“Vanakkam, Ungal Meenavan” these lines uttered by 33-year-old J Kingston from a coastal village of Tamil Nadu at the beginning of his videos has struck a chord with his viewers who are easily hooked to his YouTube channel that zoomed in on the world of a fisherman.
Kingston’s channel ‘Ungal Meenavan Mookkaiyur’ showed netizens how to catch fish and cook their catch while on boat, and also described the various aquatic creatures. His simple, non-flamboyant native way of explaining things earned him a fan base.
In a span of just three months of the launch of the channel, Kingston got three lakh subscribers and the videos got good viewership.
Ungal Meenavan’s YouTube channel is 1.48 million strong now. Over 1,000 videos have been uploaded till now and it keeps expanding as each day passes by.
So how did it all start?
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Kingston aka Ungal Meenavan says it all began with an ordinary smartphone where he started recording videos as a ‘timepass’.
“I am a simple fisherman, I still wonder if this is all a dream. I was born in a fishing hamlet called Mookkaiyur, which has about 300 families in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram district. I studied only up to class five and later started to go into the sea for fishing alongside my brother. I have an elder brother, a sister and a younger brother. My father used to sell fish and my brother Arockiyam taught me everything about fishing and the sea. We didn’t have a boat on our own, close to 15 years, my life was a simple fisherman’s life,” he said.
Kingston hailed from a village that hardly had any network connectivity. He came across an application called TikTok in 2018 and slowly started using it.
“We used to go fishing eight to ten kilometers deep inside the sea. Till we reach the point where we cast our fishing nets, we will be free. During one such occasion, I happened to scroll through TikTok and later got hooked onto it. I started doing duets and uploaded videos giving my voice to film dialogues. But I gained nothing as I did everything in my old, torn costume on a boat surrounded by water and no one liked it. But the turning point came when I caught a ‘chinna sura’ (small shark) one day. The song ‘Komban Sura’ from actor Dhanush’s Maryan was pretty famous at that time, and so I uploaded the video alongside that song and it became viral overnight,” he added.
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It was that video which made Kingston start thinking about the kind of content he needs to make to attract the audience and then he started making videos of the lifestyle of fishermen.
Kingston said as the videos of fish catch started getting popular, many of their followers started to ask them if they could ship them their catch.
“It is like showing the world what a fisherman’s day looks like. We started recording videos of how we operate the boat, catch fish and other marine creatures, and cook them on the boat. Each of those videos got a huge response as no one here was making that kind of content from the middle of the sea. All our followers on TikTok suggested that we should start a YouTube channel to make lengthy content. Uploading content on TikTok was a bit easy, said Kingston, who agreed that YouTube is a different ball game altogether. Hence he sought the help of his friends and family members to set up the channel.
Even though a few of Kingston’s family members are educated and used to watch YouTube, none of them knew how to create a channel and hence they didn’t know how to monetise them.
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As there was no proper signal or connectivity in their village, they had difficulty in getting their channel verified for monetisation as receiving any verification message or e-mail proved to be a bit tedious.
In a span of just three months of the launch of the channel, Kingston got three lakh subscribers and the videos got good viewership.
“After receiving help from other people, we started monetising our channel and uploaded content regularly. My friends and family are my pillars of strength. They encouraged me to focus on the content alone and told me they would take care of the work. Even though we started to take videos, it was difficult to edit them. We just record whatever happens on the boat, and upload them, said Kingston, who had to travel to a tea shop in Sayalgudi, which is a few kilometers away from our village, to upload the videos as his village does not have network coverage.
People of Sayalgudi used to look down upon him and his friends. “They think we are crazy as they have not seen someone doing this before. It will take close to three hours for one video to get uploaded, the connectivity was that bad. Sitting at the tea shop, sipping tea back to back, and waiting for the video to get uploaded was our daily routine,” he explained.
Team Ungal Meenavan
The journey of an entrepreneur
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Kingston said as the videos of fish catch started getting popular, many of their followers started to ask them if they could ship them their catch.
“Initially, we asked our followers to collect the fish directly from us. Later, we thought we could send ‘Karuvadu’ (dried fish) to those who approach us. Some of my relatives even left their full-time job and came here and started to courier ‘Karuvadu’ to our followers in many parts of the country. As the quality of our product stood out, there were so many orders,” Kingston said.
