Biography
Rinkoo is a working class man born to Punjabi parents, raised in Birmingham in the Thatcher era. Known for being the joker in school, work, the pub, or anywhere else he found himself, Rinkoo never considered himself a performer. After college, Rinkoo found himself experiencing exponential rejection. He applied for jobs from the British Army to Airport Baggage Handler, with rejection letter after letter. With seldom opportunities, Rinkoo found himself working as a cleaner at Aston Villa football stadium. Feeling professionally and creatively unfulfilled, Rinkoo applied for an in-vision translation position for ITV, with little hope that he would be successful. After having to bunk the train for hours because he couldn’t afford. At this point his luck change, as he beat hundreds of applicants to secure the job, being informed this was largely down to his ‘TV face’. Rinkoo enjoyed many years with TV, working with experts in linguistics and homing his vast visual language skills, but unfortunately racist issues and pay inequality became too great for Rinkoo to ignore, forcing him to leave this employment.
Rinkoo’s original audience were those around him after moving from place to place to find what he was looking for, silently observing all from the sidelines. Rinkoo lived in Birmingham, Derby, Newcastle and London, all before he was 28, searching for his fulfilment. This transpired into a love of laughs and Rinkoo was captivated by the world of comedy and performance.
Rinkoo is inspired and partakes in Street photography, underwater filming and has been arrested in Egypt for being an American spy! A keen traveler of over thirty countries, Rinkoo is a self-professed hoover of culture and signed languages. Rinkoo proclaims he can never get through airport security without extensive scrutiny.
Social truth telling is another passion of Rinkoo's, exploring language origin and partaking in the historical research of colonialism and the affects this has had on signed languages. As a keen ethnic minority member, Rinkoo believes it's his humane duty to shine a mirror up to social and political injustices through performance, comedy, documentary and written story telling.
Rinkoo's innovative, truth telling film making career led him to develop his 2015 Double Discrimination documentary, shown of Film4, uncovering the oppression experienced by Deaf ethnic minorities members within the Deaf community.
Rinkoo was invited to present at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022, to perform his one-man show, ‘Made in India Britain’; the show received rave reviews and awards. A short while later, Rinkoo received a letter from former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, praising his achievement at the Fringe Festival and inviting him to attend again.
Two high-profile Scottish theatre companies working in partnership, Raw Material and Vanishing Point, invited Rinkoo to take part in a play called ‘Love Beyond’. Rinkoo attended the Fringe again, and then toured both across Scotland and internationally on this show. Rinkoo created another film, ‘Birmingham Made Me’, a documentary discussing his passion for photography, and showcasing photos of the areas of Birmingham he grew up in. ‘Birmingham Made Me’ was invited to several film festivals and nominated for awards.
Outside of his work in the creative industry, Rinkoo works as a sign language translator and intra-lingual relay interpreter, and for the past few years has been learning Russian Sign Language (RSL).