Niranjan Mondal: The accidental storyteller

There is a moment during the conversation when Niranjan Mondal stops talking about content and starts talking about entertainment.

Until then, the creator better known as Laughtersane is discussing school, being bullied as a child, studying Chartered Accountancy and the unexpected journey that took him from making Facebook videos during the pandemic to becoming one of West Bengal's most recognisable digital creators. Then the conversation shifts to the future. He begins speaking about writing stories, directing, acting, and creating original intellectual property.

"I want to do everything," he says with a smile.

It is an ambitious statement, though not in the way creators usually define ambition today. Mondal isn't talking about follower milestones or algorithms. He is talking about storytelling.

That distinction explains why he occupies a unique space in India's creator economy. While many digital personalities build audiences around lifestyle or aspirational content, Mondal has built his around something remarkably ordinary—middle-class Bengali life. His videos revolve around neighbourhood aunties, family gatherings, household quirks and conversations that feel instantly familiar to anyone who has grown up in a Bengali home. The settings are deeply local, but the emotions travel far beyond Bengal.

Yet none of this was planned.

"I never imagined becoming a content creator," he says.

Growing up without a blueprint

Mondal describes his childhood as ordinary. There are no stories of performing on stage or dreaming of becoming an entertainer. Instead, he remembers being bullied at school, growing up in a small family, and spending time observing people rather than drawing attention to himself.

Looking back, he believes those years shaped the creator he would eventually become.

"I realised later that I had been collecting traits from people," he says.

Family gatherings became his first writing room. Surrounded by relatives across generations, he quietly absorbed mannerisms, conversations, and personalities that would later become the foundation of his sketches. Growing up around several women in his extended family, he says, also helped him understand female characters—something his audience often notices in his performances.

Like many middle-class Indian households, education remained the central focus at home. Mondal studied commerce and pursued Chartered Accountancy because it appeared to be the obvious career path. His mother, a nurse, valued education deeply, while his father ran a business. He even cleared the intermediate level of CA before realising that corporate life wasn't where he belonged.

"I realised a corporate life is not for me. I want peace in my life," he says.

His criticism isn't of education itself but of the pressure often attached to it. Having consistently ranked among the top students in school, he understands how academic success can quickly become an expectation. He believes education is important, but children should also have the freedom to pursue creative careers without feeling that they have failed conventional definitions of success.

Finding his voice during the pandemic

The turning point arrived during the pandemic.

Like thousands of aspiring creators, Mondal began experimenting with content on Facebook before Instagram Reels changed the creator landscape. Initially, he assumed that success meant creating videos in Hindi or English to reach a larger audience.

The strategy never felt natural.

His Hindi, he says, didn't feel fluent enough, while his English lacked the comfort and confidence he wanted. Eventually, he stopped chasing scale and returned to the language that felt instinctive—Bengali.

The decision transformed everything.

Rather than trying to create content for everyone, he began documenting the everyday realities he knew best: neighbourhood gossip, family expectations, awkward relatives, and the humour hidden inside ordinary middle-class life.

"The more rooted the stories became, the more people connected with them," he says.

His sketches may be unmistakably Bengali, but the emotions behind them are universal. Every family has its own version of the overbearing relative, the opinionated neighbour or the embarrassing social situation. By embracing those familiar moments instead of chasing trends, Mondal found a voice that audiences recognised as authentic.

What began as casual videos during lockdown gradually evolved into something much larger than a creator page. It became the beginning of a storytelling universe built around ordinary people and everyday life—proof that authenticity often travels farther than imitation.

From creator to entertainer

As Mondal's audience grew, so did the world he was creating. Among the many recurring personalities that populate the Laughtersane universe, none has become more recognisable than Meeta Aunty. Opinionated, dramatic, and endlessly entertaining, the character has evolved into much more than a recurring sketch.

For Mondal, Meeta Aunty represents something every creator now aspires to build—intellectual property.

Unlike viral videos that disappear with the next trend, recurring characters have the potential to live across formats, whether as web series, films, live performances or long-form entertainment. Mondal is already thinking along those lines. Discussions are underway around developing a show featuring the character as its host, reflecting a shift from creating content to building franchises.

That evolution mirrors a broader change within India's creator economy. The first generation of creators focussed on building audiences. The next generation is beginning to build entertainment brands.

