Ratta - Rathidu Senarathna

Rathidu Senarathna, known only by the pseudonym of Ratta (born 7 December 1987) is a Sri Lankan Youtuber, actor, director and social media personality. Rathidu became a big-name on the social media scene for his gifted knack of acting several roles including the role of Ratta, Ratta’s father, uncle and the majority of other roles which appear in a single comic video.

Early Life

Rathidu was born in Walisara Mahabage to Sri Lankan teacher parents (D.M. Senarathna and Anne Botheju) as the middle child being a younger brother to (Isuru Senarathna, brother) and an elder brother to (Sureka Senarathna, sister). He attended De Mazenod College Kandana from preschool to high school and left school in 2006 after taking advanced level in the commerce stream. Senarathna family has moved to Ja-Elain 2007. In 2008 Rathidu has toured to Italy yet one year later has returned to Sri Lanka with the intention of getting established in Sri Lanka.

Career

At the age of 22 Rathidu has started his cooperate career as a banking assistant in a Sri Lankan private bank and has left the job within less than six months. In 2016 he got qualified as a management accountant and at this point, he is a member of Chartered Institute of Management Accountants UK. Though Rathidu’s obsession for acting made him swap his profession as an accountant for a fulltime youtuber, his professional tendencies of working as an accountant previously still guides him in many ways. Rathidu elaborated: “My professional experience and knowledge always direct me towards the best in the new path I chose”. Before joining a BPO company as an account associate in March 2012, Rathidu had several job experiences. Subsequently, he started off ‘content creating’ on his own while posting them on Facebook as a hobby. In March 2016, his maiden video titled ‘mysterious chair’ notched around 10 000 views on Facebook and that has been the momentum for him to have a good deal of hope on his future twirling around acting and creating videos. This marked the ‘alpha’ of ‘Ratta’ on the social media setting. ‘Ratta’ the name Rathidu chose for his protagonist role in his stories and subsequently for his YouTube channel was his actual penname used by his colleagues. In 2017, Rathidu started over with ‘Ratta’, his YouTube channel descending from the name he made for himself on Facebook. By the middle of 2018, it was still on Facebook that his videos went viral and not on YouTube. Also, in 2018, Rathidu decided to give notice at his cooperate life (resigning from his post as assistant manager Finance at Allianz) and start his own business. Within this period, Rathidu missed out content creation work while giving prominence to business related work. But his business was completely taken aback by the sudden political turmoil in the country which has certainly been a blessing in disguise. After that the spare time he had was heartily spent for stuffing his YouTube channel with videos. On November 2018, Ratta’s ‘Mangala mudu maala walalu’ video created just with the thought that the ‘Vogue Jewelers’ advertisement theme song sung by Sonu Nigam couldn’t stop ringing in his ears, his video made the audience relate to themselves that by the time Ratta released his creation, almost the whole country had started having this song reverberating in their ears all the day. After this juncture, each video he posted started spreading like wildfire that the count of subscribers which was 35 000 on November 2018 accelerated to 100 000 by 1st of January 2019. After that Ratta decided to take the plunge in full-time social media and started creating sponsored content. The year 2019 adds 400 000 more subscribers to his YouTube channel. 2020 became a year of transition for Ratta with the launch of his own studio, ‘Studio Ratta (pvt) Ltd’. By the end of March 2020, Ratta surpassed 600 000 subscribers on his channel.

‘Ratta’ getting banned on YouTube

On October 2019, Ratta gets banned from YouTube and the Google services for uploading a fan reaction video which gets reported for breaching community guidelines under the ‘child abuse and exploitation’ category. This incident became a hot-button issue in Sri Lankan social media backdrop. Ratta created another channel and within five hours and his fans earned him 700 000 subscribers for his new channel buttressing the richness of what he has secured throughout the recent years: it’s not money but the hearts of the audience. Yet by the end of the same day, Ratta became capable of recovering his previous channel with the backing of Social media strategist, Sajeewa Dissanayake.

Mehewara

Ratta’s new YouTube channel has been earmarked for welfare work. Some of the community services done my Mehewara are, •Mehewara blood donation campaign – held at the National Blood Centre Colombo on 20th November 2019 This was the biggest blood donation campaign organized in a blood center in Sri Lanka.

•Haritha Mehewara – tree plantation campaign (planting 1000 000 trees) – this is an ongoing project. As the first phase, 6000 Mee and Kumbuk plants were distributed among the students of the renowned Biology teacher Mr. Thissa Jananayake. Through the second phase, Ratta aspires to plant 1000 000 trees countrywide.

Rattech

As his third YouTube channel, Ratta launched ‘Rattech’ which is a tech unboxing channel. Awards •In Raigam SoMe Awards 2019, Ratta procured two awards for the most famous YouTube channel and for the most famous short film (Asadarane).

References

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