Calm, cool, classy and award-winning comedian Sindhu Vee comes to Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre this month with her latest show Sandhog.
It is said we chose our friends, but we are given our relatives, the exception being our spouse. Those ties are highly questionable at so many points once the bloom of new love is gone (sometime between 24 hours and 24 months after the wedding!).
Yet people stay married, and she is the generation fighting on two fronts being responsible for both children and aged parents! Stand by for some home truths on marriage, and the exhausting and complicated life of giving all generations the love you think they deserve. Peter Anderson caught up with Sindhu to find out about her, stand-up and her love for Oxford as she looks forward to an appearance at the North Wall Arts Centre.
Stand-up was not on Sindhu’s radar for a career choice, she worked in investment banking, had three children, a Danish husband, and a giant Labrador. Then it happened, as Sindhu explains “It hadn’t really entered my head. I have never seen stand up and then a friend persuaded me to go and listen to them at an “open-mike” night. I thought to myself, I think I could do that and so I did a course on stand-up comedy, and the rest is history.”
It seems though when it comes to inspirations there was a seed that was sown in her childhood in India “Looking back, when I younger and still living India in the 1970s, I was fixated on Carol Burnett, I loved the way she could be so silly. I checked recently with my mum and said Oh yes you were always watching that stupid lady”.
With her experience studying does Sindhu have a structured approach to writing her act. “There is certainly a structure in that when I get an idea, I will practice it at around five “open-mike” nights continually refining it. I don’t think I could allocate a time and certainly couldn’t work at a table in a café – I would just sit and eat cakes all the time!”
Sindhu is pleased to be appearing at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford was the first place in England she lived after she got a scholarship in India to study here. “Oxford has always been dear to my heart, since I first came to England and Oxford to study philosophy in 1992. I always felt it was the wider Oxford that welcomed me as well as my college and the university”