The Outsider, page 22
At the first show I did after the canceling and the threats, there were maybe two hundred people in the audience. And hell yes, I was nervous. When I walked out, I said, “It’s good to be back in the country. Actually, it’s good to be allowed back in the country.” It got a massive laugh that broke the tension so we could all collectively breathe. I was honest with the audience and told them I wasn’t exactly sure how to talk about what had happened, but I was going to try. We were going to try. I did that in every city, and in almost every city there would be fringe groups outside the show protesting, burning effigies of me, calling for my arrest. People were breaking glass and acting crazy, making every single stop on the tour some twisted version of This Is Spinal Tap meets Argo. Ridiculous comedy mixed with real threats of violence. One night a police officer got roughed up by the crowd, and later he looked at me and asked, “What the fuck did you do?” It was absurd.
The hate started to get drowned out by the support. People would tell me they fought with family members over my Two Indias speech. They took a certain pride in me, and it felt heavy. Like I was undeserving. But strangely, it’s the first time I have ever been claimed by an audience. He’s ours, and we don’t care if you don’t approve. I’m not boasting here, just expressing gratitude. It didn’t make me feel invincible, since there were still mobs stomping on posters with my face on them, but it did make me feel like there wasn’t much else to lose. When you’re writing with that kind of mindset, that’s a different kind of writing. And then, in the midst of all this, something insane happened. Netflix called.
It was a lovely woman named Natalie, who was head of comedy for Netflix Asia Pacific. She asked me to do another special in the spring. Finally, after hiding out and fearing for my life and my family’s lives throughout the winter, I had some work. And not just any work, a Netflix special. It was all coming together. Not that I was desperate (I was), but I kept bugging my manager, asking when the Netflix contract was coming. You have to understand what a lighthouse this was for me. It’s one thing to be able to speak your peace live, but to do it on Netflix is an opportunity I had been 100 percent sure was never going to happen again.
Every week, I’d call the States and say, “Did they send the contract?”
Not yet.
“Did they send the contract?”
Business Affairs is working on it.
Note to the kids reading this: If you don’t have a contract, it’s not actually happening. I looked around at venues but didn’t book anything, because I can be bold when it comes to my work, but not bold enough to book a venue for a Netflix special before the contract has been signed, in blood.
Then, it happened. Not the signing of the contract, the total negation of it. Natalie changed jobs, and they downsized the number of comedy specials they were making. Not just me, everyone. They said they were “moving away from comedy.”
Lighthouse off.
When you truly have no work and nothing to lose, you either accept it, or blatantly bluff. It was time to bluff.
I called another Netflix executive named Tanya, whom I knew. I knew she was intelligent, and amazing, and that she had been supportive of my stuff. I said hello, and then said, “Tanya, I’m going to create a special that makes people feel amazing about India, one that no Indian comedian has ever done, and if you cancel on me… that’s fine, I’ll go with HBO (who had zero idea about my new tour). OR you and I can go get nominated for another Emmy together.”
Sheer, unapologetic, desperate bullshit.
I wasn’t trying to be a jerk; I was just trying to get my life back. Tanya was silent for a minute, no doubt wondering whether I was bluffing.
“Vir, give me two weeks.”
Two weeks later, Tanya called.
“Let’s do it,” she said. “But I want to be clear,” she added. Ah, shit. “We will control the release plan. And you have to take a pay cut.”
Fine. Yes. A thousand times yes. Where do I sign? In blood!
