Dots (2021)
Genre: Stand-up Comedy, Social Commentary
Director: Peter Orton
Writer: Ahir Shah
Star: Ahir Shah
British comedian Ahir Shah mixes philosophical inquiry, personal examination, and sweet gags in his first ever stand-up special, exploring identity, faith, family, and the desire for certainty in uncertain times.
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[lively string music]
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[cheers and applause]
Hello! Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of London.
[cheers and applause]
Hello, thank you very much for coming out this evening. You all right? [audience shouts] Yeah!
Fantastic. Pleasure to be here, particularly after the year we’ve had. Before this, it was always the little things that got me down, you know? Insignificant in and of themselves. Just these little things, like my own phone autocorrects my name to the word “shit.”
[laughter]
It autocorrects “Ahir” to “shit,” you understand? Not “Shar” to “shit,” and you’d assume that it’d be “Shar” to “shit,” right? Same two first letters, four-letter word, but it autocorrects my first name to the word “shit.” It autocorrects my surname to the word “shag.” Now…
[laughter]
When do you ever use your full name in a text message apart from ludicrously formal situations? So the only time this has ever actively impacted me in practice is when I was like, “Dear Jerry, terribly sorry. “The rent’s going to be late again this month. Feel free to call me, Shit Shag.”
[laughter]
We’ll clear up some of the obvious before beginning. I realize that I sound as though I’ve been colonized by my own voice.
[laughter]
If at any stage during this show you wonder what exactly this accent is, this is the most dangerous accent in human history.
[laughter]
This was the voice that did that shit. And totally got away with it too. Sorry, it’s just that the way that the internalized class system in Britain works is that everything that comes out of my mouth will to your ears sound vaguely plausible, all right? And that’s why several centuries ago, a bunch of people who sound like me were able to get on a boat and travel over to a bunch of people who look like me, and the second they got there, they were just like, “Tally ho!” And everyone there was like, “Shit, maybe this is his land.” “I mean, he sounds convinced and that’s an excellent hat.” I am a British Indian man.
[cheers and applause]
You’re correct to be impressed. We’re crushing it. This is genuinely true. Out of every group in the UK at the moment– this is not just minority groups– out of every group in the UK at the moment, British Indians are now on average the wealthiest and best educated, right? We are taking–yeah, it’s true. We are taking increasingly prominent roles in the worlds of business, finance, and politics, but we don’t tend to be flashy with it, so we do it in a slightly behind the scenes way, but as such that if you ever were to pull back the curtain, you would realize fundamentally who’s really pulling the strings but, like– basically, Jews are catching a lot of our heat. You got all these demented conspiracy nutters going off on one about the Rothschilds. Meanwhile, the Patels are just like… Why do you think it’s called “the Illuminati?” ‘Cause we run shit using looms, naan, and tea. Wake up. So I am a British Indian man. It tends to be obvious here. It’s not obvious everywhere. I’ll give you an example, right? Last proper holiday I had was to Mexico, right? I went out to Mexico with my girlfriend at the time. Now my girlfriend at the time was white. Probably still is. Not checked in a while. Feels likely. People so rarely trade up to a more interesting difficulty setting.
[laughter, cheers and applause]
And she is white and countryside, so like, double white, right? I’m talking full, like, Celtic alabaster, burned in moonlight situation. She was so white that when the two of us used to walk down the street together holding hands, it looked like at least one of us was trying to make a point, right? Listen. She speaks Spanish. Now, I don’t speak a word of Spanish, so she did all the talking in Mexico, right? But she looks like that. I look Mexican… it turns out. I had no idea. My conception of what Mexicans look like, probably true of most of you, largely taken from American film and telly, right? Turns out they only cast actors who come from the ethnic groups found towards the north of the country. You go out to the Caribbean coast as we did, and suddenly everyone looks like this Paki, so you’ve just got a bunch of people coming up to me chatting in breakneck Spanish ’cause they’re convinced I’ve taken my beloved on a trip to my ancestral homeland. And I’m just there like “Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, queso, help.”
