Sanjay Thumma popularly known as Vah-Chef is an Indian chef and founder of the cooking website, vahrehvah.com. He is especially popular among the Indian expatriate comunities in mainland Europe, Australia and North America. He became known for his online recipe channel on YouTube, which he started in 2007, with over 100 million hits.
Early life
Thumma was born in Hyderabad. His interest in the kitchen began when he was just 7 years old. His mother would engage him in the kitchen so that he would not annoy his siblings. His first dishes were dosa and scrambled eggs. His desire to cook increased when his mother was bedridden with a temporary illness and he had to cook for himself. He eventually went on to get his diploma in Hotel Management from IHM Hyderabad. He is married to Ragini, who is also a chef, with whom he has a son.
Career
Thumma opened his first restaurant Sizzle India in Chicago in 1998. Over the next seven years, he had opened three more. He eventually sold his restaurants as he felt as a chef, he hardly got a chance to cook. In September 2007, he set up a studio in Chicago and started recording his first 150 recipes, which he posted on YouTube on his channel VahChef, soon becoming a sensation, and each video reaching over a million views. His channel went on to become viral and gain a large following among Indian communities all over the world. His channel also has crossed 200 million views with 369,000 subscribers and more than 1,500 videos. He adds 10 to 12 new videos each month and each rakes up thousands of views within hours. He moved back to India in 2008 with his family and launched his own website vahrehvah.com. In 2014, his channel had 1.45 million subscribers. As of August 2019, YouTube captions his channel as having 1.59 million subscribers.
Language
Most content is narrated in English, his Mother tongue is Telugu, he's also active in his Tamil and Hindi YouTube channels Thumma speaks in a rapid and fluent dialect of Indian English, which is pitch-forward in a higher frequency register than typical of English-speaking males outside of India, and with a completely different rhotic character than British or American English. Some viewers unfamiliar with the Indian English accent will struggle to understand Thumma without first becoming accustomed to this accent and its distinctive characteristics.
