The Outsider, page 12
I got to study philosophy, psychology, science fiction, jazz history, literature, creative writing. All of this along with the economics and calculus I needed for my degree. Indian kids came in better prepared for undergrad. We had been trained to memorize for twelve years.
We could also take an exam anywhere on campus. Like, walk out with the paper in hand and sit in the sun on the lawn and take a final exam. Not cheating was basically an honor system. Are you fucking kidding me? For my final economics paper I remember that the professor, Roy Andersen, walked in and said, “Your current grades as they stand are written on your exam sheet. If you don’t want to take this final, you can walk out right now and keep that grade. To me it’s important that you studied for the exam, not that you take it.”
What a baller move.
During college, I didn’t go home for vacations much, since we couldn’t afford it. I stayed on campus and found work and things to fill my mind. One winter I did an “economic analysis of the theater industry.” I convinced Andersen that I could come up with an equation that would predict the success or failure of a theatrical production. He knew it was bullshit and couldn’t be done, but I’d be a fucking billionaire today if I could have done it. Even so, he got me a two-thousand-dollar grant to go up to Chicago every weekend and watch plays. I never wrote the paper. I still believe America, while having maybe the worst high school system in the world, has the best undergraduate system in the world. It’s a system that makes you believe anything is possible.
Besides partying and hooking up with Tiger and Teresa, I actually did focus on school. I got on the dean’s list after my first semester, so my parents were thrilled and felt like I’d finally done something with my life. My heart wasn’t in econ, but I kept at it because of the promise I’d made to my parents. I figured I would finish college, then go back to India and maybe join my dad’s business one day. During my second semester, though, I took an acting class on a lark, and that was the beginning of the end of econ for me.
I love drama class. I love how utterly terrible and amateur everyone is. You’re able to do fifty monologues in a semester, and there are centuries of texts waiting for you to read and perform. There are also professors encouraging you to do this. It isn’t some illegal thing you are doing while you’re supposed to be studying political science and the role of the judiciary as it evolved during the 1960s with sociopolitical shifts and a changing global attitude toward communism. In drama class, you can be different people. You can be evil like Richard III, rage like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire, plot like Aaron from Titus Andronicus, all by 10:30 in the morning. You can stand up and say, “I felt vulnerable, but the anger wasn’t coming, so I had to think about what happened to my dog when I was three, and then I found myself getting angry. My inner monologue changed, and I found the strength to call him a bitch.” At 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday? Get the fuck out!
I aced drama class. I lived for drama class. All I wanted to do from then on was drama class. One main reason I loved it was a professor named Ivan.
For some reason, Professor Ivan Davidson saw promise in me. One afternoon toward the end of the semester, he called me in to talk to him. Was I in trouble? Was he going to pull out a hockey stick and beat my ass? This was America though. Corporal punishment wasn’t a sport like it had been at my boarding school. Ivan was a sixty-year-old, pipe-smoking professor with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with old theater books and biographies of Laurence Olivier and Sarah Bernhardt. In other words, he leaned way into every archetype of academia.
“Hello, Vir. Come in and sit down,” he said while I stood in the doorway to his musty collegiate office.
I sat.
“How’s your day?”
“Day’s good, sir. How’s yours?”
“Can’t complain. So, Vir. You’ve been in my class for a while, right?”
“Right.”
“Right. I’ve been watching your progress, and I’m going to tell you something that I say to maybe one kid every seven or eight years.”
I sat there, blinking. I had no idea what he was going to say. Maybe that I needed to focus on my economics classes and never step foot on a stage again?
“Vir, you’re meant to do this. You’re meant to be a performer. So, I want you to do me a favor.”
“Okay, sir?”
“I can turn you into an actor, but you have to shut up and take every course I tell you to take.”
He meant this in the nicest possible way.
“Thank you, sir, but I can’t do that. I took a chunk of money from my parents and promised them I would get an economics degree. They would kill me.”
Ivan sat back in his chair and looked me over. Of course, I wanted to take all the drama courses and forget about econ, but I also didn’t want to get beaten by a slipper the next time I visited India.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Take spring break to think about it, and then get back to me.”
That sounded reasonable enough. I knew the minute I walked out of his office what I wanted to do though.
Four days into spring break, Ivan called me.
“Vir?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m giving you the second lead in War and Peace after spring break. I want you to seriously consider it. The whole theater department thinks I’m insane for doing this without you even auditioning, but just give me this one semester, and then you can decide for yourself. If it doesn’t work out, you never have to act again in your life.”
So I would be playing a Russian prince named Andrei who fights in the Battle of Borodino? Why not?
For a small college, Knox had a pretty big theater department. This play would be six hours long, and run over the course of two nights. It was ambitious. I returned from spring break and walked into a very pissed off theater department, since this teacher had just gone out on a limb for a random Indian kid. During the first few weeks, I got snapped at by drama majors and other teachers, but eventually they came around. This kid Ben Meyers was like the Al Pacino of Knox College, and since he was playing the lead, we started doing scene work with each other. Eventually, I got Ben’s endorsement, and everyone else in the department fell in line.
