Acting Among other roles, Surendra played Chuck Singh in the third season of the
YTV sitcom
System Crash (2000) and
mathlete Kevin Gnapoor in the 2004 comedy film
Mean Girls. After losing his bid for the lead role in the 2012 film
Life of Pi, he decided to leave acting behind. He began reevaluating his life after that disappointment, saying, "It took a year for me to mourn the loss of what happened." Surendra subsequently worked as an
au pair in
Munich, Germany. In November 2023, Surendra reprised his role as Kevin Gnapoor in a
Mean Girls-themed
Black Friday commercial for
Walmart, alongside his original co-stars
Lindsay Lohan,
Lacey Chabert,
Amanda Seyfried, and
Daniel Franzese. The commercial shows that Kevin is now a proud dad, as the original cast return to the halls of North Shore High School, where a new crew of
It girls rule the school. He read
Life of Pi for the first time on the set of
Mean Girls in 2004 and noticed many parallels between his own life and that of the novel's lead character, Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, including the fact that Surendra himself grew up in a home adjacent to the
Toronto Zoo. In a
GQ interview, he said: "The project kept getting delayed. Three months turned into a year turned into four years. It was actually six years because of that year off.
Life of Pi was attached to four different directors over the years, so every time a new director [came aboard], I'd go to the library and get out all the movies they had made and research that director. I worked really, really hard to try to get this part. In the end, they gave it to somebody else."
Fine arts and crafts While working at
Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto as a teenager, Surendra developed an interest in traditional crafts and antiques. As a result, he practices a number of traditional arts and crafts, including letter writing, calligraphy,
bookbinding, and
painting. He was an
apprentice to Connecticut-based
potter Guy Wolff, whose work has appeared in
Martha Stewart Living magazine. In 2010, Surendra founded Letters in Ink, a bespoke
calligraphy and
graphic design service based in
Manhattan. He uses pen and ink and chalk to create art and branding for restaurants and other businesses. In 2020, Surendra created a two-video
YouTube series on the art of letter writing for the
Morgan Library & Museum. Starting in 2021, he appeared in a series of videos posted on
HGTV's YouTube channel, highlighting his personal collection of handmade objects, chalk art, bookbinding, and
paper marbling. He created how-to videos, such as "A Beginner's Guide to Chalk Art" and "How to Be a Good Host", which eventually accumulated over eight million views and encouraged him to create his own channel. The channel began with a
GoFundMe, created after the success of Surendra's videos with
HGTV, as a means of continuing to share his passions and interests. The videos on the channel are presented largely as tutorials, many of them on cooking, antiques, and crafts. The
pilot of a planned lifestyle show hosted by Surendra,
Homeboy, premiered on the streaming service
Discovery Plus early that year. ==Personal life==