This all happened while I was performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that August, and as soon as I got off the phone with Tanya, I started writing the special. There’s a certain kind of freedom you feel at a comedy festival, maybe from all the manic creative energy swirling around, but I buckled down and wrote my heart out. I had an idea. Two weeks into the Fringe, when I was walking up to a tiny cliff in the middle of Holyrood Park, it hit me. I knelt to the ground and started gathering some sand by the fistful and put it into my pockets. Then I walked home. That night I did the bit. When I walked out I gently sprinkled the sand on one half of the stage. Making nothing of it. Very nonchalant. Then three quarters into the show I revealed that since I was accused of having defamed India on foreign soil, I carried around actual Indian soil to each of the shows. So every time I did a joke about India, I was “technically” standing on Indian sand. The applause was gigantic. Like a magic trick. It became the show. Little did they know that was local Scottish soil. That meant I had to time every bit of footwork to make sure that when I was talking about India, I was standing on the sprinkled soil. If you watch it now, you can see me maneuvering around so I could get the timing exactly right. I did not want to be called the most wanted man in India ever again.
Then in October we were set to film the show for Netflix at NYU. The week before we left, we went up to Juhu Beach in Mumbai and packed two zippered bags full of very Indian sand. I carried Indian sand to America terrified I might get caught. Each team member did the same. We got to NYU and built the set, and eight zippered bags full of Indian sand from Juhu Beach in Mumbai were sprinkled onto the stage. Commit to the bit.
We finished editing the special that fall and sent it to Netflix. We chatted about the title, and to their credit they never really got into the content. I think the team saw how personal it was for me. I’m eternally grateful for that respect shown to me. They did, however, release it the day after Christmas, when all government offices were shut and there was ZERO publicity. Smart.
I had a few shows left in my India tour before the special was to come out in December. Comedians always try to throw in a few last-minute shows before a special is out and the material is burnt forever. I tried to do so in India, but the fringe groups were getting out of control, to the point that a theater owner got beat up. They’d show up, burn effigies, scream my name, and just scare the shit out of us. One night after a show in Bengaluru I looked at my two tour managers and saw that they looked like they’d been through a war, like they’d aged ten years in two months. One of them said to me, “You’re being used by these groups so they can get on TV. No one cares about the Two Indias video anymore. They’re showing up to milk you for attention. Your special is a month away. If this keeps up, and you keep getting these headlines, Netflix will bail.”
So we decided to cancel the tour dates, but to do that I faked an illness, and also faked that I had just signed a massive deal and had to immediately stop touring to work on this insane project. So there I am posting, “Hey guys, just signed on a big, secret, amazing project so I have to cancel shows!” And then people were congratulating me for this pretend project, which made me feel terrible. But I knew we had to keep a low profile so Netflix wouldn’t get spooked.
It was a lie, and many people had bought tickets. I’m sorry we had to lie to you.
I was trying to keep my team and my special safe. In 2023 I did a massive India tour that went off without any hitches. Eventually the memory and the controversy faded away. I made sure to do the longest run that any comedian had ever done specifically in Bengaluru because I felt terrible about the lie. We canceled a show for 900 people; fourteen months later, we came back and performed for 32,000.
When the special, called Landing, came out, it was met not with pure hate, but with love. It was my fourth Netflix special, and the reaction it got kind of settled everything, in a way. It settled the chaos and the threats, it settled the accusations and the fear. My career wasn’t over. It might never be the same, but it wasn’t over. And it not being the same wasn’t even necessarily a bad thing.
Seven months later…
I was walking around my house in a weighted vest, and my producer Akash was there. While I was walking around in that ridiculous vest, I got pinged that Landing had been nominated for an Emmy.
And then a few months after that, we won a fucking Emmy.
A few months after the nomination was announced, I went back to New York City for the event. Back to a place where I was last called a terrorist, but this time with new journalists who were pretending the last time never happened. Like their news editor didn’t do five bulletins about me, calling me an antinational. Just casually, “Vir, how are you feeling to be here in New York?” I don’t know, madam, do you guys archive footage?
I’m not going to describe the Emmy Award. It’s a beautiful statue, so to describe it is tacky. I’m going to tell you how it feels, and about a cookie.
