Daughter of veteran journalist Vinod Dua and Padmavati Dua, a doctor, Mallika comes from a family that is as distant from the world of entertainment as the sun is from the earth. She never actively thought of being a comedian. It happened by chance. She used to perform on stage while in college and most of it used to be comedy. She feels comedy is more effective when done on stage in front of a live audience, “It’s more difficult to do a serious play and convince the audience. It can go really wrong and look very tacky but a bunch of us, who were studying abroad would meet every summer and put up these really funny plays. We would take plays from all over the world and adapt them and I would act in them. That is when comedy really started.”
After passing out of the Modern School, Barakhamba, she went to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to do her graduation in theatre performance. She says she never actually thought of taking up comedy as a full-fledged profession because the idea of a comedian in Bollywood movies meant playing stock characters day in and day out. “It was only after Russell Peters or Sasha Baron Cohen came that we realised that you can be a protagonist in your own right and still be funny and be in charge of what you are doing and not just support the main cast.”
She got tagged as a comedienne when the digital space opened big for performers and her skits on social media got noticed. She mentions her father has a great sense of humour that has rubbed off on both her sister Bakul and her. After graduating in 2012, she started working as a copywriter in 2013 and did it for three years. She was writing ad campaigns, jingles, spots and doing theatre side by side. “It’s only in 2016 when the first video came out that I started getting offers. So, I did another video with TVF (The Viral Fever) and somehow I started making videos on Instagram because I really enjoyed the filters.
It was like a bunch of us created the industry and grew along with it,” she comments. As an audience, we laugh and move on but for a comedian, comedy is serious business. Mallika reiterates the fact that comedy comes from tragedy. “Even as you’re watching the simple slipping on a banana thing, which is classic comedy, you are laughing at someone else’s tragedy,” she asserts. Being a freelancer can be quite stressful. On one hand, you’re waiting for the phone to ring and on the other, you can be shitting yourself silly under the work pressure. Jealousy or insecurity too kicks you hard sometimes in the gut when you feel your contemporaries are doing much better than you. “I think mental health can be a very delicate thing when you are bringing it out of yourself to be funny for the sake of others. I think there comes a time when you have to treat it with discipline and treat it like a job. I have learnt to make that distinction now,” says she.
She has appeared in films like Hindi Medium (2017), Namaste England (2018), Zero (2018) and now Indoo Ki Jawani has hit the screens. Indoo Ki Jawani happened to her after she met Monisha Advani and Madhu Bhojwani, of Emmay Entertainment. She’s all praise for the dynamic duo for making a space for themselves in the entertainment world in such a short time. “I find them very amazing, powerful and go-getting. They built an empire for themselves. When they called I knew it would be worth my while. When they narrated, I just kept laughing. What I loved about my character is that Sonal has her own personality and is not a sidekick. She is full of gyaan and sass.”
The other thing she liked about the film was that it showed a ‘sisterhood’ between her and Kiara Advani. Mallika says Bollywood has been showcasing brotherhood since ages and it’s time they gave sisterhood a chance. She and Kiara became pals on the sets. “My relation with Kiara was super chill just like Indoo’s and Sonal’s. We hit it off instantly and she is a very comfortable person to work with. We knew the equation we had and even though we were not Indoo and Sonal in real life, every line in the film kind of hit home,” she points out.
The year 2020 has been the annus horribilis thanks to the global coronavirus. Mallika reveals that one thing she has learnt in 2020 is to not plan. “I haven’t planned anything else and if something 2020 has taught us, it is to not attach yourself to plans and expectations. I’m glad that I got to spend the entire year with family even though it came at such a great cost to the planet.”
Her wishlist for 2021 includes the complete eradication of COVID-19. Also, she wants more and more companies to adopt a work-from-home routine for their employees. And she also wants the internet to be a kinder place. “I think in 2020 we saw that opportunism doesn’t escape anything. We saw vultures and opportunists preying on death, on protests. I think the internet and news media were at peak toxicity. I would like to see that change.” We can’t help but agree.
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