The YouTube Guru of Small Things

Meet Wilbur Sargunaraj, the man who showed the world how to use the Eastern toilet

Late in the morning of 1 December, at a postcard-perfect bayview restaurant in Mumbai, a young mother walked over to a man a few tables away. Her son’s a big fan of his, she said. Would he allow a picture? “Of course,” the tall man with a French beard beamed. Together, they walked over to a side of the patio and posed for the camera-phone. One could see that the kid looked more flustered than happy. His mother, on the other hand, looked delighted. It was difficult to say who the real fan was.

On seeing this, a woman having a brunch of Caesar salad with her husband at the table next to mine turned to me. “Who is he?” she asked curiously.

He was a man I had been following for almost three years, a man who has one of the most popular YouTube channels run by an Indian. The answer should have been on the tip of my tongue. But how does one condense the hysteria accumulated over years of online presence into a line or two?

“That is Wilbur Sargunaraj,” I said. “He is the man who teaches you how to do your business on an Indian toilet.” It was an honest answer, but I had to reassure her that I wasn’t joking.

My answer is perhaps not a unique introduction. And to field exactly such queries, he has made a helpful video titled, ‘Who is Wilbur Sargunaraj’.

“Is he just the toilet man who shows people how to use the Eastern latrine on YouTube?” the voiceover asks. The voice refers the internet surfer to one of the most popular videos Wilbur has made and starred in: ‘How to use an eastern latrine’. It features a 33-year-old Wilbur, his pants well up to his waist, entering a typical Indian potty and demonstrating the right way to squat, wash and clean. “We take some water, we take the left hand and then we pour,” he says with a deadpan expression.

Its success is evident in over 1.3 million views, not to mention the inspired spin-offs that describe the correct way to use European and Japanese toilets. Some of his other videos are titled, ‘How to tie the lungi’, ‘How to eat with the hands’, ‘How to light firecrackers in India’, ‘How to do the shaving Tamil Nadu style’ and ‘How to drive Aston Martin car in Oman’.

A native of Madurai, Wilbur, now 36, knows where his appeal lies. The only child of a couple working for an NGO for the elderly, Wilbur was schooled in several cities including Varanasi, Darjeeling and Kolkata before he settled in Madurai. It was back in 2007, during a stint in the hospitality industry, that he started releasing a series of videos that he clubs under the tagline, ‘Making the common extraordinary’. It’s a broad term and Wilbur has made a career of it. In his repertoire are tutorials that teach you how to ride a bullock cart, pluck a coconut and even carry a baby like Africans do (“The baby is folding!” as he puts it).

Then you have Wilbur’s music videos, ranging from the wacky to those bordering on the sublime, like an ode to ‘Chicken 65’ or his irreverent ‘Love Marriage’, each honoured with more than a million views on the internet. Auto-tune plays a considerable role in Wilbur’s success. As does coconut oil.

String all that together and you could find yourself at Artisans Centre, an intimate art gallery in south Mumbai, where I found myself catching the premiere of Simple Superstar on a November evening, a biopic that is part autobiography, part road-trip and part instructional-video. It was an eye-opener.

They say a camera always adds a few kilos. In our simple superstar’s case, it was the opposite—unlike the lanky man in his videos, I was face-to-face with someone well-built and broad-shouldered at the screening. Yes, the bushy moustache was still there. He was dressed in a white shirt, dark sunglasses and trousers ending in a pair of chappals. He had traded his black trousers for what he called ‘lungi-pants’, a pair of pyjamas with a texture typical of a lungi.

“Everyone was calling me a superstar,” Wilbur explained. “I wanted to do away with this notion. What is a star? A person who is different from a common person. So I said, call me a ‘superstar’, but realise that I am a simple person—and that simple is the new cool.”

Cinematically, the biopic is not something to write home about. Starring Wilbur Sargunaraj as himself, it’s a journey of a man who has built an identity for himself by reconnecting his roots and helping others in the process. Up to that point, be it his music or instructional videos, with Wilbur, what you saw was what you got. This movie, however, is a departure from his wafer-thin style of narration and attempts to pick on bullies and the pan-India obsession with fair skin, climaxing with a feel-good message of following your own dreams.

