding a rare wild fruit, hunting mountain crabs, or even building what he calls “a traditional pig hut”.
“I don’t go out of my way to do anything different. My vlogs represent how I grew up in a village surrounded by jungles,” Toni says during a Q&A with his subscribers.
The Mom’s Vlog, a channel featuring a mother of five from Nagaland, continues the trend of documenting ethnic lifestyles without pretence. With 60.2k subscribers, her everyday stories have an audience that finds its engaging enough to return every time she posts a new video.
Her most recent vlog details “how a village mother handles 5 kids”. The lady talks of being so tired of handling everything, yet having to drag herself to the kheti (farm) that she hasn’t tended to in days. It’s as if she’s having a conversation with herself. But the comments below suggest everyone is part of her journey. The power of projection.
In Meghalaya, Russian Marina-Kyntiew Kbani documents life and learnings with her Khasi husband and in-laws through the lens of a foreigner. The content varies from “Khasi mother scolded jobless son” to “1st time feeding pigs – Life in an Indian village”. Marina’s 164 videos have already fetched her 230k subscribers.
People in many parts of India may still be asking questions like “Can you see China from Kohima?” or “Is Assam hilly?”, but vloggers from the many-splendoured NorthEast are changing perceptions, one video at a time.