You never think you’re going to win, but there’s a small part of you that hopes. I checked into my suite at the Sofitel, and the Emmys had a wonderful spread of food waiting. The centerpiece was a Christmas cookie. About four inches in diameter, with white frosting that said “International Emmy Awards” with the logo. I put my bag down and ate some of the chocolate-covered strawberries. Keep in mind this was PTSD, nominee nervousness, and déja vù, all together in my system. So I was stress-eating beyond belief. I lifted up the cookie, about to dive in, and thought, “If I win, I’ll eat it.”
Now I’m getting ready and hoping to god my suit fits. I do this thing where I launch a new designer every time some publicity milestone happens in my life. Fuck it, I’m here because people in power took a punt on a kid—I’m doing that too. Both of my Emmy outfits and most of my red-carpet looks are brand-new, made by fashion students from small towns who get paid well, receive a big platform, and I’m proud to say, go on to design for much bigger celebrities than myself. Yes, A-list designers would happily dress you for free and send you something unimaginative and trite. But a kid, with underdog energy, will share your underdog energy, and combined underdog energy is a powerful thing. THAT’s exposure.
Then it goes like this:
You put your suit on, then you’re on the red carpet, then you’re having a glass of champagne to calm the nerves, then you’re rooting for your fellow Indian nominee, Shefali Shah, who is nominated for the Best Actress Award, then your category comes up. A guy who has a camera on his shoulder comes and sticks that camera in your face. You’re nervous and crack some sort of stupid smile, trying not to blink too much because you feel like he’s close enough for people to see every single eyelash move. They announce your nomination, the smile gets stupider. You feel your body and the bodies of every other person at the table around you tense. Like a rubber band stretching and stretching and stretching and stretching. You hear the presenter go “and the winner is…” And then… from the crowd two tables away, you hear a lady go, “Vir…” Just whispering it to the person next to her while they drink red wine. Just a random lady. I don’t know why I noticed her; there is no way she could have known. She looked about sixty and like she was from Brazil. You’re thinking, “Does Vir mean ‘more wine’ in Portuguese?” This silence feels forty-five minutes long. And then what happens next feels like one millisecond.
You hear your name. Everyone at your table explodes. You’re on your feet and hugging people. You didn’t smile, you didn’t exclaim, you didn’t cry, you’re just kind of in a trance. Then you’re walking up to the stage, and you have no idea how you even found the way there, you were so fucking far away. Now words are coming out of your mouth, even though you have no idea who you’re actually addressing. You find yourself saying, “Thank you, namaste, salam alaikum, sat sri akal, good night.” You have never uttered all those phrases from those religions together before in your life. Now there’s an Emmy in your hand, it’s heavy, and you carry it through an entire press junket where you’re struggling to find any words because all you are thinking is “FUCK!!”
You meet a member of your team who assures you that you thanked your wife and Netflix, even though you do not remember any of it. Now you’re in a Cadillac Escalade headed to an after-party. You’re dancing. On the way to the party you’re on the phone and people are crying. Your wife and your parents, you.
The first call I got after talking to my wife and parents was Netflix’s Tanya, who said, “I cannot believe you called it.”
“I was being arrogant!” I told her. “I can’t believe I called it either.”
The next morning, I realized they gave me the Emmy in a box with no handles. I had to go through JFK being a brown man with a beard carrying this pointy object in a nondescript black box. I stole the belts from two bathrobes at the Sofitel and fashioned myself a makeshift handle.
As I was leaving, there it was still, that cookie on the table. The one with the international Emmy logo, four inches wide, with white frosting. I took a bite, and it was stale. But there was strawberry icing under the white frosting, and I ate the whole damn thing.
I crashed on that flight like you wouldn’t believe. Thank god for Air India. Here I was again, two years later, headed home on an Air India flight the morning after an Emmy ceremony. Slightly different circumstances. What a crazy goddamn circle. After they’d let me sleep for about ten hours, when I finally surfaced, two younger Air India air hostesses came up and said, “Sir, we heard about the Emmy. Can we see it?” They drew the curtains, and three of us stood there in first class at thirty thousand feet and unpacked it. It was the first time I had a second to just look at it. A gold lady with wings, on a brown Air India flight.
