Aastha Shah is a digital content creator who empowers people suffering from Vitiligo. Her content is aimed at making people comfortable in their own skin and it is admired by lakhs of people, especially youth, who struggle with body image problems. We invited Aastha for a frank conversation for our special series NewsX Influencer A-List. Below are the excerpts from the interview:
Our first question to Aastha was about how she started her journey in content creation, to which she replied, “Thank you for having me here, I would like to start by giving you an idea about my skin condition. I have Vitiligo which is a skin condition where the colour of the cells which give colour to your skin, melanocytes, stop functioning. So they start losing colour in patches that can either spread throughout your body or remain in certain parts of your body, so obviously, I have a long journey with Vitiligo but this year in March, I just thought of putting it out. I always wanted to inspire people but this year, I thought I’d just put out a video on social media and see how it actually does to inspire people.”
Aastha added, “I put up a video of my transformation, my old videos versus now, and that video hit 32 million views on Instagram. I think that’s where it all started. I got the confidence that there are people who are taking this in a good way and they may get inspired, so I should start creating content that is motivational.”
We asked Aastha how she manages to juggle a full-time job in finance and content creation, together. She replied, “I agree, both require an equal amount of effort but for me, content creation is a stress buster. I also love finance, being a financial analyst, but this is like a stress buster after working all day, I feel coming back to this, making content, ideating, being creative is a very big thing, so I like doing it and I like making content, so for right now, it’s like a stress buster, it’s a hobby and dancing has also been my hobby, so I make a lot of content even around dancing. So yeah, I love doing it. It is tough but I don’t think it’s impossible.”
Aastha then tells about how she thinks it’s important for content creators to be themselves, she gladly stated, “So, I believe that you need to be yourself in this. You need to create content which your audience consumes but you also need to be yourself, I do not think of it as a minus point but a plus point. Whatever your external appearance is, it should not matter what other people think. Just be yourself, put out whatever you want-art, creativity, anything. The audience who do not perceive it in a good way, will not follow you, and the audience who love it will follow you. So, in the end, you can put stuff that you like plus what your audience consumes.”
