Lilly Livered

Numbers don’t lie. 11 million subscribers can’t be wrong, can they? Or 1.8 billion video views? In India this month, Canadian YouTube personality Lilly Singh—yes, that’s a legitimate occupation now; ready yourself in case your child wants to become one—did a series of shows to promote her first book, How to Be

a Bawse. With the cheapest tickets priced at Rs 1,500 and meet-and-greet tickets selling for Rs 8,500, the shows were packed with teenaged girls sporting their arturo caps back-to-front, unsuspecting parents in tow.

Her YouTube channel, ||Superwoman||, is best known for spoofs of how Indian parents deal with growing children, especially with teen girls of Indian/NRI/Punjabi extraction. Her impressions are particularly popular, and she makes up for her limited comedic material with her talent at voice modulation. Superwoman is now materialising out of her digital avatar. She has moved to Hollywood to break into films and TV. While she works that heroic path, she’s opened a sideline as a self-help guru and a motivational speaker as well. What wisdom does she offer? “Play Nintendo in your life”—when you play Nintendo, you can control only Mario, not any of the other variants. Then there are other quotes like “hustle harder”, “send the GPS deep”, “climb the ladder” and “schedule inspiration”. Until she makes it big—no doubt, many parents are praying her acting career takes off so that she has no time for YouTube—we have her gentle guiding hand for our young people. Capisce?