Writer

I like to dissociate myself from the person I was even three hours ago. It's a natural requirement to be a writer.

I like to dissociate myself from the person I was even three hours ago. It's a natural requirement to be a writer.

People who are privileged can take more risks because of that safety shield that privilege provides.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don't do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image.

I don't think changing minds is possible with just comedy. It's too much to expect from your own art.

My only success is that I am alive.

I've stopped many things such as healthy eating. What's the point? In this post-truth era, I feel increasingly powerless.

I am primarily a comedian. Sometimes I also do comedy about my cats. Now unless you find metaphors in cats, there is nothing political about those and I love doing such jokes as much as I love doing political content.

We critique all politicians who are in power, whenever there's a talking point.

I don't understand why people who have the most power, say people like Amitabh Bachchan, are silent on most issues.

There's a lot of ordinariness, and people tend to play to the same regressive tropes - sexism, patriarchy, unkindness to the oppressed. Comedy shouldn't fall into these traps - by its very nature comedy is supposed to be edgy and anti-establishment.

I think both comedy and dissent are liberating, for the listener as well!

Comedy as dissent or any art form as dissent is going to be our last safety valve.

Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.

I am Hindu, upper-caste, male, and able-bodied. So everything is on my side. That gives me the extra cushion that Swara Bhaskar won't get.

Revolutions can be messy but they can't be perceived as unjust.

In any show, not everybody is completely with us on all the topics we talk about. We talk about Hindutva, and we talk about the problems with Islam also. If there are Muslims in the audience, laughing at the jokes on Hindutva, they will have to confront the jokes on Islam too.

I was writing stand up comedy for TV for around 5 years and just wanted to attempt it myself. Vir Das started an amateur comedians' night in Bombay in 2009 and I went for the very first one. It was a competition and I won the first prize.

When a new government comes, even the detractors want to give them a chance because they have been voted in by the people of the country.

The best jokes take something awful and make it silly.