Then I ate aloo matar and three rotis. There were some paparazzi waiting at the airport when I landed, but way fewer than before. Thank God.
So now, I don’t think I’ll ever get to be shallow again in my career. There are some days when I just want to be lowbrow, but now I feel this expectation where the audience is thinking, “We kept you out of jail and fed your family. We are your audience. Don’t you dare start complaining about cancel culture or do shallow dick jokes again.” I hear you guys, and I’ll try.
A SHORT DOSE OF GROUNDING
I hate showers. I grew up on bucket baths. I stay in the fanciest hotels in the world and wish I had a plastic bucket and a mug. If you have never felt the joy of squatting on both legs on a cold bathroom floor on a freezing Delhi winter morning and then pouring over yourself a hot mug of water from a bucket you perfectly monitored and mixed between a cold and a hot tap, have you really lived? I think not. Once a year I travel to Ladakh and spend a week or ten days staying in a tent by the river. The highlight is the hot bucket baths. Maybe I’m getting older, or I’m just indulging so much that the bath is taking too long, but my glutes hurt after every bucket bath. I don’t know if I have the core strength anymore.
CHAPTER ELEVEN A TALE OF TWO PASSPORTS
Vir performing a set on religion outdoors. I didn’t really want to write this book. I wanted to write a book, but not a memoir. This inherently felt like the wrong time to do it, and that’s because I think you write a memoir at the end of it all. When there’s not much left to do, no more choices to make. Writing it now felt like trying to build a dam while swimming in the middle of the river. I’m an artist, not a beaver. I haven’t hit a bank yet. I don’t know where I’m going to wind up, and when I say that, I mean both artistically and geographically.
Let’s talk about controversy. In one of his many sublimely wise moments, one day my manager looked at me and said, “Your content may become controversial, but controversy should never become your content.” That’s a profound thought, ideologically speaking. It’s also impossible to follow, comically speaking.
You don’t know you’re burning your career down until you’ve burnt it down, and usually even then you are completely blindsided. That’s because in modern comedy the audience has a voice that is louder than the artist’s, and for the first time in a long time words have very serious consequences. And none of those ideological thoughts apply when you’re being milked for headlines, which is what controversy ends up being. You end up being this ratings machine. Anyone who wants to get their picture in the paper, their face on the news, their podcast to go viral, their article to get clicks finds themselves talking about you, or to you. It’s fair game, until it isn’t.
The only people in my life who were possibly actually happy that I was canceled in India after the Kennedy Center chaos were my managers in America. Not because they were cold-hearted, but because for years they have been asking me when I was going to make the move to America. I think they figured that, like many rational people, I would want to leave a place that had labeled me a terrorist and burned pictures of my face in the streets. To attain real success in America, you have to give America everything. You have to move there, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Trevor Noah, and the dozens of Canadian comedians who crossed the border for Saturday Night Live. The problem is, it has always felt inherently unnatural to me to do that, to leave India for Los Angeles or New York. Maybe I’ll never be able to fully leave for America because India has been stringing me along like a fickle lover. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it, though.
I think about it in new terms now, as America goes through its great reclamation of stand-up comedy. I wonder if there’s a place for an outside voice. In my more pessimistic moments, I think that the comedy pendulum swung from overly apologetic, woke, and lecture-ish to some sort of “dudebro edgelord saying r words, c words, f words, and really only avoiding the N word because edgelord doesn’t want his ass whooped” phase that it’s in now. Eventually it will swing back to a more nuanced, middle-ground place. Then on other days I think that comedy in America has gotten too attached to ideology, and maybe Americans need a blatant outsider to come in and show their country back to them? Someone with no dog in the race, no camp to impress, just someone who sees the things they don’t. I could be that guy.
