Recognised for creating Culture Based Content, Giulia Raffaello Jain, popularly known as @namastejuli on Instagram, joined NewsX for a candid chat as part of NewsX Influencer A-List. In the exclusive interview, Giulia opened up about her journey so far, the kind of content she creates on the Internet and much more.
Speaking about her journey so far and the kind of content she creates, Giulia said, “I started this journey of content creation roughly 3 years ago. It was because I was doing my full time job in HR but I really needed to find a way to express myself. I was always drawn by performing arts and I was taking some acting classes. I was trying to find a creative outlet for myself. My now husband Shrey was actually the one telling me, ‘you should start being in front of the camera because of your personality, because of your energy’ and that’s how we started. Since the beginning, we decided that there was a specific topic we wanted to talk about and that was our intercultural relationship. I am from Italy originally. We both live in Germany in Berlin. Shrey is from India, so there have been a lot of different hiccups or things we could have taken for granted in our relationship from two people from the same cultures but we didn’t. We decided to share it with the world in a really funny way so we started with comedy and sketches. We started with sketches that were literally the jokes that we will make with our friends because both Shrey and I are really funny. We make a lot of jokes with our friends so we basically translated that into our first sketch and we started from there creating content. It started picking up quite soon and it became viral. Even the first video got a lot of traction.”
Talking about the growing interest among audiences to watch an Intercultural couple and follow their journey, she added, “There is a lot of need and attention around how do you balance two cultures together, two people that come from two different continents in our case. A lot of people that have reached out to us since the beginning telling us we are also an intercultural couple and we are inspired by you, by the way you really respect each other’s cultures and from there we started. Eventually we brought the topics less on comedy. We still have done some sketches until some months ago and we decided to bring our audience along with our story, with our travel, us meeting our family and trying each other’s food and that’s where we are right now.”
Sharing her opinion on the lack of portrayal of inter-cultural couples in mainstream media, Giulia said, “Definitely there is a need because even for myself, when I started meeting Shrey and started dating him, I was trying to think of people that I know, even among my friends or in my family circle that were in an inter-cultural relationship and already back then, I didn’t have any. I’m the first one in my family and my friends’ circle. From there, I started looking at Bollywood couples or couples that are more well known and they were missing. They were not there. It’s of course really difficult for a couple that is in an inter-cultural relationship to find role models or to find people they can be inspired or look up to, ask questions because you can’t operate an inter-cultural relationship the same way you would operate a normal relationship, i.e a relationship of two from the same culture. There are things that maybe not in the same culture or relationship, you would take for granted. Wherein, in inter-cultural relationship, you really have to talk about everything because you don’t know what the other person has gone through, how the person has grown up, what were the values, what are the things that they might offend them and you don’t know because there is a lot to be uncovered at the beginning and still in the process. There is a need to see successful and happy inter-cultural marriages and relationships. There are more right now. When we started, there were just a few on YouTube and now there are lots of them. I am happy to say that a lot of them started because they got inspired by us. They also wrote to us and they keep on contacting us and we are really happy about it because there is definitely a need to talk about it and to uncover some of the stereotypes and to uncover some of the issues that might come along.”
Check out the entire interview on NewsX YouTube:
