RJ Balaji

Although he is known to be a funny, loud lad on air, in real life Balaji is a shy, soft spoken person. He claims to have got his sense of humour from his mother who he considers the funniest person ever.

Balaji got married at a young age of 21. He is the father of a son, Manath, who was born in 2012.

RJ Balaji was born on June 20, 1985 in Chennai and is the eldest brother to four of his siblings-one younger brother and three younger sisters.

His family was abandoned by his father for reasons still unknown. This took a toll on the family and his mother could barely settle down at any place for a long time and hence, the family kept on moving from Perambur to Thiruvanmiyur to Mylapore and several other places.

The impact of this hippie lifestyle affected Balaji’s education immensely. It was admitted by him in an interview that throughout his childhood he had stayed at 19 different places, and changed 11 schools and 24 houses.

He could not pass his 12th grade in the first attempt and had to reappear. It was only after he completed his B.Sc in computer science from the Kumararani Meena Muthiah College of Arts in 2006 that he realized that his strength was in interaction with people. So he went ahead and pursued a post graduate diploma course in Journalism from Amrita School of Communication in Coimbatore.

The start to his present career was rather haphazard. Initially, he joined NDTV and after being asked to prepare a report, he prepared the same with 47 grammatical mistakes out of the 56 words. That English Journalism was not his cup of tea was crystal clear to him after that.

He was still pursuing his journalism course when an advertisement in Radio Mirchi for a radio jockey grabbed his attention. Needless to say, he got through the job in the latter half of 2006 and thus began the journey of RJ Balaji.

His stepping stone in to the world of radio jockey was with a three hour morning drive show named ‘Hello Coimbatore’ where he spoke in about several social issues. He left the show after four years when he could no longer bear the all day serious talk show and returned to Chennai to his family and friends.

He then joined BIG FM 92.7 where he was lured with the freedom of designing and planning a four hour time slot all by himself, which he called ‘Take it easy’. ‘Take it easy’ shot him to fame in no time. Here, he helped the radio lovers to relax with his gibberish talk and escape the busy hectic everyday schedule.

He introduced a new segment in his show called ‘Cross Talk’. This show was about making prank calls to random people nominated by their friends, family, colleagues or neighbors. It was a big hit among the youth. Several clips of the show, when uploaded on SoundCloud, went viral. It got millions of views on its very first week from not only India but also from United States, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany, Singapore and Seychelles.

In order to create a sense of identity for villages and circulate village-specific information among the masses, Balaji took part in "Namma Ooru Website Creation Competition", a joint initiative by IIT Madras’ Rural Technology and Business Incubator and the National Internet Exchange of India in December 2011.

On the 375th anniversary of Chennai, he gave an intro in "The Madras Song".

He played as an all-rounder in the 2015 edition of the Celebrity Cricket League playing for his home team Chennai Rhinos.

He was also a speaker at the first edition of TEDx Mylapore in May 2015.

He was awarded the CNN-News18 Indian of the Year award in the category of "Public Service" for his humanitarian role at the time of 2015 South Indian floods.