Vote for Pant But Don’t

Your Future, Dear Beloved Leader

Introduction

I was born in 1981, the same year when Infosys was started in Pune by N.R. Narayana Murthy. Many people have called me the Infosys of Indian comedy. In fact, I’ve gotten exhausted with the comparison. One journalist described it as follows:‘Sorabh Pant is commonly known as “the Infosys of Indian comedy” because of the sheer impact on the country and revenue he’s generated. In 2020, Infosys generated $12.78 billion; Sorabh’s revenue is considered by experts to be almost twice that in February 2020 alone. Narayana Murthy has reportedly told employees to aspire to be more like Mr Pant and an HR policy instituted on 8 December 2013 stated: “In celebration of this day when the esteemed comedian Sorabh Pant finished five years in comedy, we would urge all employees to kindly get haircuts like Sorabh to get an aerodynamic feel that would inspire them to reach his heights.”

Unfortunately, Infosys—as incredible an organization as it is—can never touch the high standards Mr Pant has set with his stand-up videos titled ‘Your Friends Are Haraamis’, ‘Game of Thrones Nudity Explained’ and ‘Goa and Penguins’ and of course ‘Celebrity Kids That Should Not Have Kids…’This was published in the The Times of India, page no. 86. Since TOI usually publishes around 60 pages, many readers of TOI might not have received the remaining 26 pages and hence are unaware of this important piece of news. The journalist, Mousami Joshi, also disappeared and was reported missing; TOI denies that such a journalist ever existed, which is surely part of a larger cover-up operation.The year 1981 was also the year when Yuvraj Singh, M.S. Dhoni and Roger Federer were born. While the three of them won World Cups, grand slams, IPLs etc., their stand-up never got almost three lakh views. Sorry to say, but that is another win for Pant (me).Truth aside, let me give you a quick introduction in case you’re reading this book out of the blue and have no clue who I am. My name is Sorabh Pant. I’m a stand-up comedian and an author. This is my fourth book, but first non-fiction title. My first three novels, The Wednesday Soul: The Afterlife with Sunglasses, Under Delhi and Pawan: The Flying Accountant would all be commissioned by OTT platforms by the time you would be reading this. One of them has been commissioned for over `8 crore—sorry, Amish Tripathi. I’m hoping you are reading this in 2028 when the possibility of this being actually true may be higher—though, not by much.

You may recognize me from there.In 2014, I co-founded a comedy collective called East India Comedy (EIC). We thought we could dominate the Indian comedy scene like the East India Company, but with zero deaths, slavery, inhumanity and blatant robbery. Frankly, we could have named it something else; we were unaware of history, baggage and other things that allow people to have a brain. EIC did well and we achieved a reasonable amount of success with shows like The Ghantas (an annual award show on the worst of Bollywood), EIC Outrage (a weekly news/issue-based show) and brand deals with alcohol companies that ensured the above two didn’t leave us broke. Over the course of three years, we made some money, expanded the team and got some 300 million views online and spent a lot of time thinking how much success we could have had had we called ourselves East India Bakchod. My fellow comedians in EIC—Kunal Rao, Sapan Verma, Sahil Shah, Atul Khatri, Azeem Banatwalla and Angad Singh Ranyal—remain my closest friends in the industry, even though some define them as ‘leftist liberals that are anti-national vermins who should all lose citizenship of India’.You may recognize me from there. In 2017, I left East India Comedy in pursuit of making more money because my wife caused two kids to appear magically (I only have a vague idea how) and god knows we needed the money, which I succeeded in making till March 2020. We’ll come back to that… I also toured a live stand-up comedy show in 14 countries called Rant of the Pant—where I ranted about important issues that I didn’t understand, preceded by my Amazon Prime Special, My Baby Thinks I’m Funny, where I used my son’s birth for profit and jokes, and my 2018 Amazon Prime Special, Make India Great Again, where I tried to make political jokes that wouldn’t get me killed and ones which turned into political jokes that were not as sharp as I wanted them to be.

You may recognize me from there.You may have also seen me on my appearances in news debates—which I stopped doing as frequently in 2019 because I released a stand-up clip making fun of news debates and coincidentally, they stopped calling me. You won’t recognize me from there.For a considerably long time—till about 2019—I used to make a lot of political jokes. That’s when I realized I have kids and a family and despite what people will tell you about freedom of speech in India, it’s not as free as the dumb may think. Despite constantly attempting to be neutral in my jokes, I was not neutral enough for some people. Because for these people unless you LOVE and ADORE and WORSHIP their dear leader (whichever leader it happens to be at that time), you are funded by a foreign government or a rival political party and should promptly move to Kazakhstan. Who will pay for your tickets to these countries is a question they are not willing to answer.I’ve been accused of being a fan of the other party by every other party. The BJP fans called me a Congress agent, Congress fans called me a BJP agent and the AAP fans called me for donations.

