: Taking Tuitions to Fund His Dreams, How Jitendra Kumar Went From IIT to Panchayat #IndiaNEWS #Famous Personalities The past decade has seen the emergence of a new breed of graduates from the prestigious

Taking Tuitions to Fund His Dreams, How Jitendra Kumar Went From IIT to Panchayat #IndiaNEWS #Famous Personalities
The past decade has seen the emergence of a new breed of graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). These are personalities who have given up their middle-class dollar dreams, fat paychecks from established multinational corporations and, possibly, a career in the civil services for creating their own niche in the professional world.
Whether its establishing their startups or pursuing a passion that is wildly divergent from the courses they pursued in college, these graduates usually dont have the safety net of a large family business to fall back on in the event they fail. What holds them together is their sheer force of passion, character and perseverance.
Jitendra Kumar, a 30-year-old actor from the small town of Khairthal in Alwar district, Rajasthan, is one such personality. Last month, the IIT-Kharagpur graduate won a Filmfare OTT award in the category of Best Actor Comedy Series (Male) for his performance in the Amazon Prime series Panchayat.
From viral comedy sketches on YouTube in the early 2010s to mainstream recognition today with lead roles in films like the Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), Jitendra has come a long way.
Nonetheless, his journey till this moment was everything but linear.
(Image courtesy Instagram/Jitendra Kumar)
A Passion For Acting
As a child growing up in Khairthal, he performed in the local Ramlila, which is otherwise known as the dramatic folk re-enactment of Lord Rama according to the ancient Hindu epic Ramayana. But it was during his time at IIT-Kharagpur when he started to take acting more seriously.
“While I was pursuing my B. Tech in civil engineering, I began actively participating in the college theatre scene. It was the first time I encountered a proper stage, lights, script and everything else. As part of the Hindi Dramatic Society, we did plays by Vijay Tendulkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Mahesh Dattani. A personal favourite was performing the role of the lead protagonist in Tendulkar saab’s Sakharam Binder. In my final year, I performed plays written by my college senior and dear friend Biswapati Sarkar,??? says Jitendra, speaking to The Better India.
After graduating in 2012, Jitendra didn’t have dreams of a career in acting. But sitting for campus placements wasn’t working out either. While Jitendra was struggling to find a job, his senior Biswapati Sarkar, whom he fondly calls ‘Biswa’, joined The Viral Fever (TVF) comedy collective as a writer. He would constantly tell Jitendra about the company, their work in making 5 to 10-minute comedy sketches on YouTube and encourage him to act in these videos as well.

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