Arunabh Kumar took the plunge and announced his engagement to his girlfriend Shruti Ranjan from 2013
Arunabh Kumar with Shruti Ranjan
It seems love in the time of Corona is a thing now. Arunabh Kumar, the founder of TVF, which produced the recently hit Web-Series "Panchayat" for Amazon Prime, took the plunge and announced his engagement to his longtime girlfriend Shruti Ranjan. Shruti, who is from Lucknow and Arunabh who is from Muzaffarpur, have been together with each other, despite ups and downs for over 7 years now.
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Arunabh Kumar had just started TVF, which was a garage office with a total of six people, when in the summer of 2013 he first met her. "This was the time when we used to shoot spoof videos in less than 1000 Rupees and because we could not afford actors, we used to go around requesting anyone to shoot for us. We were shooting one of our earlier videos called "Shit Engineers Say' in IIT B campus and needed a girl to shoot for one particular scene. Someone from team approached Shruti and she agreed", told Arunabh. That's how he ended up meeting her and NO they did not connect over love for acting. Shruti has no interest in acting and was pursuing her M.Sc. in Environment Science from IIT Bombay and Arunabh loved the subject and that's how they ended up breaking the ice. They started spending time together, talking about Environmental Science and meditation techniques. "I remember meeting him outside his office assuming, he would be running a proper company, but looking at the store-room type office with 4 Neel-Kamal chairs, I realized he was a struggling entrepreneur with no money, no work but only passion. I liked his ambitious nature and perseverance for doing things that he loves. He endlessly spoke of how he wanted to build and nurture great teams and in fact he only made me believe that I could drop out and pursue my passion as a career. " said Shruti Ranjan.
Arunabh and Shruti together in September 2013
In 2014, when she was doing her PHD in IIT Bombay, she got introduced to a DSLR camera at Arunabh's place and she got interested in it. She at times needed to shoot pictures related to environmental science for her project, and started clicking more. She started clicking simple headshots and in fact, her one of the first assignments was that of Arunabh's niece. "He told me that, I should first do homework and get to know about photography before jumping into it fulltime. He introduced me to Tracy, who was working with him at TVF and I started assisting her in projects involving photography." Shruti took a year to be familiar with photography and then joined a photography school for formal education. "Shruti's dad jokes with me and tells me, that you got out of IIT KGP and became a creator and now you have brainwashed my daughter to leave PHD and become a photographer," Arunabh told laughingly. "She started dating me, when I had no money, no work and no one knew me".
They have been living together in Mumbai for sometime and are planning the wedding sometime this year. "He has gone through a lot, I have seen him rise from being a nobody to getting awards and then barely spending a year trying to relish the just found success, when he was hit with the worst phase of his life", Shruti said.
Arunabh underwent therapy and depression for over 2 years leading to partial blindness in his right eye, a psychosomatic disease. He was so scared of going blind that he ended up realizing one of his childhood dreams of creating Comic Books, before he would lose more vision in his eye. He has been busy mentoring the team at TVF, so that the team sticks together, even though he himself was eating anti-depressants and taking therapy sessions to keep himself together. Speaking on the Corona Virus outbreak, he said," Its very unfortunate, but humanity can use this break to assess and reflect on what we were doing together and individually and then find what would make us truly happy and correct ourselves".
Arunabh Kumar hails from a small-town called Muzaffarpur, from Bihar, while Shruti is from Lucknow and their Jodi from UP & Bihar is very much like the jodi of the writer and director of Panchayat, Chandan Kumar and Deepak Mishra, who each hail from Bihar & UP, respectively. He has been a big fan of Raghuvir Yadav, since "Mullah Nasruddin" and waiting to meet him in person as soon as he can and celebrate its success together with entire team of TVF.
He founded TVF, India's 1stonline content company and he is known for pioneering the era of Viral Youtube videos and Web-Series in India. He also is the creator of India's highest rated show "TVF-Pitchers" in IMDB top 250 List. As he would say with his shows, here is wishing the lovely couple, all the wishes for the next 'Season' in their life.
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