IT HAS been a decade since Sindhu Venkatanarayanan, popularly known as Sindhu Vee, debuted as a stand-up comedian.
She found her new true calling in her early 40s, after quitting a successful career in investment banking in 2012.
“I never intended to be a banker. I studied philosophy and wanted to be a professor,” Sindhu says.
But the risk of quitting a well-paid banking job paid off well. Today, she is one of the most sought-after comedians performing in the United Kingdom.
Interestingly, just like her banking career, Sindhu got into comedy by chance. “I got an email from someone who said she was doing stand-up and she was one of the least funny people I knew.”
She thought if they could do it, why couldn’t she? “My first performance was a heat in the Funny Women competition in 2012. I got offstage and never looked back. I was home. I cannot tell you how grateful I was.”
Onstage, Sindhu talked Danish to a girl from Greenland and told the story about her mother asking if she was a lesbian to a bunch of lesbians in the audience and went straight to the semi-final in 2014 Funny Women Awards. There has been no looking back since then.
Apart from the UK, Sindhu has also performed on stage in India and the United States. She has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year between 2013 and 2017.
Not only that, her debut series, Sindhustan, aired on Radio 4, she has also made television appearances on such shows as Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You? on BBC One, Richard Osman’s House of Games, and QIon BBC Two and Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled for Dave.
She has also been a part of Netflix’s popular British comedy-drama series Sex Education, where she impressed critics and audiences alike as Olivia’s mother. In 2021, Sindhu appeared in the BBC series Starstruck.
Sindhu will next be seen in Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of Matilda.
The comedian has numerous awards and accolades under her belt. She was nominated for the BBC New Comedy Award in 2016, was second in the 2017 Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year, and joined third in the 2017 NATYS: New Acts of the Year Show.
The daughter of a civil servant father and teacher mother, Sindhu was born on June 19, 1969, in Delhi. She grew up in Delhi, Lucknow, and the Philippines. But she was raised by her nanny who was from Nepal and would tie her to her back and do everything.
“I used to think she and I worked for these three people. I called her ‘amah,’ which means mother. My first language was Nepalese,” Sindhu says. Their relationship came to an end when Sindhu was four-and-a-half and her father was posted to the Philippines.
The comedian, who has studied at the University of Delhi, University of Oxford, University of Chicago, and McGill University, has travelled a lot and it helped her hone her comedic skills. “I have always been an outsider, but it is not a bad hing. All my peers who are comedians are the same: it gives you a better perspective,” she says.
Sindhu Vee currently lives in London with her Danish husband, a financier, and three young children.