I loved the theater. I did movement work and hung lights. I rehearsed scenes and helped build sets. To this day, I love the smell of an old theater. I love backstage and greenrooms and lighting grids. The whole thing is like a massively intoxicating drug. I helped build a comedy scene in India, and often we would be performing in old theaters and sweeping the stage before we headlined. There is an honor to a theater stage. You clean it before you headline it.
I never imagined I would go from the Harbach Theatre in Galesburg (capacity 500) to Carnegie Hall (capacity 2,804) or the Sydney Opera House (capacity 2,679). Back then, that five-hundred-seat theater at Knox may as well have been an arena.
We did something called rep term during War and Peace, where the entire theater department turned into a repertory company. You wake up in the morning and do acting class, writing class, reading, set building, rehearsals, and then you go to bed. It’s 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Your body is broken, and it’s fucking paradise. Then at the end of the term, the play goes up.
I waited an entire year to tell my parents that I was focusing on drama. They were not happy, but they were too far away to do anything except grunt their displeasure over the phone. I don’t think they knew it was a full-time thing, just their kid’s new obsession, his new phase to be outgrown. I studied acting, learned the lines of whatever play I was in, and did some economics work when I had to. I got a job at a gas station owned by a Sikh man, and since I couldn’t afford the school meal plan beyond the first semester, he gave me the leftover hot dogs and donuts that he’d have to throw out at the end of the day, so that kept me going. The place was called Quick Stop One. My boss spoke very little English, and he and his family lived in an apartment at the back of the gas station. We were like two constructs of the American dream, this privileged college kid and then this guy with a very real immigration story, working his ass off for a better life. We’d both smoke cigarettes at dawn before I headed off to class and his wife took over for him, because it was safer for her to work during the day.
You know that sound a cigarette makes? That crispy sound you hear from tobacco leaves burning when the lead character takes a drag? That sound is beautiful when it’s dawn in Galesburg and minus 6 degrees and you’re surrounded by snow.
From the day I was cast as Andrei until the day I graduated, I was one of the leads in every production at Knox. Ivan found every emotional barrier I had and broke it down in scene work. For example: I’m not a violent person, so he cast me as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, a guy who epitomized primal macho aggression. I did musicals, dramas, and comedies. I played a redneck from the Ozarks. I played an Italian guy with a Brooklyn accent, a Jewish guy, and a naked dude in Equus, the play that’s famous mainly because a post–Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe played the lead, buck naked on Broadway. When I played the lead, a character who is a teenager who murders six horses with a metal spike, I had a major issue. It wasn’t really that I had to stand onstage in front of the entire department in my underwear. That I could handle. It was that my equipment, or the character’s equipment, was not supposed to work when he was trying to make out with the girl he liked because the images of the horses in the barn were fucking him up. My issue was that there were no actual horses, and I had been making out with the girl playing opposite me in real life. So my equipment was very much hardwired to work. It was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me, besides being beaten with hockey sticks.
I pulled Ivan aside and told him my issue.
“Vir, you just need to focus on your inner monologue.”
“Sir. You have no idea what my inner monologue is saying right now. It has nothing to do with Equus whatsoever.”
Instead of focusing on my inner monologue, which was telling me to hook up with my scene partner, I asked her to do something gross, say something creepy or mean that would give me the ick so I would definitely not want to do the deed. We rehearsed like hell, the ick set in, I got new wiring. It’s funny how much of this shit is just mental wiring. Acting exercises and the like, all sound a little foo-foo to an outsider, until you start to mess with your own internal systems and discover truly how much your brain affects your biology. Mostly, I think that experience made me a better comedian. There’s nothing as humbling as being in your underwear onstage in front of a class. If you can’t laugh at yourself and crack jokes to lighten the tension in that situation, you’re doomed. These experiences also made me totally unprepared for the real world that awaited me. At Knox, I could be and do anything. I could play that guy with an Ozark accent, I could do Shakespeare and Tolstoy. I went into the world thinking these roles would be possible for me, but the world gave me Arab #7 and Indian #75. I had a lot to learn. Along the way, though, Ivan kept saying, “You’re not Knox-talented. You’re talented.” It was an important thing to hear, even if the real world wasn’t going to be as welcoming.
Ivan and the truly wonderful professors Liz Carlin Metz and Bob Whitlatch were three theater instructors who didn’t treat us like students. They critiqued us like adults, which I believe is important for acting students: to sometimes hear that what you’re doing sucks, and that’s okay, because it won’t suck forever, you just have to keep at it. I also think the average theater professor has to create a sense of community and deal with more emotions than the average calculus or philosophy professor. Everyone who walks into a theater department as a student is some kind of social reject, or narcissist, or both, coming in with all of their feelings splayed open. A theater becomes this safe space largely because of the professors that imbue it with a sense of acceptance. Think about it from their perspective. Here’s this brown kid from India. A country that sends twelve students a year to Knox, and 99 percent of them are in computer science, premed, economics, and other serious majors. He’s got a strong Indian accent when he is offstage, but he can thankfully do an American accent onstage. His English is not as good as the American students’, so he struggles to read Shakespeare even though he’s playing Leontes in The Winter’s Tale this semester. He’s one of the leads in every play he auditions for. This is not going to be the case when he gets out of here. He’s also not used to being this open about feelings and background and trauma. It’s not a part of his culture as much as it is over here, so he struggles with finding real depth as an actor. He’s also close to failing most of his economics classes, which is what the idiot came here for. He has a 2.4 GPA in econ, so it’s clearly not his calling. He’s constantly unfocused, heartbroken, and in some sort of long-distance relationship.
