Odia digital creator
Biswa Kalyan Rath
About Biswa Kalyan Rath
Biswa Kalyan Rath (born 27 December 1989) is an Indian stand-up comedian, writer and YouTuber from Rourkela, Odisha. He first became widely known through the YouTube series Pretentious Movie Reviews, made with Kanan Gill. He later created and wrote the Amazon Prime Video series Laakhon Mein Ek and released stand-up specials including Biswa Mast Aadmi, Sushi and Mood Kharaab.
Early life and education
Rath was born in Rourkela, Odisha, on 27 December 1989. He studied biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and graduated in 2012. After graduating he worked at the mobile-security start-up BitzerMobile and then at Oracle. Orissa POST describes his role at the company, later acquired by Oracle, as graphic designer.
Online career
Rath met Kanan Gill at an open-mic night in Bengaluru in 2013. The two performed part-time while Rath kept his job. In 2014 he left his job to do comedy full-time, and he and Gill gave their first live show together in Gurgaon. Between 2014 and 2015 they made Pretentious Movie Reviews on YouTube, a series that mocked badly reviewed Bollywood films. They chose those films because they were deeply rooted in Indian popular culture. Rath's own YouTube channel has been active since 2015.
Stand-up comedy
Rath began touring as a solo stand-up in 2015, starting with the show Biswa In Your Face in September of that year, and later toured with Biswa Mast Aadmi. In 2015 he also hosted Comedy Hunt alongside AIB and others. His specials Biswa Mast Aadmi (2017) and Mood Kharaab (2023) were released on Amazon Prime Video, and Sushi came out in 2019. In December 2020 he launched an online stand-up course, Learn Comedy on FrontRow with Biswa.
In a 2025 interview with Orissa POST, Rath said streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime had helped India's stand-up industry grow by giving comedians a way to earn a living from recorded specials. He also said he was working on a new special.
Television and web series
Rath created and wrote Laakhon Mein Ek, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video in October 2017. Vaspar Dandiwala, Abhishek Sengupta, Hussain Haidry and Karan Agarwal co-wrote it, and Wikipedia lists the series as running from 2017 to 2019. He was a judge on the competition show Comicstaan in 2018–19 and appeared on Improv All Stars: Game Night (2018). His other appearances include Going Viral Pvt. Ltd. (2017), a guest role in Afsos (2020), the Netflix documentary series Alma Matters: Inside the IIT Dream (2021) as himself, and the role of Brajesh Gupta in the Amazon miniTV series Hum Do Teen Chaar (2023).
Films
Rath made his film debut in 2016 with a cameo as Ilash in the Netflix film Brahman Naman.
Personal life
Rath married the actress Sulagna Panigrahi on 9 December 2020.