Natalia Gul Jilani, a dentist by day and stand-up comedian by night was recently under fire for poking Sindhis.
Soon after her video went viral all she received were death threats and hate speech, which she says was a first for her in the two years she’s been doing stand-up: “As a Sindhi, I’ve drawn on my experiences for skits often and I’ve never faced such backlash with any real audience. Even in the video, you can see people in the crowd were enjoying it,” shared Natalia.
Her comedy skit titled ‘Sindhi Encyclopedia‘ have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way; I take it some of them did not enjoy being stereotyped and called “hairy and horny”. Even Sanam Marvi, a Sindhi folk singer called her out on it:
Everyone hated it so much that it got to the point that she had to deactivate her Facebook, and make her instagram private. She did not imagined that she would be getting so much hate.
“I could’ve never imagined this sort of a reaction. I drew on my own life experiences, being a metric student, the fact that we love daal chawal, my landlord brother does own a chai dhabba, I mean some clichés are clichés for a reason” she added.
Later on when the video went viral, The Circus, an online entertainment channel that bought the content from Natalia and had posted the video issued an apology after taking it down:
“The clip was doing well and getting a lot of views when it initially went up from their [Circus] page. When I woke up the next day though, my phone was flooded with notifications. Someone had downloaded the video and posted it on some random page with a very crass caption, I think it actually said “Sunny Leone type” and that kind of incited a whole bandwagon of negative people.”
After all this, she went off social media and this all made her to disappear from the social media for a while now. This is the reason why our talented people couldn’t come out of their comfort zone just because of the fact that there are people ready to judge you and pass remarks on you. It definitely takes a alot of courage for a person to come forward and showcase what they are good at. To make people laugh is a hard job and Natalia being the first woman in Pakistan did that, but still there are people who just can’t appreciate the efforts of a person. If a guy does the same he is appreciated but when a woman follows the same she has to face all this negativity.