You have not known suspicion until you have seen sets of eyes bearing into you as if to say, “Who is this silent Mexican? “And why does he insist on conducting all of his business via his albino PA?” It’s good to get away, though, right? It’s good to get away. You got to get away in order to find out who you are, and the trick is to come back the day before you realize that who you are is an alcoholic whose second language is English slower. So I came back, and I was back on tour. Now when I’m on tour, I’ve got an old phone of my dad’s that I use as, like, an MP3 player. There’s no SIM card in it, but it’s a good way to do pre-show music. It is still linked to his calendar, and I discovered this a few years ago on the 21st of March in Sheffield when I handed this phone over to the tech guy and we both simultaneously saw an iCal notification pop up that said, “Tomorrow, 10:00 p.m. Ahir conceived.” I already knew that I was conceived on the 22nd of March. I didn’t know the time admittedly, right? But I knew. ‘Cause years ago, Dad had told me that most likely it happened on his and Mum’s wedding anniversary according to the Hindu calendar, right? Now that’s a lunar calendar, so it doesn’t map neatly onto the Gregorian, but in 1990 so happened to be the 22nd of March. And I love this as a fact about my parents’ marriage because I think it displays exactly the right blend of the pre-modern and the post-modern, right? My parents are sufficiently post-modern that they have iCal notifications, which sync wirelessly across multiple Apple devices and sufficiently pre-modern that they fuck according to the moon. Yes, please. Life goals. By the way, checked every other entry in that calendar ’cause I was convinced he’d have put other batshit stuff in there. Other than the date of my conception, my father makes note of three things. Everyone’s birthday, fair enough. Day he needs to get the car serviced, sure. Anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death. It’s not an Apple preset. I think my father is the most certain person I’ve ever met, and recently, as I’m sure we all have, I’ve been thinking a lot about certainty, about its necessity, its utility– in my case, often its absence. And I think you can have certainty in all sorts of ways and Dad’s got the lot, right? My father has a cast-iron political ideology that he’s convinced is the right way for the entire world to move forward. He is married to the only woman he’s ever been with. He’s like, “This is my wife. These are my children. That just is the case until I die.” And when he does die, he’s genuinely not frightened because he’s convinced he’s gonna come back as a sparrow or some shit, right? Hinduism, cuz. Yeah. Imagine that. Unshakable ideology, unconditional love, unquestioned faith. I am a single atheist who votes Lib Dem out of a lack of imagination. And if you’re not British and you don’t know who the Lib Dems are, don’t worry. Neither do half of the people in this room. That’s why it’s so pathetic.
[cheers and applause]
Used to have some of the certainties, but not anymore, you know? I feel like when you lose your certainties, it’s like you’re untethered, you’re unmoored, right? You’re like a tent with all of the pegs taken out hoping that the winds won’t pick up and blow you away until things just start to make sense again, and that’s basically where I am at the moment. And it’s an odd position for me to be in because I now have an amplified voice, and amplified voices are expected to opine on shit when there’s absolutely no need, right? Like, okay. Last time I was at the Edinburgh Festival, after a show, my publicist came up to me and said, “Ahir, if you win the award for best show “at the entire festival tomorrow, “then a journalist from a broadsheet newspaper wants to write a big feature all about you.” I thought, “Oh, this is amazing, right? It’d be very good for the career going forward.” I was like, “Oh, please tell me, what is this feature about?” He’s like, “Oh, they want to write a feature on why you feel it’s acceptable for you to say the word ‘Paki’ on stage.” Oh, cool, fun, please, tell me a bit more about this journalist, right? I was asking for fun. It was obviously a white woman, all right? I mean, come on. So anyone who wasn’t white wouldn’t have needed to ask, and a white man would have been too nervous. So deductive reasoning is easy, free, and available to everyone. Get involved, all right? So you don’t need to be Shah-rlock Holmes to pull this stuff off.