Success has also transformed Laughtersane into a broader entertainment brand. What began as comedy sketches has evolved to span digital content, acting, and commercial partnerships. Mondal is now the brand ambassador for the men's collection of Anjali Jewellers, one of eastern India's prominent jewellery brands—an association that reflects his growing influence beyond social media and positions him as a contemporary face of modern Bengali style. Yet despite the commercial opportunities, he insists that creativity must continue to lead every decision.

He doesn't believe authenticity can be manufactured through strategy or content calendars. Instead, he sees it as something audiences recognise instinctively.

"I feel I'm like an open book to my audience," he says.

That philosophy shapes the way he approaches partnerships. If the humour feels honest, audiences accept branded content. If it doesn't, no amount of marketing can repair that relationship.

At the same time, Laughtersane is gradually becoming more structured. Mondal says the team is exploring multiple verticals, onboarding creators and expanding beyond a one-person operation. The ambition is to create an ecosystem rather than simply manage a social media page.

Today, Laughtersane operates with a lean team spanning content, production, brand partnerships and business operations. As the business has grown, so has the organisation around it, with employees across creative and operational functions. Nyx Talent & Entertainment oversees Mondal's business strategy, commercial partnerships and talent management.

The business has also evolved beyond creator monetisation. Revenue comes from brand collaborations, platform partnerships, digital content and appearances, making Laughtersane a sustainable business in its own right, says the team The company does not disclose its financials.

Mondal’s career has already begun extending beyond short-form comedy. In 2025, Mondal made his acting debut with the Hoichoi original series Birangana before taking on a darker, more layered role in the psychological thriller Mecho, signalling his ambition to explore narrative-driven storytelling beyond digital content.

"For me, I am always a creator first. Business comes after that," he says.

It is a refreshing perspective at a time when many creators increasingly describe themselves as entrepreneurs before artists.

Thinking beyond Bengal

One of the defining moments in Mondal's journey came with his debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

The invitation felt so improbable that he initially assumed the email was spam.

Only later did he realise it was genuine.

The Cannes debut marked a milestone not just for Mondal but for Bengal's creator ecosystem. As the first Bengali digital creator to walk the festival's red carpet, he showed that stories rooted in local culture can resonate on global platforms.

The experience fundamentally changed how he viewed regional storytelling. For years, creators working in regional languages often believed their audiences were naturally limited by language. Cannes challenged that assumption.

If stories rooted in Bengal can find recognition on a global stage, perhaps language isn't the real barrier.

Instead of making Bengali content less Bengali, Mondal now wants to make it more universally relatable. He has begun experimenting with visual narratives and situations that rely less on dialogue and more on emotions that audiences anywhere can understand.

The goal isn't necessarily to create English-language content.

It is to create stories that travel.

"We can achieve more," he says.

The next chapter

Ask Mondal where he sees himself over the next decade and social media barely dominates the answer.

Instead, he talks about acting, writing, directing, and building original entertainment properties. More recently, he has discovered that he enjoys writing stories just as much as performing them, opening up possibilities beyond short-form comedy.

Ultimately, he doesn't want to be confined to a single role.

"I would like to call myself an entertainer," he says.

That ambition perhaps captures what makes Niranjan Mondal one of the more interesting creators emerging from India's regional creator economy. He isn't trying to outgrow his roots or reinvent himself for a larger audience. Instead, he continues to draw inspiration from the same ordinary lives that shaped his earliest videos.

The difference is that today, millions are watching.

In an industry often driven by trends and algorithms, Mondal's greatest strength lies in his ability to find extraordinary stories inside ordinary moments. Family gatherings, neighbourhood gossip, middle-class anxieties, and familiar household conversations have become the building blocks of a creator universe that feels deeply personal yet widely relatable.

Perhaps that is why his content continues to resonate. It doesn't ask audiences to escape their everyday lives.

It simply reminds them that the funniest stories have been there all along.

And for Niranjan Mondal, the journey appears to be only beginning. What started as a pandemic experiment has grown into one of Bengal's most recognisable creator brands. His ambitions now extend well beyond social media—to acting, writing, directing, and building long-form entertainment.

If the first chapter of Laughtersane was about making people laugh, the next may well be about building stories that endure long after the algorithm moves on.