Barkha Singh: Couldn’t relate to a bahu, so shifted to the web

After appearing in films Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002) and Samay: When Time Strikes (2003) as a child artiste, actor Barkha Singh forayed into television. Talking about why her TV stint was cut short, she tells us, “I was doing soaps where I played a proper bahu. But I was a 21-year-old girl straight out of college and I couldn’t relate to being a bahu at that time. That’s when I wanted to shift to the digital space.”

But she quickly adds, “I don’t want to look down on TV. I know that it has its own set of audience and the medium has been entertaining the Indian audience for so many years now.”

At a time when the web space was in its nascent stage, Singh decided to take a plunge and venture into the digital world. “The OTT giants hadn’t come into the picture then. The smaller Indian streaming platforms were releasing home-made videos. It took me about nine months to get my standing in that space because it was very different from TV. I was one of the first few people to get on the tide when it just took off,” she recalls.

However, this shift wasn’t easy for the 29-year-old. The actor, who went on to be a part of web shows like Engineering Girls and Please Find Attached, reveals that she was dissuaded from dabbling in the digital world.

“There was a prejudice against web content. When I would tell my casting directors that I want to do web content, they would be like kyun karna hai… bina matlab ke kissing scenes hota hai udhar. I related so much to the web content and I didn’t understand why other people of my age wouldn’t. And something in me told me that this would take off, and it did,” Singh ends.