[cheers and applause]
Or as I prefer to be known, Magnum Pak-I. Why do I think it’s acceptable? There is an involved answer, I suppose. You know, it’s like all of my heroes come from the African American stand-up tradition. Lots of them do stuff with word reclamation of words that have been used to hurt them. I thought, “Why not do the same on behalf of that word that’s been used to hurt me?” But what’s the point in the involved answer? Why is the question so fascinating? Why do I think– I consulted a mirror. That Paki didn’t seem offended when I said it, neither did this one. And that’s the thing. As a member of a minority, you’re expected to have opinions on behalf of people who aren’t you, right? Quite often when you’re in a minority, people will assume you have opinions that you don’t. After several media appearances in this country, I have received emails from strangers asking why I want to impose Sharia Law on the West… which, as the atheist son of Hindu parents, makes me feel ever so naughty. Sharia, moi? No, no. We’re expected to have opinions on everything now. Social media has done this to us, the Internet more broadly. I feel like any time I’m on any website within about ten seconds, I’m in a comment section where someone’s just going, “Define what you mean by gender in the contemporary world!” I’m like, “I came here to learn how to make a risotto.” I know that’s very important, but right now I was mainly concerned about stock. That’s why I miss romantic love, I’m telling you. At its best, romantic love means finding that one person with whom in private you don’t have to be constantly woke.
[laughing]
Oh, yes, please. Yes, please. Sorry, just the acknowledgement that you’re both probably just flawed human beings trying your best, and so you can afford to give one another the benefit of the doubt occasionally, which no one else will do for you anymore in this fucking world. Yes, please! Be still, my beating dick! Oh, God.
[cheers and applause]
Really, single favorite thing in the world. I’m standing front of the hob stirring something. I hear her come home from work and hang her coat up, and I turn over my shoulder and say, “Hello, darling. “How was work today? “How many stereotypes were you forced to pretend have no basis in fact?” Oh, my day? Thank you. I learned how to make us this lovely risotto, and it was a fucking minefield. I love curry, my parents are incredibly pushy, and I’m excellent at maths. In case you were wondering what mine were. Can’t keep up. I’ve had to stop reading “The Guardian” ’cause I felt like every time I got to the end of “The Guardian,” I was just like… “But what happened?” “I get how everyone felt.” And then during COVID, “The Guardian” got very good at reporting on exactly what was happening and I was like, “Can we get back to feelings, actually?” Maybe that’s why I’m so unsure of everything. I’m not a news junkie anymore the way that I used to be, but I just can’t hack it ’cause what can I affect on a global level? I mean, like, look, the Arab Spring was a decade ago, and it’s still fucked. I don’t think my tweets are gonna fix it, you know? I’ve read that the other day, mate. The Arab Spring was ten years ago. I thought how long can a crisis conceivably last? And then I looked at my own personal life, and I was like, “Yeah, okay. That makes sense.” Even on a narrower scale, what am I supposed to keep up with? British politics? I can’t follow British politics anymore because all British politics does now is fill me with a sense of abiding shame that my ancestors got conquered by a ruling class this shit.
[cheers and applause]
Honestly, sister, my great, great, great, great, great, great granddad basically got the shit kicked out of him by Boris Johnson, our prime minister who contracted the coronavirus, theoretically got better, and ever since has looked like a ghost whose unfinished business is fucking your wife. [laughter] It’s fine. Oh, I try to follow it, but then, you know, the country’s not run by or for people like me. It’s run by keep calm and carry on people. You know the sorts of people I mean? It’s on their tea tow– ooh, “keep calm and carry on.” That’s their mantra. And they are deeply suspicious of those of us who can correctly pronounce the word mantra. What’s this obsession with the Second World War for absolutely no reason? Oh, very well alone as though anyone ever actually achieved anything that way. Ooh, keep calm and carry on. Keep calm and carry on. Keep calm and carry on. Never remind me how many genocides it took to undergird my relative prosperity. I should be more interested in politics. Politics is interested in me, so I should be interested in it, right? I live in an inherently politicized body. I’m a person of color.
[cheers and applause]
Everywhere. Bro, if I use a chocolate-flavored condom, it looks like I’m putting my dick into my dick. Person of color. Not sure when that one happened, by the way. Felt like I spent most of my life being told that “colored” was one of the most offensive things I could conceivably be called. Put my “out of office” on for, like, two days, got back, and someone was just like, “Ahir, speaking as a person of color, how do you feel about–” “What, fam? What? What? What?” “Oh, no, everyone thinks it’s fine now.” Absolutely “Matrix”-ed. Person of color. [giggles] What a fascinating way to homogenize the experience of the majority of people on planet Earth.