Currently, I have received no donations from any of these parties, which is really disappointing. By their own logic, I should be on the payroll of every political party in India. Not for the first time though, making political jokes comes with wonderful psychos sending you death threats. I had received the same in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 with clockwork regularity—like renewing an annual contract with murderers. I took them on the chin because I’ve never been a fan of life in the first place; I mean I love living, it’s great, but I’m not too afraid of the alternative. And then came 2019.In December 2019, I received 19 death threats for a ‘political’ joke I had made in 2017. It shows how long it takes for some people to understand—or in this case completely misunderstand—a joke. Two years is the time period it took their brains to comprehend what I was (not) trying to say. The threats detailed how I would be killed as well as various creative methods that would be applied. One man said, ‘Saale tera sarr kaat ke football khelega mein [I will cut off your head and play football with it].’It’s nice of this man to promote sports in India, especially football. I imagine Sunil Chhetri (a man I deeply admire) would have mixed feelings about such a threat: on one end it is a psychopath threatening to kill another human being, but on the other hand, it might be a good advertisement for Indian Super League. Imagine it: man threatens me that he’ll chop off my head and play football with it. He does. My head rolls down, he paints it black and white, kicks it, a whistle goes off and 22 players kick my dead head around for 90 minutes, interspersed with advertising for products related to heads: shampoos, rackets, etc. It could lead to what I didn’t really get much of in life: viewership.Also, my head is quite nicely shaped to be a football and the lack of hair ensures there’s a consistent surface area—barring my nose and lips, which I’m assuming are pretty disposable once my head is chopped off. Obviously, I was not this relaxed at the time I received those death threats.

A lot of the threats came from men holding swords and guns (which may indicate what the joke was about)—not joking—as if their Facebook display picture was showing me the suspect’s face and mode of attack, kind of like Street Fighter or Tekken. (Yes, I’m old and refuse to update these references to Dragon Ball FighterZ or Virtua Fighter) . The worst part about the whole thing was the date: 31 December 2019, i.e., New Year’s Eve. My only resolution that year was to not die. It’s not an ideal way to bring in the new year—10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…MURDER!—but it sort of typified 2019 for me. The year had been a bit of a challenge, to say the least, on a professional (as talked about above), personal (will discuss in a future book/stand-up show), emotional, financial, global and the local front. Everything was aligned to push me up against a wall. And through the year, I looked at 2020 with hope. Mathematically, aesthetically, it’s such a wonderful figure. It exemplifies perfect vision, a perfect score in archery (I think) and my second favourite format of cricket. It’s also a leap year and a leap year implies joy by its definition. Frogs leap, you leap for joy, a leap of hope—it implies flight and jumping, all joyful things. I decided to get fitter (I did), lose weight (I did), get more focused (I did), more relaxed (I did) and expected 2020 to be the best year of my life. And I know many people who felt that way—the year itself inspired this thought. By the time the year actually caught on, most of humanity was wishing we had the option to leap over the entire year. While protests rang out across India and many parts of the world for different reasons, trade wars escalated and de-escalated, Russia and Saudi Arabia fought over oil prices and fire raged in Australia, we felt the chaos across the world, but somehow most of us could deal with it. Then somebody decided they wanted to eat a bat soup, mildly flavored with pangolin faeces… And everything changed, arguably, forever.

Both these things—the threats and the pandemic—combined to help me realize one essential truth: I have two kids, one wife and a hefty EMI to pay. I have to remain alive and I have to pay off my loan. That’s the reason I’m writing this book—to help me pay a small portion of my monthly EMI. Given books barely make money, this will help pay about 72 per cent of one month’s EMI. If you’re bored and want to do some math, this can help you figure out how much I got paid for this book and how much my EMI is and, in consequence, my net worth.I would also like to convince you through this book that I should be PM (one of the PMs mentioned earlier) and enumerate the reasons why. Because let’s be honest, there’s nothing more profitable than politics. You either make money illegally or you earn power legally and both are abundantly rich currencies. Additionally, if you are PM and someone sends you a death threat, then that person can be tried for sedition. And that would be a massive upgrade from having to report threats on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube and occasionally getting no response. So, please vote for me in the next election. I promise to be the best Particulate Matter this nation has never seen.

small thoughts

News debates seem to be losing a bit of steam in the public discourse which usually means they’re going to get more desperate to make them relevant, which means we all better watch out. With that in mind, I propose some rules for news debates in India. These could also be the rules for advertisers; even though they rarely let ethics overrule reach, they advertise on my YouTube as well.Either way, here are some simple rules that should be followed: Every person in a debate gets to talk and the sentence has to be more than, ‘Let me speak, please.’ If they’re not, then the anchor has to pay for 100 minutes of free international talk time for the panellists.

• If the anchor talks for more than 50 per cent of the debate, they have to forego 51 per cent of their salary for 50 per cent of the year.

• If the number of panellists in a debate is more than the members of a cricket team, that debate shall hereby have to be called a cacophony or a chaos or a mela and not a debate. • If the words ‘anti-national’, ‘Pakistan’, ‘China’ are mentioned on a debate not involving the above three topics, then each panellist gets a round trip to Beijing (paid window seat as a throw-in).

• The anchor should be free to mute any panellist they deem worthy because while a lot of abuse gets thrown toward the anchors, a lot of panellists on news debates are rough

• If an anchor shares more than three bits of false news in a week, then the panellists can spread four bits of false news about the anchor without any legal repercussions.• Viewers have the discretion to not watch debates.

Okay bye.

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