Look At The Amazing South Korean Influencers Inspiring Indians

When South Korean YouTuber Lee Jun-hak travelled to India in 2016 to pursue his university education, he fell in love with the Bengali language and culture.
While studying for a degree in Hindi, Lee watched Bangladeshi news channels to hone his speaking abilities and learned the fundamentals of Bengali grammar from friends who lived in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.
Since then, his experience has developed into an obsession, and in early 2021, he launched his Bengali-language YouTube channel, Bengali Lala. Since then, about 2,700 people have subscribed to Lee’s channel, which he manages from Seoul. With 278,000 followers, his Hindi-language channel, Korean Ka Lala, is also maintained by him.

The 26-year-old, who expressed his admiration for the Bengali detective series Feluda and the adventure series Kakababu, told This Week in Asia, “I love Bengal’s unique culture, and knowing the language is the best way to understand and experience the culture.”
“The cultural mindset, way of life, love of travel, and football are all very similar between Bengalis and South Koreans,” Lee remarked.

Enakshi Bhattacharjee, one of Lee’s admirers, comments on Lee’s Bengali Lala YouTube channel, expressing her amazement at hearing a non-Bengali speaker speak the language flawlessly.
Bengali, a language spoken by 234 million people globally, including those in Bangladesh and India, has drawn increased attention from South Koreans in recent years. This is especially the case for influencers who have gone viral on social media for speaking the language well.

Luna Yogini, a.k.a. Dasom, informs her 102,000 Instagram followers in Bengali about her travels and daily activities from Seoul. She talks about driving at night in Kolkata, dancing with tribal ladies in Santiniketan, West Bengal, and getting a new hairstyle.
In one video, Luna suggests an antiseptic lotion for cracked lips that is widely used by Bengalis in India. In another, she gets her mother to join her in singing a Bengali song that praises Kolkata, the city where 2.7 million Bengalis call home.

At the age of five, Luna moved to West Bengal to live with her mother, who wanted her to grow up in a cosmopolitan setting. The 35-year-old is currently residing in Seoul and establishing a yoga studio with her mother, a yoga trainer.
In one video, Luna says in Bengali that she has friends and family in India and that her passion for the country has grown as a result of her upbringing in West Bengal.
Prapti Bindu, one of her fans, compliments Luna’s Bengali proficiency, stating that the South Korean celebrity speaks the language more fluently than the majority of Bengalis.

Joseph Kim, who has lived in Bangladesh for almost 12 years, operates Koreanbhai, a YouTube channel with about 369,000 followers, situated in Dhaka. The channel has videos that Joseph Kim has posted on his experiences living in Bangladesh.
In one video, Kim claims that when he was studying economics at North South University in Bangladesh, he started learning Bengali in order to gain more knowledge about the culture of the nation.

Kim, who himself is an activist, businessman, and YouTuber, shares with his fans his goal of constructing a school for the nation’s poor kids. He has assisted neighbourhood schools in Khulna, Bangladesh, through work with a nonprofit organisation. In a video, Kim claims he feels like he is a part of a “big family” because of the Bangladeshi culture.

Kim loves Bangladesh “more than many of us,” according to Sheikh Ahmad Baki Billah, one of his adherents, and the government ought to grant him honorary citizenship. Tonmoy Chowdury, one of Kim’s other supporters, believes that Kim is a citizen of Bangladesh and wants her to stay there.
The 30-year-old Bangladeshi-American Sharanika Akter noticed that her Instagram account had gained more followers after she posted footage of her August wedding in New York, where she and her 33-year-old husband Sehee Kim participated in customary Bengali rituals.

In just three months, her following jumped from 5,000 to 30,000, and she currently has over 100,000 users on both TikTok and Instagram.
Videos showing the couple’s life in New York, including Kim learning to eat Bengali food with his hands, making chicken curry with Bengali spices, and enjoying Ramadan and Eid holidays, have been posted by the marketing manager at a US multinational. In other films, Akter is shown gaining additional knowledge about Korean culture from Kim.

In contrast, South Korea’s entertainment scene has become more well-known in Bangladesh and India in recent years, in part because of massive K-pop acts like Blackpink and BTS.
A year ago, a K-pop concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between South Korea and Bangladesh took place in Dhaka. The event featured performances by South Korean boy band Tan, girl group ICU, and taekwondo performance team Nolja. The members of Tan’s band won over Bangladeshis before the event by speaking briefly in Bengali in a video promoting their concert in Dhaka.

Additionally, South Koreans are becoming more interested in Bangladeshi history and the writings of Bengali authors like Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore.