Breaking Stereotypes Ft. Amtul Baweja

In this conversation I sit down with Amtul Baweja, a woman whose energy you can feel through the screen. If you know her from Instagram or from Patangir, the travel platform she runs with her husband Fahad, you already know she brings a certain fire. But behind the loud laughs and the animated sketches, there is a whole story about family, about being a woman in comedy, and about holding on to who you are when the world keeps handing you a box that doesn’t fit.

This is not a surface level chat. Amtul walks me through the early days of falling in love with theater, the complicated family dynamic that could have silenced her but didn’t, and the painful moments when her body became the topic of discussion on set. What emerges is a picture of a woman who has been quietly, persistently, breaking stereotypes her whole life, simply by refusing to dim her own light.

The call of the stage

Amtul’s love for performing started young. She traces it back to school, to auditions, to a dramatic society called Drama Line at LMDC. There is something she says that sticks with me: “I just love being on the stage, you know, just performing. I feel like there’s something that came naturally to me.” That natural pull carried her through years of theater, from backstage shadows to finally having her silhouette appear on stage. She laughs about it now, but that hunger was real.

Later, at LUMS, she got international exposure, traveling to Malaysia and Germany with her theater group. That was a turning point. It was also where she first tried improv comedy, and it did not go well. “I was horrible,” she says. “I was so bad, so awkward, so nervous.” As a trained actor used to scripts and characters, improv felt like a different world. But she kept at it, eventually finding a home with the all female improv group Cartoons, where she finally felt she could be herself without apology and talk about things that mattered.

The family that let her fly

This is the part of the story that surprises most people, and I want you to sit with it. Amtul comes from a conservative Delhi family. She says it plainly: “a lot of people don’t know but I am a Delhi wala and Delhi walas are known to be conservative.” Extended family members wore burqas, some even wore gloves. Growing up, she could not wear jeans and a shirt to her dadi’s house; her grandmother would make her change into shalwar kameez with a dupatta before she could even enter.

Yet, inside her own home, her dad was a different force. He carved sculptures, played the harmonium, sang with his kids, and read widely. More than that, he told her to travel, to call her guy friends over to the house because it was safe, to be who she was. When an aunt called from America about a red dress she wore during a summer at Stanford, her parents’ response was not to scold her but to protect her: they told her to block the family on social media if it would stop the talk. That distinction is everything. Many parents give in to family pressure; hers stood like a wall.

Amtul remembers a particular confrontation when a relative was upset she was traveling with a male colleague for a theater workshop in Kenya while her dad had just had a heart attack. She told her then, “Listen, this is what I do. I give financial literacy workshops to women and kids so they can be independent. I give entrepreneurship workshops so people can earn a livelihood. I love theater because that’s a way to express yourself. I’m going to teach kids theater and just because I have a male colleague doesn’t mean that what I’m doing is wrong.” That moment of clarity, that refusal to let one outdated idea erase everything else she was doing, is the backbone of who she is today.

She’s trying too hard: women in comedy online

When Amtul started making comedy videos, she walked into a minefield. She noticed a clear pattern: audiences laugh more easily at a man’s joke. A woman doing comedy makes people uncomfortable. They call her loud, cringey, “trying too hard.” She says, “I really observed like a comment section of male comedians… And I’ve seen that of course everybody has their own battles, but I feel like they’re more willing and open to laugh at their jokes and support them than us.”

Then there is the added layer of being a Pakistani Muslim woman. If an Indian creator wears a crop top, the comments cheer her on. If Amtul wears a normal sweater, some viewers tell her she is not decent enough. The conditioning runs deep: a decent woman is soft spoken, polite, covered, never sticking out her tongue, never too animated. Amtul’s whole presence is a rebellion against that tiny definition. And she is right, it is not about one comment. It is about slowly normalizing the truth that women come in many forms, loud and quiet, and all of them deserve to take up space.

That moment when your body becomes the problem

One of the rawest parts of our conversation comes when Amtul recounts a brand shoot that turned into a humiliating body shaming session. She was hired to create content for her own page, wearing her own night suit. The brand and agency were there to oversee. Suddenly, it wasn’t about the content anymore. She could hear them discussing her body: her boobs looked too big, her butt was showing, the clothes needed to be looser. She was just walking, wearing a regular loose night suit. Nothing was exposed. The problem was simply that she had curves.

She told them what she felt: “I know what the issue is, I know my curves are a problem because I’m really curvy. I have big hips and big boobs and a big ass and you don’t want to show that on camera. The next time get a skinny content creator who can fit in your type.” She was right there in the room, hearing every word, dealing with the additional weight of a family member being critically ill at the same time. It was such a stark reminder of how often a woman’s talent is judged only after her body passes an invisible, unfair test.

What she did afterwards is why this story matters. She spoke about it openly, and countless women wrote to say thank you. South Asian women’s bodies are often pear shaped, curvy, real. When brands reject that reality in the name of appealing to an audience, they are erasing the very women they claim to serve.

Just be who you are

At the core of everything Amtul stands for is a very simple idea, and she repeats it like a mantra: just be yourself. Not a polished, palatable version. Not the loud one just to shock. Not a watered down version for the family group. Whoever you naturally are, that is enough. “I think the biggest thing that I could do was just be yourself,” she says. “That’s the biggest thing that you can at least do in this world where we’re so quick to judge others.”

It is a message that lands differently when you hear where she comes from. She grew up stifled in extended family spaces, was told to cover up, to fit in, to be quiet. She chose to speak up. She chose to do comedy. She chose to create content with her husband where they tease each other, where she is older than him, where she is the one who first asked him to marry her. None of it fits the typical narrative, and exactly for that reason, it helps the women watching her feel a little less alone.

Why this conversation stays with me

I think so many of us carry a version of this struggle. The pressure to look a certain way, to sound a certain way, to keep parts of ourselves hidden so that relatives won’t talk. Amtul’s story is a reminder that you can come from a conservative background and still carve out a life that is fully yours. You can be loud and still be taken seriously. You can be curvy and still be a creator, an actress, a businesswoman. The people who matter will stand with you, and the rest, well, you can always block them, like her mom advised years ago.

This episode is for the girls who have been told they are too much or not enough. You are allowed to just be.