Sonali Bhende has set many goals for herself—she wants to act, and become a top-notch make-up and mehendi artist. “But that can’t just happen on its own, you have to make it possible. And, so for now, I make reels,” says the 27-year-old from Kolhapur. Bhende is a semi-urban, regional influencer trying to use the Instagram algorithm to her advantage. It started off on the more massy and democratic TikTok, before she moved to the high-brow Instagram, when the Indian government shut down the former short format video hosting service in June 2020.  

Bhende, who has 37,000 followers on Instagram, is a Gujarati born in Mumbai. Her mother was a mehendi artist, while her father did odd jobs. She remembers accompanying her mother to Juhu Chowpatty and peddling mehendi stamps or printing blocks, dipped in henna, to foreigners. That’s how she learned to speak English, she says. “I have only studied till Class VIII. But when I used to meet these foreigners on the beach, I’d pick up words, or ask them to teach me sentences in English,” says the enterprising woman. Getting married and shifting to Kolhapur with her businessman husband, who makes garam masalas for a living, didn’t kill her creative spirit. “I have always loved acting and enjoy listening to music,” says Bhende, whose reels have her lip-syncing to English music, while she shows off her mehendi, and sarees draped in Gujarati style. Her plan is to keep doing what is working till she hits gold and gets an acting gig: “I have shot [a reel] for Netflix as well, but they haven’t released it yet. Sometimes people don’t believe that I have done that!”