He is no Oprah, but the Wilbur package comes with helpful nuggets on life. My favourite is his spontaneous discourse in a video released last year that probes poverty. After trawling through slums and sewage canals, speaking to everyone from roadside shopkeepers to pavement dwellers, Wilbur lands at the house of a farmer in a small village. But this time, he is not interested in vox pop. “Many people are striving to be very very rich. Even poor people want to be rich. The rich want to be richer,” he begins, before the camera faces a couple of goats tied to a pillar, bleating merrily. “But in life, you should be content as these two goats. See how content they are. They are happy with their life, happy with their food, happy with their house right here. So be like a goat.”

It’s not easy to put a finger on why Sargunaraj attracts such a vast following with his thick accent, amateurish videos and lyrics that usually take a line and flog it throughout the song (the track Please Check My Blog repeats this plea 62 times over four minutes). But it doesn’t matter in Wilburville, where everything is ‘very very first class’, be it the lives of people living in slums or the Mediterranean cuisine he has had for breakfast.

In person, Wilbur is nothing like the buffoon one is led to picture by his antics on the web. His fortunes took to the sky when he decided to go online. Since then, he has accumulated over 29,400 followers on his Facebook page. He is, of course, a YouTube view millionaire. Outspoken and articulate, he underlines the mantra to his success lucidly: “I really don’t think too much.”

“Nothing gets shelved,” he says. “Something will just hit me and if I think I can do it, I will. If I look at a theme and go, ‘Oh, that’s funny’, I go ahead and do that. It’s all about having fun.”

This results in random flights of fancy leading his way. When he thinks of a concept, he sees it through. There is no script to his self-help videos, only the seed of an idea. That’s how he decided to make a video on how to tie a veshti (the Tamilian dhoti), a “tube-like structure”, in the middle of Times Square in New York. The idea of juxtaposing rural Indian life with hi-glam Western modernity was irresistible, and he flew to the Big Apple to execute it.

His tutorials are the products of one man flying solo. But who manages the camera? “Common people on the street shoot the videos. I randomly go up to them, put [the camera] in their hand and say, ‘Please shoot them.’ I don’t even have a tripod. My mother shot ‘How to eat with hands’. She had to hold the camera for six minutes.” Apart from being a one-take artist, Wilbur is an auteur of sorts—conceiving ideas, editing footage, composing music and posting videos, albeit minus a team of minions to get him his filter coffee shaken not stirred.

It would be misleading to say Wilbur makes a living of peddling Exotic India. He also uploads clips with instructions on how to navigate an aeroplane or negotiate some mean Michael Jackson moves. A cursory glance at his YouTube channel reveals people crowding his comments box with criticism for perpetuating Indian stereotypes. For Wilbur, however, it is about adapting to a new life without losing pride in one’s identity.

“It’s not like I have set out to take Tamil Nadu to the world,” he says, “My roots inspire me to write the songs I sing. In my childhood, I used to visit coconut plantations. There used to be lots of cobras there. That’s where I got the song Cobra Cobra from. Then one day I thought of making a video on climbing such trees to pick a coconut, so I did.”

Robert Stephens, a friend and the co-producer of Simple Superstar, is a Canadian architect who now lives in Mumbai. It took all of three hours for Stephens to decide that he wanted to fund the biopic. It was an investment without any hope of financial returns, he confesses. “Wilbur Sargunaraj is a nobody,” he says. And yet, Stephens dipped into his life savings to fund the entire post-production process. “Before I met him in person, all I knew of him was through his videos. I didn’t know the script of the movie. But I knew that this man had a message that can change a life, a confidence that is out of this world.”

It is a confidence that has taken Wilbur from his debut concert atop a truck in Madurai to packed auditoriums in Toronto. And throughout the journey, he has kept up his campaign to promote cultural intelligence. Years after he made his most famous video, it’s common for people to approach him and ask how to use an Indian-style latrine.

‘What if we are left handed, Wilbur?’ said a recent comment on his ‘How to eat with the hands’ page. Trick question. Wilbur has already said that it’s impolite to wash yourself with your right hand as that’s what you use to greet people. Pat came his reply, ‘Use the gloves ;)’, smiley wink well in place.

About The Author

Omkar Khandekar

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