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But the business faced a setback soon after the Covid-induced lockdown was implemented in Tamil Nadu. “The courier services failed and people commented on our channel saying that they paid but haven’t received our product. They started saying that we were cheating them. It hurt us and we stopped accepting orders,” he said.
Even though the courier service came to a halt during the lockdown, Ungal Meenavan and his team continued to sell fish directly in their locality.
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Till now, Ungal Meenavan has 21 franchises in the state.
“A few of them approached us for bulk orders. Hence we received a good income. On one such occasion in 2020, a person from Tirupur came and said he would like to start a shop in the name of Ungal Meenavan and procure fish from us. He said we would be offered a certain share of the profit. We agreed to the offer as it gave us an opportunity to get a steady flow of income,” The shop turned out to be a thumping success. Two tonnes of fish got sold in the first two days and slowly the word got spread to other towns.
People from Erode, Coimbatore, and other neighbouring areas approached Kingston. This opened up the idea of starting a franchise and Kingston and friends soon signed agreements with new partners and started selling fish to them.
Till now, Ungal Meenavan has 21 franchises in the state. Starting a franchise was not an easy task for the team. Initially they had to shift the fish to the franchise using their own transport. They had other challenges waiting at the harbour.
“For example, for reaching a shop in Tirupur which is around 300 kilometers from our place, we used to hire a second-hand Tata Ace truck. Others in the harbour did not give us space to park our vehicles so we used to park our vehicles at a distance, but now we have six new vehicles on our own,” he said.
Future plans: Masala for cooking fish and seafood, a chain of seafood restaurants
Kingston said, they have set up their own company ‘Ungal Meenavan Pvt Ltd’. They are planning to open their own outlets over the franchise model as they believe they can provide a quality product at a much lower cost.
“We will start this initiative at Namakkal soon. For Deepavali, we are going to launch our masala used for cooking fish and seafood items. We have sought a proper license for producing those products, and we are taking measures to brand them effectively. Our long-term plan is to open a chain of seafood restaurants across the state,” Kingston added.
Kingston says he didn’t plan for these things and just made good use of the opportunities that were before him.
“It’s a team effort. We are a team of eight members. Through our own money, we brought WiFi connection to our village. We were informed it would cost at least a lakh as it includes setting up cables and they need a minimum number of people to use that connection, but we wanted the connection to our village and we paid the entire price. Now, at least 40 to 50 houses have WiFi connections in our village and all this happened in a span of 1-1.5 years,” he added.
From an ordinary fisherman, Kingston has become a popular figure and he is invited to many functions in his town as a guest.
When asked about many other YouTube channels on cyber sea adventures and also the risks they are facing because of some of the recent incidents of a popular YouTube creator being caught for smuggling, Kingston said, “Yes, many of them are doing some amazing content using modern gadgets and honestly, they are getting better views than us. But I believe they are more focused on how to get more views and generate more money. What we did was to showcase our lifestyle which I feel is missing in some of these channels.”
Kingston and his team said that they are happy to have started the YouTube initiative and are moving towards another phase of life.
“When one of the content creators got caught for smuggling, it had an impact on our videos as well. People started to generalise. They said all fishermen are like that. But we didn’t turn off our comments and later they realised not all make such mistakes,” he said.
Kingston has received several accolades and is now popular among the student community as well. He was recently invited as a guest speaker to PSG College in Coimbatore on World Maritime Day and spoke to students about the lifestyle of fishermen, the difficulties they face, and also his views on the marine ecosystem.
From an ordinary fisherman, Kingston has become a popular figure and he is invited to many functions in his town as a guest. “I have gained respect in my town now and I am happy about it. My wife and my two daughters are very proud of me. I am glad when people say I inspire them to grow in life. I know how people looked down upon me,” he said.
The coastal village of Mookkaiyur, with conservative beliefs, also grew in popularity along with Kingston. “Earlier, when people say they are from Mookkaiyur, others hardly recognised it but now everyone relates the place with Ungal Meenavan and I am very happy about it,” he said.
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Exploits of Kingston: From a TN fisherman to YouTuber to an entrepreneur - The Indian Express
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