Abhiraj & Niyati, Travel influencers, who are are popularly known as Abhi & Niyu on Instagram with over 2 million followers, recently joined NewsX as part of its special series NewsX Influencer A-List. In the exclusive conversation, they spoke to us about their journey together as influencers, inspiration behind their series and much more.
They commenced by telling the audience about their journey from being college sweethearts to getting married and then together take up a career in influencing. “More than 10 years ago, we met in college as friends. We were together in college events and that’s when we realized that we both have feelings for each other. We dated for a long time before we married in 2018. Now, we are partners in all our ventures of life,” Abhi said.
Commenting on difficulties of being married couple working together as influencers, Niyati said, “So far not really, because we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We have been together for so long. We respect and leave some decisions on each other. We don’t try to trample in each other’s fields. Of course, we have creative disagreements but then they get resolved. It’s not too much about ego over here but to put out good content.”Abhi added “We are a team, whatever comes across if it’s good then it doesn’t matter whose idea it was. What matters is producing good products.”
When asked about how they navigate when people question their content and how do they pick content, Niyati responded, “Being online and creating content means that you have to deal with whataboutism. Our ultimate goal is to put out positive solution-oriented content, which can bring in some kind of impact. This influences our selection of topics as well. Due to pandemic, we are unable to continue series on ‘100 Reasons To Love India’ as travel is restricted. So, we have started creating content on famous Indian personalities. We feel the responsibility as a lot of people, especially kids, are following us. This automatically makes us very careful of what we are putting out. The direction is we want everyone to be critical thinkers, discover more about India and question things.”
Talking about the idea of series “100 reasons to love India” and how does it helps, Abhiraj spoke, “The idea came in 2019 because of lot of negativity regarding our country on internet. When foreigners come to India, they are excited about it but people of our country do not know good things happening around us. With an aim to make India one percent better, we thought to bring up this series in entertaining way. All of us want to see something solution-oriented on internet. By this, we give people the hope to make their neighbourhood one percent better. In return, we are making our neighbourhood one percent better. In return, we also make our country one percent better. We don’t need to make whole world a better place. We just need to light a dark corner of our house.”
Niyati added “People in other countries show pride in their culture and document it well but that is somewhere lacking in India. Kids are exposed to so much negativity online that it they think nothing good is there. But that’s not correct. A lot of people are doing good work; we learn life lessons in our history and of our rich culture.”
Niyati concluded the session by sharing how they have moved from doubts to meaningful content in their journey as influencers. She said, “It was hard to convince because nobody had done it before. We also didn’t have road map of it. We were also so not sure about what to do. But as we started are close family and friends appreciated it then we knew what we were doing. That is why I love India.”