[laughter, applause]
[cheers and applause]
I’m indistinguishable from a Black woman. I know why it happens. Look, most people’s hearts are in the right place. We’ve all got a limited amount of bandwidth up here, and we try and do the right thing with it, and I guess, to me, it just seems like white people got super good at acknowledging the level of diversity that exists within white people and then the line got drawn ’cause it got too hard, right? And it’s very fun for me ’cause I’m friends with lots of these young, wet, liberal whites, and watching them go through the daily mental gymnastics is fucking hilarious, right? Every day they’re just like, “Right, okay, so, “there are white men and white women, “but obviously lots of white people don’t necessarily “fall into the conventional gender binary, “so we need to be a lot more accepting of that going forward. “That’s only right, and obviously, “there are white heterosexuals and white homosexuals, “but white sexuality is actually better understood “as a spectrum where all white people “fall on a different part of that spectrum, “and I think that the way that you remember that “about the spectrum is that if you mix together “every color in the spectrum, you get white, right? “And I think– “I think I’m right in saying “that currently at the last update, “I think currently– and I haven’t checked Twitter “in half an hour, so please don’t murder me “if I got this wrong, but I think– “I think I’m right in saying “that there are currently 7,000 different types “of white people. “And then there’s the Dothraki horde. “And you’re one of them, Ahir. “You, Jackie Chan, Beyoncé, all the same. “If you guys could just light your swords on fire “and charge into the army of the dead for us, “that’d be great. “So sorry. I thought we’d made it clear. “Your job is to be expendable so that our characters can develop.” You will never know how clear that was made to me. Paradoxically, my world view feels a lot more malleable than it did when I was, like, a teenager, you know? I feel like my dad’s got the other way. Just more solid grounding on everything. Ah, for the certainty of an 18 year old again. Do you remember that? Just being sure of stuff. Ah. Everything was black and white apart from me. Cigarettes are right up there with the best forms of certainty going in this world, right? 20 moments every day where there was something deeply and profoundly wrong with me, and I knew exactly how to fix it. You ever given that degree of simplicity with any other problem in your life? Don’t think so. I had to stop. I had to stop. And I’ve gone full post-modern by the way ’cause I said I’ve stopped smoking. More accurately, people who love me kept yelling that they were worried I was going to die, so now I have to smoke a fucking USB stick. It looks shit, but you can’t tell your mum you’d rather be a dead legend than a living nerd.
[cheers and applause]
I don’t get–everyone got very anti-smoking very quickly. I got successfully peer pressured out of something that 15 years ago I was peer pressured into. I had to stop. Basically, what happened was my girlfriend never liked me smoking, which is obviously legit, so eventually I stopped smoking, and then six months later, she realized that she actually didn’t like me. Which is equally legit, but admittedly, tougher habit to crack. I don’t know if anyone in the room has ever attempted to vape themselves. Trying to quit my personality for a full 30 years now, and it’s proved impossible at every hurdle. I keep forgetting to charge it. I keep forgetting to charge it, so I have to carry this massive portable charging block with me everywhere I go. It’s fucking huge ’cause you can put an iPad and a phone and everything into it, and I only ever remember when I’m on a train, so I sit down, plug everything in, push a button on the side, it all lights up at once. Every so often, a commuter shoots me a look from the corner of their eye ’cause for a microsecond they’re convinced I’m about to go full Allahu Akbar, but… It’s not even just white people. Other brown people are like, “Fuck me. This Paki is going full Allahu Akbar in front of everyone.” I tried to explain this to my partner, but she didn’t get it ’cause she was covered in loads of tiny brown bits, and those are known as “freckles” and are associated with being cute, whereas I am covered in one massive brown bit, and that’s called skin and is associated with being see it, say it, sorted. See, I have to say for the Americans– so on our trains, they say, “See it, say it, sorted.” I know on yours they say, “See something, say something.”
