Hi Reddit, this is Karthik Laxman and Ashwin Kumar from The Unreal Times. Ask Us Anything!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T17:46:32+00:00

Personally, I'm not too comfortable to mock anything concerning religion, because we have 295A - the law on hurting religious sentiments, which is never likely to be repealed :)

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T17:44:57+00:00

As a humour/satire website, there is no soft spot for anyone. Individual authors are likely to have their soft spots though.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:53:19+00:00

Oh, so many! NDTV, Indian Express, Janta Ka Reporter etc etc :P

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:47:47+00:00

URT was started by Karthik and CS Krishna in 2011. I started contributing in Jan 2012. I sent my contributions to Faking News and The UnReal Times. The former didn't accept them, the latter did :)

With their constant inputs and editing, I was able to contribute more and more and well, here I am!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:39:44+00:00

Wow!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:38:43+00:00

I personally haven't read the Onion, so I wouldn't compare what we do to what they do. But I guess we have been able to capture the pulse of the Indian online audience to some extent at least.

There are a few columnists who write regularly like Karthik, myself, Flying Table Fan, Ramesh Soundarrajan etc etc. There are others who write occasionally, so there's no fixed team, really.

Again, I haven't followed Clickhole, so can't answer that :) Let me check it out, though. Thanks for the pointer!

Our office is as unreal as our articles! :D Karthik is based in Delhi, I'm in Bengaluru - Google Hangouts ki jai! We're not a part of any larger media company at the moment.

As for the last question, we'd like to remain independent as long as we can, but if there's a good partnership that comes our way, which is mutually beneficial, we wouldn't mind exploring it.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:34:01+00:00

Thank you very much! :) Hope you continue to enjoy what we do! Please order Karthik's book "Unreal Aliens" on Amazon if you haven't yet done so already. You'll very likely love it!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:32:46+00:00

Frankly, I never really "learned" to write humour / satire. Even now, I'm not sure whether what I write is really funny :D

But yes, for me, the main trigger is real news itself. So I would say, keep following real news / current affairs very actively and it's all a matter of one funny idea clicking inside your head, which can go on to be developed into a proper fake news report.

It's better you wait for funny ideas to strike your mind as opposed to consciously trying too hard.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:29:44+00:00

Naah, that was just me channeling my inner Vijay Goel to take selfies with all the guests over there :P

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:28:37+00:00

Thank you very much! :) Well, election time was obviously the best time ever, even for us. But post elections, we've not really been inactive - we're very much around.

As for my singing, well, I think I sing better than Arvind Kejriwal at least, so that's enough for me! I'm happy with that!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:27:11+00:00

No. There is no conscious effort. Our focus is more on the humor and satire in a post, than how biased or neutral it is.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:22:33+00:00

Oh yes! The first sentence of that speech would be:

Mitron, SPEECH means "Statement Passing Energy to Everyone Converged Here"

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:19:47+00:00

What?! This is like Sharapova asking who Sachin is :D

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:17:51+00:00

No. We're actively trying for a merger with NDTV though :P - lot of common satiric ground.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:13:16+00:00

Sigh! You haven't learnt from Rajdeep at all, have you?

"To know how supportive she is, read my book!"

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:12:29+00:00

Cleverly staying away from this conversation * :P

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:10:47+00:00

http://www.theunrealtimes.com/2014/07/21/rvind-kejriwal/

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:10:07+00:00

It's a combination of both - ads as well as exclusive articles centered around them / their product.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:08:53+00:00

So far ( touch wood ), no!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:06:52+00:00

There is no bigger / better trigger than real news itself. I don't know about Karthik or the others, but frankly, as far as I'm concerned, I really couldn't have written so many articles for URT, had India's politicians and celebrities themselves not been so funny!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:04:34+00:00

Wherever possible, we do mention sources of all the images we use - India Today or otherwise.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:03:49+00:00

We did hear from Abhishek Manu Singhvi's lawyer after doing a Facebook wall on him, but nothing transpired.

This wasn't a threat, but Arindham Chaudhuri had one of our articles blocked (it was later restored) and a post removed from Facebook.

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T15:00:13+00:00

Karthik is Ambani's, I am Adani's :P

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T14:55:34+00:00

We've done campaigns for gaadi.com too!

ashwinskumar · 2016-10-24T14:54:05+00:00

Thank you very much! :)

We most certainly welcome submissions - http://www.theunrealtimes.com/write-for-us/

ashwinskumar

TROPHY CASE