I needed a safe space, and they gave me one.
During my time at Knox, I also spent time with my host “parents,” Pinky and Gene Gibbons. Let me explain. When an international student comes to town, they are given local “parents,” just a local couple who volunteer to take care of students and act as guides to American culture. You meet your host parents once every two weeks for a lunch on Sunday. And no matter who their host parents were, eventually all of the students would wind up at the house of Pinky and Gene Gibbons. Honorary host parents to almost every foreign kid, as declared by other foreign kids. They both rode Harley-Davidsons, and we loved them. Pinky worked in the cafeteria of the Gizmo bar cafeteria on campus. Their house was like a hub for international students, and they always treated the international kids as their own. They introduced us to the Galesburg community. I once rode on the back of Pinky’s Harley, looking like a small brown stowaway. Pinky and Gene were (and are) decent, kind, hardworking people. They took care of kids from all over the world, worked to pay their bills, watched The Bachelor, and went to bed.
Because of them, I’ve always had an aversion to comedy that patronizes, demonizes, and shits on “real America.” I’ve had a different experience, and I know that ignorance isn’t the same as evil; it doesn’t always equate to malice. You know, the year 2002, the year after 9/11, when I graduated from college, wasn’t the best time to be a brown guy in Middle America. Pinky and Gene, and most everyone in the town, never treated me with anything but respect. They didn’t scream, “Osama!” at me (that would happen later, when I was innocently riding a bicycle in Alabama). When I went back to Knox in 2018 to give a commencement speech that I called “Be Stupid,” Pinky and Gene were sitting right up front. We took a selfie with my now honorary PhD. I haven’t ever had the gumption to say that out loud. But I did change my Twitter profile for twenty-four hours, just to piss a few friends off.
I know not every small town in America would have welcomed me with open arms, especially at that time, but being in that place, for those three years, was really the first time I enjoyed how unique I was. I was the brown kid in the play, the first Indian to join a frat, the first Indian acting TA. I dated a stripper for a few weeks! I did feel like an alien in that small town, and in my previous life, that would have stressed me out, but instead it made me appreciate the things that made me stand out. It made me lean into those things, instead of trying to hide them.
That place, and those people, gave me the confidence to think that I could be a comedian. If I could do a hillbilly accent in a drama and not cause people to laugh, then surely I could be myself and make people laugh.
Right?
During my last semester at Knox, I was writing a paper in the Seymour Library and something insane happened. I decided I was going to be a comedian. It is hard to describe, but it was a flow state. Pure flow. It’s happened to me maybe ten times since. I’d been watching a bunch of stand-ups, people like Richard Pryor, Eddie Izzard, and Eddie Murphy, so maybe I was inspired. Or maybe I just needed a way to procrastinate and not write that paper. Or maybe this was my final rebellion against my econ degree. Whatever the reason, I got on the computer and created a flyer for a show called Brown Men Can’t Hump, a riff on the 1992 classic movie White Men Can’t Jump starring Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes. For some reason, and I still cannot tell you why, I just made a poster. I needed a venue, so I booked a seven-hundred-seat auditorium on campus. I used the copy machine code from the Career Center and printed out one hundred posters, then went all over campus at two in the morning plastering them on buildings and bulletin boards. Once the posters were up, I had no choice but to follow through. That’s still the way I work today. Book the venue, announce the thing, and then make it happen. Somehow.
The next morning, people on campus were like, “What the fuck is this?”
I gave myself six weeks to write an hour of stand-up, which is ridiculous. But I did it. The auditorium was packed, and for sixty whole minutes, I killed it. Maybe Ivan was a genius. Maybe I was meant for this. Maybe I was a brown George Carlin! I wasn’t. It was inside jokes for many friends, and I can see in retrospect it was terrible craft and writing. But it gave me a freedom I had never experienced onstage. That night at Knox, performing Brown Men Can’t Hump, I knew that my destiny did not involve becoming a credit analyst or a portfolio manager. My destiny was to become a comedian, to perform.
A SHORT DOSE OF GROUNDING
I drove a Hero Puch to school every day in Noida. A Hero Puch looks like a bicycle fucked a moped. It’s this tiny motorbike that does a maximum of thirty miles an hour. Once, on a particularly cold and foggy day, I was crossing a narrow bridge on a back road to school near Sector 18, Noida, and I found a dude standing in the middle of the bridge. I took a sharp left, fell off my bike, and slammed chest first into the side of a cow. I lay there wheezing with the wind knocked out of me while the cow looked at me nonchalantly. It then shat on me for twenty seconds. It was a cold winter day, and that shit was warm.