That’s the phrase over there. And it’s not like, “See something, say something, sorted.” I think it’s more “See something, say something, shot.” This thing’s just surgically attached to my bottom lip now. ‘Cause it’s not like a cigarette, which has a definitive end. This is basically the world going, “Hey, Ahir, you know that air you were breathing anyway? Do you want drugs in it?” Yes. And cigarettes were my reset, you know? Every so often, just five minutes where this could stop, refresh, defragment. I don’t have that anymore, so all of the thoughts just pile up on top of one another and all of the uncertainty compounds and it’s no good for me. I’m making positive steps, guys. I’m back on medication. I’m back on my bullshit. Yeah, yeah, basically what happened was, right, for a year, I came off antidepressant medication, and it turns out that that is a pro depressant. I’m a smart man. You’d think I’d have been able to work that out, but no. It’s interesting, you know, the world keeps turning even if you’re not taking part in elements of all of it, you know? And you hop back on the wagon and things change, not all of them for the worst. Some things change for the better. My pharmacist takes AmEx now. So now I get air miles on antidepressants… which is the single most millennial thing I’ve ever done. Who knew that a side effect of mental illness would be business class? I had no idea. And I love to travel, and I love to get a deal, so I wanna brag about what a good deal I’m gonna get on my travels, but I have to do that with you because I can’t very well get on a plane and the person sat next to me is like, “Hey, so why’d you decide to take this flight?” “I’m suicidal.” Every day I take a vitamin B supplement because I don’t eat meat. I take a vitamin D supplement because even the sun in this country hates me. And I take an antidepressant because I’ve never been overly fond of myself either, and it’s odd doing three things daily to make yourself feel how other people presumably just feel the whole time, right? Just wanted to be the sort of person whose internal monologue wasn’t always on caps lock. And no, none of it’s a cure, obviously, but it helps. It helps. I hate that I’m that easy to work out. I mean, I wake up every morning thinking, “Oh, another day in the life of a tortured artist.” I go to the bathroom, neck three tablets, and go, “No, it’s just another day in the life of a sad, brown, vegetarian, really.” It’s much less exciting. But none of us like to feel as though we’re simple enough for the simple answers to work on us, right? We all hope to be that bit more complex than other people. It’s like whenever I go to my doctor and he says, “Oh, do you know what’s really good for your mental health, “is a better diet and exercise. Have you ever considered a better diet and exercise?” And every time he says “better diet and exercise,” I just think, “Please be lying.” I am willing to try anything else. What was your suggestion? Sorry, an apple and a jog? Poison apple, jog off a cliff. Job done. And then I went through several very difficult months in the spring of 2019, and I started eating fruit and going to the gym, and I felt great. Fucking livid. Isn’t that rubbish? All of the trite bullshit just turns out to be true, and that’s why it became trite bullshit in the first place. Every cliche is just the grain of sand that is at the center of a pearl of something genuinely valuable, right? This will piss you off. Do you know the single best piece of advice you could be given in life for roughly 80% of your problems? Keep calm and carry on.
[cheers and applause]
The truest way to stay sane on the face of this Earth is framed on the walls of cretins. At 18, I think I genuinely thought that year on year, everything would just make more and more sense until finally it’s just like, “Bah, we’ve got it now.” Fucking moron. I think I know where that lie comes from there. I learned how to swim at a place called Vale Farm Sports Centre in northwest London, right? We used to get the coach there from Lyon Park Infant School. Felt like it took longer than the Trans-Siberian Railway. I looked it up the other day. 11 minutes. But at that age, I’d experienced a lot less time, so time felt like it took longer while passing, right? And I learned how to swim in a small, warm, shallow pool where it felt like there was one person constantly and vigilantly looking out for just me, and when I got just good enough at that, I was moved into a much deeper, larger, colder pool where the one person who was apparently tasked with looking after everyone felt as though they were absolutely miles away with their back turned half the time, and I was taught to feel proud of myself because that meant I was growing up. Growing up is the cold pool, and the only advantage of the cold pool is less piss. I’d make that trade. I would be slathered in piss… for the security of my childhood once more. I can’t have it anymore ’cause I’m a grown-up now, and not even a grown-up who enjoys being slathered in piss. I’m a grown-up now. We’ve not even got a good word for it in English. I was watching an Italian comedian with English subtitles, and he had a whole bit about growing up. Do you know the Italian word for growing up? Crescendo. Ain’t that better? Crescendo. There’s some optimism to crescendo. It makes more sense because it’s literally what happens when crash-endo.
