An entrepreneur, author, athlete, stand-up comic, and more: the many acts of Anu Vaidyanathan

When Anu Vaidyanathan talks of her childhood, she reaches for an unusual metaphor: a patchwork quilt. 

Born in Delhi and raised in Bengaluru, Vaidyanathan grew up in a family that cut across regions, languages, and traditions. With relatives spread across the country, her childhood was shaped by constant exposure to different ways of living and thinking.

“It felt like a patchwork quilt of places, people, and cultures—never just one thread. Bengaluru was a wonderful city to grow up in,” she tells HerStory.

This image of different pieces stitched together into something whole and beautiful reflects Vaidyanathan’s journey as an electrical engineer, endurance athlete, author, PhD scholar, stand-up comic, and a mother.

At Purdue University in the US, she was one of five women in her graduating class of 150 engineers. 

“In Bengaluru, my greatest competitors were women; we were all trying to get into IITs. I never thought, “Oh my God, I don’t have other women.” I always thought, “I'm in a class, and that's it,” she recalls.

But at Purdue, the gender disparity was of another kind. "One of the guys couldn't get pregnant and drop out—it would have to be one of your girlfriends. That woke me up to the fact that I was on a very tilted stage, not on even ground by any measure."

Turning to sport for mental strength

Feeling constrained by engineering, Vaidyanathan turned to sport, taking up running and swimming to let off steam. Around the same time, she dropped out of her PhD programme, started her intellectual property consulting firm, PatNMarks, and later moved to New Zealand to complete her PhD.

While she got into sports to gain mental strength, it went on to break barriers, and she conquered new heights.

In 2009, she became the first Asian triathlete to conquer the Ultraman, a 10 km swim, a 420 km bike ride, an 84.4 km run, securing the sixth position in Ultraman Canada.

Her journey in sport led to her memoir Anywhere But Home: Adventure in Endurance, published in 2016—an intimate portrayal of a single woman navigating diverse challenges in India. 

It received critical acclaim and was longlisted for the Mumbai Film Festival’s word-to-screen market. 

Her transition to creative work—films and later, stand-up comedy- happened for much baser reasons, Vaidyanathan admits. Unable to afford a $9,000 triathlon bike, she made a documentary instead, hoping to sell it for enough to buy the equipment she needed.

"The way I came to creativity was slow, lateral," she reflects.

The path to comedy

Vaidyanathan’s path to comedy began with a comedy script and a simple plan. Keen to learn how to direct comedic actors, she enrolled at the legendary French clown school, École Philippe Gaulier. 

She arrived as an observer, “the passive-aggressive nerd in the corner taking notes,” hoping to absorb technique from the sidelines.

Gaulier, however, had other ideas. "He was like, who is this person? Why does she think it's good enough to take notes? And he basically just broke my back," she recalls. 

"He was like, no, you will perform every day's exercises. You will be in the centre of the circle. He really forced it out of me, that to be good at anything, you first have to be able to do it yourself. You can't just take notes."

The experience was transformative. Though she initially imagined a future in spoken word, after her first stand-up set, joking about family life in a London basement, her path to stand-up comedy became clear.

In 2022, still emerging from the pandemic, Vaidyanathan took her debut show BC: AD (Before Children, After Diapers) to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, though she admits she "had no idea what the Edinburgh Fringe was at that time." She only knew in retrospect that she'd been preparing for this moment since age 16, when she saw Tamil comedian SV Shekhar perform in Chennai.

By the fourth week of her run, she was selling out the 60-seat venue every day. The show connected across cultures in ways she hadn't anticipated. "Being a woman is a globally painful experience. Being a woman who is told you're not good enough is also a globally painful experience,” she notes.

After Fringe, the show toured internationally and marked its off-Broadway debut at the Kraine Theatre in New York. It earned praise from English actor and screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who described it as “super and funny.” 

Her latest work, a stand-up show called Allegory, explores what she calls "the tales we tell ourselves to survive." 

Her mother-in-law, from pre-partition India, looms large in the work. "She was a mathematician, one of the most brilliant minds I've ever met. But she was always in this cultural context that kept her from flying. The privileges we take for granted, they never could have,” she says.

Allegory examines how little has changed across generations. “She had to come and lay roots somewhere else. As immigrants, we are also laying roots somewhere else, but we feel much more sorry for ourselves. We need robotic vacuum cleaners. These women, I don't know how they managed, but they just did,” she adds.

Vaidyanathan presented Allegory at the Fringe last August as a work in progress. "I loved the joy it brought to my audience because I was only playing. All the buttons were off. I was under no pressure to say anything specific because I'm building the hour, and the Fringe—that's how it worked out for me,” she elaborates.

Allegory begins touring with previews in Cambridge this month, ending with a taping in the same city. She is also developing fiction scripts, one of which was curated at Sundance Feature Labs, another made it to the final round at Hubert Bals, and has just finished a feature documentary, awaiting sound and music completion. 

Vaidyanathan’s theatrical hour, Menagerie, drew critical attention with a review in The Scotsman, before evolving into a film, Dispatch. The project was selected for the 2025 National Film Development Corporation Producers Workshop, held in association with Netflix, placing it among a small cohort considered to be shaping the future of Indian independent cinema. Dispatch is slated for release in 2026.

Though she doesn’t look into the day-to-day running of her consultancy, PatNMarks still handles big clients. 

For Anu Vaidyanathan, life isn’t a circle to complete but a series of acts to explore, each one expanding her freedom to create, express, and choose.

(The story has been updated to correct typos.)