Born in Calcutta and based out of Bangalore, Oninthough is a stand-up comedian, a poet and author, and an artist. That’s besides his day job of heading the Marketing function for India, for a global IT firm.
An award winning author, Oninthough is one of the few trilingual (English, Hindi and Bengali) poets in the country, and has penned more than 500 poems. He is also an award-winning stand-up comedian, infamous for his humor jabs often with political overtones and religious undertones. He’s performed stand-up comedy for audiences across 20+ cities, 7 countries and 3 continents. He’s also an artist who’s worked on 50+ commissioned works of art, and has been featured for the niche he’s created for himself, in portraits and stippling art.
His latest venture is his debut novel – “Ticking Thirty: Premature Midlife Crisis Or Delayed Identity Crisis?” that questions and demystifies the unnecessary hype around the peer and societal pressure of turning thirty in India. A comedic disaster in terms of content, it was published in April 2022, and has already bagged four prestigious awards, including the “Ukiyoto Literary Awards: Top 30 Books (Fiction) To Look Out for in 2022”.
More About the Book: Turning thirty is just about turning thirty. Possibly everywhere. Everywhere but India. As a kid growing up, there’s a lot of dreams that are embedded deep inside you, thanks to the hilariously dysfunctional combination of peer pressure, societal expectations and parental advisory. In India and India alone, you can be too young to date at twenty-three but old enough to file for IT returns. But, nothing, and absolutely nothing beats the exaggerating amounts of hopes and dreams that revolve around the idea of turning thirty. It’s this one stop solution to every problem your life’s ever had, up until now: from broken relationships to thinning hairlines to near-empty bank accounts, turning thirty is about all of this magically transforming into something, just something, something that no parent quite clearly ever tells you about. And that precisely is the Catch 22. This novel is an attempt to narrate the journey of someone caught at a similar crossroad, and how turning thirty did in fact transform life: for better or for worse, is up to you, or just your perception (if one was being utterly poetic!).