‘The 50’: Mr Faisu recalls dark phase in his career after TikTok got banned in India; says, “We lost it all”

Reality show ‘The 50’ has been entertaining the audience with fun episodes, revelations, and much more. Mr Faisu, who’s one of the contestants this year, recently opened up about a dark phase in his career. He revealed how things changed in his life after TikTok got banned in India. Adnan Shaikh, who’s a good friend of Faisu, shared his take on it as well.


During a discussion, Shiny Doshi, Ridhima Pandit, Monalisa, and Rajat Dalal spoke about Mr Faisu’s popularity in India. She asked, “I once saw a video of Faisu stepping out of a car to lakhs of cheering fans, and I wondered, what does this guy do? Who is he?” and questioned Faisu about what his claim to fame was.




Faisu walked down memory lane and recalled his journey. He said, “Back then, even we didn’t fully understand what we were doing that made people go crazy for us. We started making videos on Dubsmash. People used to make 15-second videos there, but we started making one-minute-long content. We would compile those and put them on Facebook. We never knew these platforms would become so big. We posted a music video on YouTube and got 45 million views on it in six months.”


He further added, “Our thought process was very simple. We made sure that every third video that the audience saw should be ours. I have personally made 7,500 videos. Then TikTok got banned, and when that happened, we lost it all. A year before that, I had gotten banned on TikTok. I was number one in India. I was the third most-followed person in the world. My videos had 1 billion likes; no one had that in India. The moment my account got banned, we made my 20–22 million fans follow me on Instagram,” he continued.


Later, he said, “The company that we had signed up with supported us a lot. The CEO of that agency saw potential in us, and they invested in us for a year or two. We had to take up many classes on grooming – how to eat, how to sit, how to be a gentleman. They groomed us so much, and we could understand that it was making us better human beings. So we continued following that.”