Laughing your way out of depression

Ludhiana: Gurdatar Ryait (23), a city stand-up comedian, is cracking jokes to raise suicide awareness. He is also making people laugh so that they can’t fight depression. He along with his team is running a campaign titled, ‘Just laugh and say no to suicide’, in the city.

Gurdatar performs under the stage name ‘GD Ryait’. A B.Tech computer science student, Gurdatar has witnessed a number of suicide incidents among students in various colleges. Those incidents have left an indelible mark on his mind and he decided to do something through which he can raise suicide awareness. He decided to entertain people, especially students so that he can tell them the how beautiful life is.

Gurdatar has shared the stage with some famous stand-up comedians such as Kenny Sebastian and Kanan Gill recently. They, too, have applauded this city stand-up comedian’s initiative and how he uses comedy to tackle such a serious issue

While talking to TOI about his initiative, Gurdatar said, “I have witnessed a couple of suicide incidents. Those incidents have disturbed my mind. I fail to understand why the students end up committing suicide. I wanted to do something to make the students understand that studies are important but your life, too, is precious. I decided to do stand-up comedy for the cause of suicide awareness. The open mic events help me to speak to the people and also give them a chance to speak their heart out.”

Talking about his campaign, he said, “In our campaign, we write content on the importance of family in life. We weave content in such a way that we can talk to the audience about their problems and how our jokes can bring a relief in their lives. We also develop content on the importance of education. We also encourage the audience to speak their heart out.”

Gurdatar said they have a small team but they have big dreams. “Kumar Saurabh (23) organises the open mic events and Harnoor Singh (25) is the editor. We have planned to organise new shows in various schools of the city to make the students laugh and show them the happy side of life too.”

Gurdatar takes pride when he said that his team was the first to introduce the concept of stand-up comedy in the city. “We were the first to introduce open mic for stand-up comedy here. The money collected through the tickets goes to various NGOs.”


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