In his memoir, Emmy-winning comedian Vir Das retraces his unpredictable journey with sharp wit and aching honesty; the book tells the story about growing up different, staying defiant, and finding one's tribe.
The best thing about reading Vir Das’s The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits (HarperCollins India) is that it’s the ultimate two-for-one deal, a dynamic double feature. While you’re absorbing the roughly 250-page memoir, your mind instantly becomes the stage for a full-blown Vir Das stand-up routine. You’re reading the pages, of course, but the dominant voice you hear is his: a phenomenon now internationally recognised after multiple specials, viral interviews, and an International Emmy award.
Comic artists often write in their ‘on-stage,’ performative voice, and The Outsider is no exception; it makes the reading experience as much a comedy performance as it is an intimate story of Das’s life. It is part-travelogue and part-love letter, and utterly soaked in nostalgia for a bygone era. We start the journey into Das’s whirlwind life when he is in Cozumel, Mexico, stranded visaless on an island, following a not-so-stellar comic performance on a cruise ship.
Subsequent chapters delve into his time at The Lawrence School, Sanawar; his childhood in Lagos, Nigeria; his teenage years in the bylanes of Chitra Vihar and at DPS, Noida; and even his key role in a college production of War & Peace at Knox College, Illinois. And as we move through the book, the realisation dawns: Das stranded visaless in Mexico was not even the tip of the iceberg.
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This is a man who has suffered blackout beatings by hockey sticks before he hit puberty, faked appendicitis (which led to the removal of a perfectly healthy organ), dated a stripper, and even been called a ‘terrorist’ by national media. We also see him addressing the elephant in the room — being cancelled after his show “Two Indias” performance, and his subsequent Emmy win. The comic, let’s put it politely, has lived a full life. The ‘material’, as they say in comedy parlance, is definitely all there for him to work with.
An ode to the 1980s and 1990s
Running throughout all these travails and travels with Das, one thing did manifest itself consistently: he was always standing out and looking in. He was the ‘misfit’ and the ‘outsider’. This self-definition manifests in key moments, from his youth to his career: his refusal to quietly take beatings from bullying seniors in Sanawar, instead retorting with his now signature wit; his choice to study theatre in an American college while his contemporaries pursued the predictable tech/doc/MBA route; and later, his refusal to reduce himself to ‘this guy on that show’ by declining stereotypical brown character roles on American television. He simply never fit the mould.
Many of the incidents and references mentioned in the book will be familiar to those who follow Das’s work on stage. The writing is sharp, observational and dripping with acerbic, self-deprecatory wit. In one of the initial chapters, he writes, “Many Indian kids from my generation had two states of being: high alert ninja…and dead. My parents, however, never hit me, not once. They hired someone else to do it for them.”
The Outsider is a lovelorn ode to the 1980s and 1990s. It immerses the reader in the world of STD booths — there’s a joke in the book about it not being a store selling chlamydia — cassette players, international phone calls that cost Rs 1,000, and rides on a Hero Puch through the roads of Delhi. These were the days when TGIF was the place for a date, and Blue Frog was the crucible in which modern Indian indie music was forged in the 2000s. What truly makes this memoir memorable is that, amidst all the charming nostalgia and postcards to the past, it maintains a perfect balance between the highs and the lows. For all the drama and exaggerated cinematic scope of his past, what grounds the book is Das’s unflinching honesty and authentic voice. His comedy works because it stems from a personal space; the memoir is an extension of the same.
The ultimate misfit
Das documents his failures with equal panache as he does his success. In spite of the Emmy and the global recognition that has come his way, Das still remains rooted to his origins. He tears up, like most Indians would when there is an Amitabh Bachchan or SRK in the mix. “I teared up. Mr Bachchan said my name on KBC. By the way he says 5000 names a week on the show. If you are Indian you know what it means to you. If you are not, it feels like Dylan wrote a song about you. I played it on my TV and recorded it on my phone,” writes Das. The fact that Shah Rukh Khan called him after Das got cancelled finds an honorary mention in the book.
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These moments of vulnerability land hard as they reiterate the book’s central, unifying theme: a message that moves beyond fame into the far more relatable territory of finding acceptance. Das has found his tribe: all his shows are sold out. He is now directing a film, Happy Patel, produced by Aamir Khan. It only took him being cancelled, winning an Emmy, and getting an FIR.
This memoir speaks directly to everyone who has ever struggled to fit in, whether they blossomed late, peaked early, or experienced a midlife crisis that turned into an epiphany. Das, the ultimate misfit, has created a whole new band for others like him. The message is clear and comforting: “it’s okay to be a misfit or an outsider; you will eventually find your tribe.” In fact, he’s built a new table in the high school hierarchy where the misfits of the world can safely, and peacefully, unite.
