Vir Das was dead against writing his memoir. That’s exactly why you should read it

“I was dead against writing a memoir, to be very honest,” he adds. “I was made to by my American agents, who were like, ‘You’ve won an Emmy, now write a memoir.’ I said I would do it if they let me write a book about failure, about cluelessness.” Das doesn’t want you to read his book and imagine he’s a guy who has got it all figured out. He’s walking you through his life, his dizzying highs and his palpably scary lows to remind you that, even after selling out the NSCI Dome in 20 minutes, winning an Emmy, writing a memoir, being cancelled for sedition, writing jokes for Shah Rukh Khan, writing and directing a movie for Aamir Khan… he’s still the kid in the corner of the party, wondering “How the hell did I get invited to this thing?”

If there’s one thing I would envy Das for, it’s his conviction in his craft. Not everyone can sit on a film script for 12 years, believing—dare I say, knowing—that it’s ahead of its time, but that’s essentially the origin story of Happy Patel. Das wanted to write a Johnny English-esque Indian spy comedy, the sort of ridiculously silly movies that still take the action very seriously. In 2010, when he first went out to narrate the script for various producers and directors, he was met with blank stares. Then came Tiger, Pathaan and the Indian spy universe, and Happy Patel’s alternative edginess finally had a mainstream reference point. Aamir Khan, whom Das hadn’t spoken to since Delhi Belly, scooped it up and the film is teased to release in 2026. True to form, Das isn’t sitting with his legs up; he is still very much at the drawing board, figuring out his next big thing. There’s a YouTube series in the pipeline he can’t talk much about, except that “no platform would have the guts to greenlight it, so we went ahead and made it anyway. We know the audience is there, so we’re just taking it directly to them.”