[cheers and applause]
I wanted to crescendo, but instead I grew up. And I don’t mean in that sort of “adulting” way that tedious millennials enjoy complaining about. You know, you get people who are fully, like, 32 years old going like, “Oh, it’s so difficult adulting. Oh, I hate adulting.” But what they actually mean is, “Oh, I hate not being able to outsource domestic labor to my mother.” Well, it turns out ironing’s hard. Why isn’t there a woman to take for granted? Learning what interest rates are is hard, but it’s not adulting. My dad has set two corpses on fire. That’s adulting.
[laughter]
For Hindu reasons. So to be absolutely clear, in our culture, if you’re the eldest male child, then when your mum and dad pop their clogs, then it’s your responsibility to… [clicks tongue, whooshes] Two is the max you can get away with. You start trying to move on the great uncles and aunts, and people are like, “Brother, you into this.” He set fire to his father a very long time ago. More recently set fire to his mother. And I’m the male child in my family, right? So theoretically, that’s my responsibility, and I had a conversation with my mum about this. It’s one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had ’cause my mum sat me down and said, “Ahir, I am perfectly happy with the idea of you setting fire to your father.” “However, on a personal level, “I would rather your big sister set fire to me in the name of gender equality.” Now, I really liked that because that is an entirely understandable and indeed admirable sentiment to have, but I also know my sister very well, and I’m approximately 1 billion percent confident that her feminism stops at exactly the point where she is called upon to immolate the corpse of her dead mum.
[laughter and applause]
I obviously hope this doesn’t happen for a very long time, but I can imagine decades from now sat opposite a table with her having the most morbid admin chat of our lives. And I’m just like, “Didi, you know that Mummy wanted you to be the one to… [clicks tongue]” And she’s like, “Yeah, Ahir, I did know that. “Did you know that, on average, women are paid less for equal work than men?” “Yes, I did know that. What’s your point?” “Buy a lighter.” Think Dad had the right mix of everything. Yeah, the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern. My father was sealed into a metal tube and shot at hundreds of miles an hour across continents in order to land in India, go to a temple, recite the sacred mantras, and set fire to the body of a loved one as countless generations had before him and then leave that temple and let me know exactly how it went over WhatsApp. It’s everything, isn’t it? Everything from every era sort of comes together and makes everything else that little bit more manageable. It’s all valuable, right? The pre-modern stuff included. We give it short shrift comparatively now, but it is important, right? Take for example, these mantras. These are, like, holy Hindu phrases that give you some sense of grounding, what to think about, some purpose. I started reciting them myself again like I used to when I was a child, so in the mornings I’ll be like, [recites mantra in Sanskrit] For white people, that’s like, when you recite stuff like #liveyourbestlife.
[laughter]
So… [speaks Sanskrit] I think is Sanskrit for “You just do you, babes.” Belief helps, I think. Faith matters. And that’s not a maybe for Dad. That’s a certainty. And there’s nothing as soothing as that. As with everything, not really sure anymore. I call myself an atheist, but I am very worried I am very close to becoming intensely religious… Which would be so annoying ’cause it’s definitely bollocks. Here’s the thing, right? You as a human being have all of these questions about life, the universe, and everything, right? That’s normal. Turns out number of questions grows exponentially over time. I am a young person. I feel like I’ve already got so many questions, and it feels like year on year, there are just gonna be more and more questions coming at me until eventually that snowball turns into a fucking avalanche, and I know that during that entire process, religion is there being like…
[cheers and applause]
“When you’re ready. “So I just couldn’t help but overhear “that you’ve got some questions. “Uh, thought you might like to know we have existed “for literally thousands of years “to provide literally every answer. “So if you ever feel like thumbing through a brochure, they are all bestsellers in their own right.” Where did you get the answers? “Don’t worry about it.”
