Championing reunions - how one creator in APAC helped nearly 350 estranged families reconnect
Dec 12, 2023 – minute read
In the last three years, Apan Thikana has produced more than 400 episodes and helped reunite nearly 350 families.
With billions of monthly logged-in users and hours of videos generating billions of views, YouTube helps creators connect with their viewers across over 100 countries around the world across 80 languages. In Bangladesh, Kebria Sharkar saw the opportunity to utilize YouTube to give back to his community.
During the pandemic, Kebria started the Apan Thikana channel, based on his “Lost and Found” radio program he previously hosted. With its own unique charm, Apan Thikana features raw and unedited stories of individuals who have lost their families during their childhood. The heartwarming and emotional videos generated popularity amongst viewers in Bangladesh, and is now a household name and a go-to place for anyone interested in reconnecting with long lost family members.
In the last three years, Apan Thikana has produced more than 400 episodes and helped reunite nearly 350 families but Kebria’s mission does not end here. Find out more about Kebria’s journey and how he found success.
What was your driving force behind Apan Thikana and how did you come up with the idea to center your content around reuniting long lost family members?
I was publishing content on my own YouTube channel “Kebria RJ” and in my videos, I often ask people to share their life stories. During one of these interviews, one of my guests shared that he had lost his family in his childhood. When that interview was posted on my YouTube channel, we succeeded in identifying the lost family and they were reunited after almost two decades. That was our first success and our idea of creating a channel to reunite families was born.
We saw the need to create an independent channel in order to amplify the noble work that we wanted to achieve and we worked on this program with full force while everyone was quarantined in 2020 due to the pandemic. With an independent YouTube channel, Apan Thikana has managed to locate and reconnect 350 families who were separated due to various reasons.
Your channel has a very interesting and heartwarming concept of helping reunite families. How does your channel help to reunite families?
Apan Thikana channel invites those who have been separated from their biological families to tell their story. We work with those who were separated from their family at an early age - a certain age when someone can remember some partial or incomplete information such as their father’s name, mother’s name or any particular name of a place from their memory. Through that information, we can help them locate their family members.
“ We get to experience the real human emotions through Apan Thikana. Sometimes, what we expect doesn’t happen. And sometimes, things happen beyond our expectations.”
What happens when you have located someone and what does the process look like to connect the family members?
We produce videos with the information they provide us, such as childhood memories. We publish these videos on our YouTube channel and our viewers who watch these videos can identify them and leave comments for our team.
We have a very strong team working together in Bangladesh, as well as in other countries. They work on posting these videos on many channels, collecting information from our national information center and so on. When we successfully locate their family through the data we have collected, our team members contact them and invite them to our office.
What is the most rewarding part of running your YouTube channel?
The most interesting and rewarding part comes after creating these videos, and publishing information about the lost family members on our YouTube channel. When we invite the families to our office, we can feel their excitement, even during the phone conversations! They want to visit our office right away to reunite with their missing child and we can understand how they feel.
It is equally exciting for us. It is difficult to express the feeling of a mother who is almost 100 years of age, and her lost child who is 50 or 60 years of age now, separated for 40 to 50 years, now finally reunited! It is very difficult to portray the expression of a mother or the family who have gone through this experience.
Your videos are kept pretty simple in terms of filming and editing, yet you have amassed such a huge amount of followers. What do you think drives the success of your videos and what do your subscribers usually look forward to in your videos?
Apan Thikana creates very simple videos because we work with families with humble backgrounds from underprivileged parts of the countries who grew up in critical conditions after getting lost in their childhood. We feel that heavily equipped studios or heavy light settings create a formal setting that can be unsettling for people who are not used to them.
We also want to create videos that showcase their raw, real and unfiltered emotions that reflect their life and lifestyle as closely as possible. We try to illustrate the simplicity of life through our lenses and keep everything from color correction, to editing to the music editing as simple as we can. We want to focus more on ensuring a comfortable environment for our guests so that they can express themselves naturally when they meet their long lost family members for the first time.
Our viewers are excited to see the first expressions of the family members and how they behave when they meet for the first time. Most of our returning viewers tend to watch the update videos that come after the introductory ones to see the outcome. Say, a child was lost during his childhood and his parents were finally found and reunited. Our viewers tend to enjoy those moments of joy. The most crucial segment for us is the intensity of emotions, when parents recognise their child during their reuniting. We capture and present that moment in its most authentic form and this is the key appeal in our program that attracts our viewers.
“ I hope this serves as an inspiration for content creators in South Asia to use our channel as a model to create unique content, and allow more families to reunite with their lost family members.”
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We know the search process can be long and emotionally taxing. What are some of the challenges and problems that you face in the process?
We get to experience the real human emotions through Apan Thikana. Sometimes, what we expect doesn’t happen. And sometimes, things happen beyond our expectations. It’s hard to predict what’s coming in an episode. I wouldn’t say this is a challenge, but this has surprised us on multiple occasions.
What keeps you going and drives you to continue your channel?
To date, we have made a total of 470 videos, with almost 350 successful stories of reunited families. There are approximately 100 videos on our channel that remain unsuccessful and it is not always a 100% success.
We continue to pursue the ones that have not succeeded. Back when we started in 2020, no one knew about Apan Thikana’s work. Apan Thikana is now recognized as the go-to place for reuniting lost families and because of the audience’s demand and popularity of these stories, we are currently planning to republish the unsuccessful stories or create a playlist with the hope of reconnecting more families.
Apan Thikana publishes new content almost daily because I feel that through this channel, I am giving back to society and want to continue Apan Thikana for as long as I can to help reunite families.
What are your future plans and aspirations for your channel?
As a content creator, I feel that Apan Thikana provides very unique content in our country and for the rest of the world as well. I hope this serves as an inspiration for content creators in South Asia to use our channel as a model to create unique content, and allow more families to reunite with their lost family members. I would love to extend my support to those who want to replicate this model.
I am not only interested in promoting this idea to create content, but I feel a sense of social responsibility to give back to my community. I encourage other content creators to build a channel like ours, and my company and I will always be there to help.
I believe that there are more countries like Bangladesh where families get separated and children are missing. It is only with the help of a huge platform like YouTube that we are able to accomplish our big dreams of creating unique content to reunite families.