Operating with humour

BENGALURU:  Doctor, comedian, author, medical device innovator... This city-based ENT surgeon sure dons many hats. But balancing all these roles hasn’t always been an easy task for Dr Jagdish Chaturvedi. The hurdles he encountered while trying to balance his love for theatre, medicine and innovation have been captured in a humourous manner through a six-episode web series – Starting Troubles – which Chaturvedi conceptualised and acted in, besides Bollywood actors Renuka Sahane (from Hum Aapke Hain Koun fame), Parikshit Sahni (3 Idiots, PK) and Kurush Deboo (Munna Bhai MBBS).

Now, the series, which released in India earlier this year, has been picked up by Amazon Prime UK and USA too. “To be honest, it was not a high-quality production but an amateur effort to make something for the medical fraternity, where we represent them well by using accurate medical language and contexts,” says Chaturvedi, who works at Fortis Hospital, Bannerghatta Road. 

The medical comedy series was made in Rs 50 lakh, and can be accessed on HiiiH – Healthcare Innovation for Indian Healthcare. Due to budget constraints, the team came up with an ingenious narrative tool to put forth the story, which is based on Chaturvedi’s experiences from his MBBS days, as he managed theatre and entrepreneurship.

“Most web series make an episode alone in Rs 75 lakh or 1 crore and our entire budget was Rs 50 lakh. We used a mix of standup and narrative scenes, since the former don’t need much in terms of resources to shoot. The show has me performing a sketch where I take the audience through the story, and these parts are then played out through flashbacks for which we used full-fledged scenes and sets,” explains Chaturvedi.

The show, he adds, can now reach Indian doctors abroad through Amazon Prime UK. Though set in an Indian context, it is universal enough for every doctor. So much so, that medical students in Nigeria have also reached out to Chaturvedi about the show.

“We put out a short clip online and somehow, it happened to reach students in Nigeria, who found it relatable. The medical culture we show is something a doctor anywhere can relate to,” he explains.  Chaturvedi was into theatre long before he got into medicine. While he continued to pursue it alongside his MBBS, he eventually found it harder to continue it with full-time medical practice. “Standup was just picking up and it was something I could carry out on my own.

Theatre required group practice which was getting harder. I decided to go with standup since that also involves playing different characters sometimes,” says the doctor, whose eponymous YouTube channel has over 1 lakh subscribers. A comic awareness video on the coronavirus saw 1,62,000 views. But how does he manage comedy with a time consuming job in the medical field? Funnily enough, Bengaluru’s traffic has a role to play here.

“The distance between my home in Dairy Circle, and the hospital isn’t much but in traffic, it takes about 45 minutes. Being stuck in a jam leaves me in a good state of mind to attempt writing. Most jokes come from a pain point and the traffic leaves me frustrated enough to do this,” says Chaturvedi, who has various sketches on relationships, traffic, stories from work. Come January and Chaturvedi is hoping to start shooting for season 2 of Starting Troubles. “We have five seasons planned but were unable to do so because of the pandemic. Once things get better, we will resume.”