[applause]
No, no, I think I would actually quite like to know. Where did you get all of those answers? “We made them up to control people, fine. “Why is that bad? Why is that bad? “Haven’t you found total intellectual liberty “paradoxically alienating, “and wouldn’t you willfully give up “some of your precious control in exchange for answers even if that did mean a net loss of freedom?” Yes. You’re like, “Look. I don’t know what the sea is.” So I’m stood by a beach, right? And I’m watching waves come closer and closer to my feet, and I’m thinking, “Yeah, that happens ’cause of “the gravitational effect of the moon “creating a lunar tidal effect “that raises the level of the thing that brings–” based on a GCSE physics lesson that I half listened to about 15 years ago. Why is that better than Poseidon? I’m glad someone knows, but I don’t need to. I’m not a ship’s captain. [scoffs] Why is it better that I know as I do that stars are finite balls of gas light-years away that will eventually extinguish into nothing when I could simply believe as people used to that those dots are holes in the floor of heaven? At least that way, I’d feel less tiny every time I remember I’ll never be able to count them all. I don’t know what a cloud is. None of you do. Be fully honest with yourself. Not one of you is properly confident of what a cloud is. Best guess, certain altitude, water gets fluffy.
[cheers and applause]
Think if I had to believe in something, it’d be Hinduism, which is coincidentally the one I was told was true as a child. It’s the closest to the way that I think that the world works anyway. Favorite part of Hinduism is a thing called moksha. Anyone know what that is? No? You’ve all heard of reincarnation though, right? That’s one of our, like, absolute top ten bangers. So here’s the interesting bit. Reincarnation isn’t the end goal, if you will, right? The idea is you go through all of these circles of birth and rebirth until eventually you fulfill your karma, your duty to such an extent that you get moksha. You get released from the cycle, and your atman can join the universal Brahman in an eternal state of nirvana, and that’s what you actually want. You want the moksha, the release, right? And that’s fascinating to me because it confirms something I’ve long suspected and I think we all suspect at at least some point in our lives, which is the idea that this is the punishment.
[laughter]
[applause]
Not specifically this. In a bit broader sense. I once asked my dad if he honestly believed in reincarnation, and he said to me, “Ahir, look at you and your sister. “I have two already and I’m not dead yet. How could I not believe?” Nice way of thinking of it. I too want religious justification to live vicariously through my children. It’d be great. Why not? Look, I know given the state of the contemporary world, having children could be seen as a selfish act. If I say to you that I’d like to have children one day, all I’m basically saying is that I’d quite like something soft to cuddle during the end time. Mummy and Daddy couldn’t afford to buy you gills. No, the rich parents, they were able to genetically engineer their bubbas to breathe under the water we’re forced to live under now, but Daddy insisted on being an artist, so no gills for you, no. Ooh, but Mummy and Daddy love you so much. We love you so much, and you are going to grow up to be so big and strong so you can fight for us in the resource wars. I often feel quite detached from the present, so to tie myself to an idea of the future, I have started planning the lives of my children who do not exist in creepy detail. Ten out of ten would recommend favorite game, right? So e.g., I attended the University of Cambridge, so my children will be attending the University of Cambridge because the system is awful until you get your foot in the door, and the second you’ve got your foot in the door, you find yourself going, “Fuck me, there’s nice shit on the other side of that door.” We need more Pakis through the door. I mean, look, the walls can’t be the only thing that’s mahogany. Few years ago, I was sat in the senate house in Cambridge watching my friends Tim and Lois collect their doctorates and genuinely thought to myself, “Ah, so sad that I’ll never be in this building again until my kids graduate.” They do not exist, and I am the most pushy Indian father imaginable. I’m definitely gonna be like that though without question ’cause, look, right, I’m a second-generation immigrant, which is like a regular immigrant but Wi-Fi enabled, right? I feel very British and very Indian as a consequence, right? Like, I once saw a world map on a wall and stopped to look at it and thought, “Huh. “Out of every country, Britain and India definitely have the nicest shapes.” Just, like, just the outline is the most instinctively aesthetically appealing to me. [chuckles] Nice. That’s how dumb nationalism makes everyone. The nicest shape. One of them decided the shape of the other one!
[cheers and applause]
I feel very British and very Indian, and Indian people are even better at being British than British people. I don’t know if you knew this, but it is true, right? Think about it. Who’s the most famous Indian ever? Mahatma Gandhi, fair to say? Yeah? Main achievement? Defeated the British empire. Main tactic? Keep calm and carry on. