Varun Grover (writer)
Varun Grover is an Indian lyricist, writer, stand-up comedian and filmmaker. He won the award for Best Lyricist at the 63rd National Film Awards in 2015. He co-created the political satire group Aisi Taisi Democracy, and his debut film, All India Rank, closed the 52nd Rotterdam International Film Festival, in 2023. Grover also performs stand-up comedy, writes poetry and acts.
Early life and education
Grover was born in Sundernagar, Himachal Pradesh, to a school-teacher mother and army engineer father, and belongs to a Punjabi Hindu family. His paternal grandfather originally lived in Faisalabad, a city in the Punjab Province of British India. After the partition of India, Faisalabad became a part of the West Punjab province of Pakistan, due to which he moved to Jagadhri in present-day Haryana, where he settled and eventually started a business of sign painting for shops. In the early 1950s, a cinema hall opened in Jagadhri wherein he went on to design posters for the hall. He instructed his two elder sons, Varun's uncles and his father's brothers, to also make such posters. This led the family to gain an interest in watching movies, many of which they watched at the same cinema hall, in which Varun's grandfather also took his father. Varun accredits this for his interest in films, as he "inherited the same addiction from father".Varun spent his initial years in Dehradun, Uttarakhand and Sundernagar, before moving to Lucknow for his adolescent years. He studied civil engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, graduating in 2003. He began his career as a software consultant with the multinational company Kanbay in Pune, where he worked for nearly a year. In 2004, Varun Grover moved to Mumbai to pursue his passion for writing. The following year, he secured an opportunity to script for the television series The Great Indian Comedy Show.
Music
In 2017, Varun Grover released Beete Dino Ke Geet, a song in collaboration with US-based producer Krishna Chetan.Books
- Paper Chor, Jugnoo Prakashan
- Biksu, Ektara India
- Karejwa, Bakarmaxindia