Harindu and Hasindu: The Twin Brothers Giving Ayurveda a Social Media Makeover

By Thaliba Cader

There are probably few places where you would expect to find Ayurveda and internet humor in the same sentence. An Ayurvedic shop, perhaps, is more likely to conjure up images of shelves lined with oils, powders and familiar bottles than a phone camera, a reel and two brothers trying not to laugh. But that is precisely where Harindu and Hasindu Bandara come in. The 27-year-old twins are part of the family behind Sampath Ayurveda, a business their Aththa started in 1994 and later passed on to their father. They grew up around Ayurveda, but becoming the people to put it in front of thousands of people on TikTok and Instagram was not exactly part of the original plan. Harindu filmed a simple “POV” about a day in an Ayurvedic shop, mostly to see what would happen. People watched. Then they commented, shared it and, more importantly, remembered it. The brothers began making videos together, drawing on the sort of everyday teasing and nonsense that comes naturally when you have spent 27 years growing up with the same person. Hasindu is usually the one in front of the camera; Harindu is often behind the narration and editing. It is also a useful lesson in how advertising has changed. People can recognize a sales pitch almost instantly now, and the quickest way to lose them is often to sound like one. The Bandara twins seem to have stumbled upon another route: make people stop because they are curious, make them stay because they are laughing, and let them discover the product along the way. We spoke to Harindu and Hasindu about the family business they never expected to inherit, the strange art of making Ayurveda entertaining, and what happens when two brothers decide that maybe an Ayurvedic shop is, after all, a pretty good place to make content.

1. Let’s start before the reels and jokes. Who are you both, and what is the story behind your family business?

We’re Harindu and Hasindu Bandara, 27-year-old twins, and we come from a very close-knit family of four: Amma, Appachchi and the two of us. But the story of the business actually goes back much further than us. Our Aththa started it in 1994, and it was later passed down to Appachchi. So, Ayurveda has genuinely been part of our lives for as long as we can remember. In the beginning, though, we weren’t exactly planning our lives around taking over the family business! We were doing our own things and weren’t necessarily as interested in getting involved. As we got older, however, both of us started wanting to change the way we lived, worked and looked at our health. That brought us back to something that had been around us all along: Ayurveda. We started learning more about Ayurveda together, while also becoming interested in business, marketing and content creation. Somewhere along the way, we realized we could take what our Aththa and Appachchi had built and introduce it to a new generation in our own way. That’s really where the Sampath Ayurveda that people know today began.

2. What made you decide that Ayurveda needed a little less traditional advertising and a little more personality?

Ayurveda has always been communicated in a very traditional way, and when we started looking at social media, we realized there wasn’t much Ayurveda-related content that looked or sounded like the content we were used to consuming ourselves. At the time, Harindu was looking after the retail side of the business, while Hasindu was mainly handling the wholesale side. One day, Harindu decided to make a video around the idea of “POV: Beheth Kadeke Dawasak.” It was really just an experiment. He wanted to see whether people would find this type of business interesting. When the video started getting views and people actually engaged with it, we realized there might be something there. That’s when Harindu thought, “Why not bring my twin into this as well?” And from there, Hasindu gradually became much more involved in the content too. So, we experimented. Some ideas worked, some absolutely did not, and some probably should have stayed in the WhatsApp chat! But slowly, we found a style that felt like us.

3. What is the most unexpected or slightly unhinged idea you have pitched to each other that somehow actually made it into a video?

Probably the ඇස් වහ video. That was definitely one of those ideas where you say it out loud and immediately wonder, “Are we actually going to post this?” And somehow, we did. That’s also what makes working together fun. We can come up with something completely ridiculous, look at each other and go, “Okay, but what if we actually do it?” Sometimes those are the videos people end up enjoying the most. There’s also something nice about having someone beside you who is willing to say, “This might be a terrible idea… but let’s try it anyway.”

4. A lot of young people tend to scroll past anything that immediately feels like an advertisement. Are you essentially trying to make people forget that they are being marketed to?

In a way, yes, but we don’t want to trick people into watching an advertisement. We’d rather make something that people genuinely want to watch and then let the product become part of that story naturally. We’re young people ourselves, so we know what it feels like to scroll past something the moment it starts feeling like a sales pitch. If we wouldn’t watch it ourselves, why would we expect someone else to? Our thinking is pretty simple: give people a reason to stop, make them laugh or relate to something, and introduce the product without making the whole thing feel like, “Okay, now we are going to sell you something.”

5. Is there a bit of your actual family dynamic hiding underneath all the jokes and content?

Definitely. Probably more than we realize. We’ve been together our whole lives, so the way we talk to each other, argue, joke around and make fun of each other naturally comes through in the videos. A lot of the time, we’re not really “acting” in the traditional sense; we’re just exaggerating what we’re already like with each other.

Hasindu being in front of the camera and Harindu doing the narration also works because that dynamic is already there. The voice behind the video and the person on screen are basically two brothers who have spent 27 years figuring out how to annoy each other. That’s probably why some of the video’s work. People are seeing a real dynamic between two brothers rather than two people pretending to be brothers for a video.

6. Do you consider yourselves marketers who happen to be funny, or creators who happen to be marketing a family business?

Honestly, we’d say we’re just two people who happen to be funny sometimes! We definitely didn’t approach this thinking, “Let’s become marketers and create a huge social media strategy.” We were just having fun and making videos around a business that was already part of our family. We don’t think we even used ten percent of our brains for some of the videos! We genuinely didn’t expect them to become a hit like this. The business side is obviously important to us, but the content started from a very simple place: we were enjoying ourselves and wanted other people to enjoy it too.

7. If someone had told you a few years ago that you would be making Ayurvedic products entertaining through humor and creativity, would you have believed them?

Absolutely not. We had never really seen Ayurvedic products being marketed in this way, so it wasn’t something we ever imagined ourselves doing either. If someone had told us a few years ago that the two of us would be making people laugh on the internet while talking about Ayurvedic products, we probably would have thought they were joking. And now here we are, somehow making jokes about Paspanguwa and getting people to watch. It’s still a little funny to us that something we never planned has become such a big part of what we do.

8. And finally, if “Ayurvedic marketing in English before GTA 6” is the current era, looking back at everything you have created so far, how cool do you actually think this whole journey has been?

Honestly, really cool. We started this without knowing where it would go, and we definitely didn’t expect so many people to connect with it. What makes it even more special is that we’re doing it together and building on something our family has had for generations. We’re still figuring things out, and there’s a lot we want to learn and improve, but being able to take something so traditional and give it our own personality has been a really cool experience. And the fact that people now recognize the Sampath Ayurveda name because of something we created ourselves, that’s probably the coolest part of it. At the end of the day, we’re still just two brothers trying things out, learning as we go and hoping people enjoy what we make. We’re genuinely grateful that people have come along for the ride. And honestly, if we’ve learnt anything from this whole experience, it’s that you never really know what’s going to happen. After all, even GTA 6 got leaked, so at this point, we’re not ruling anything out!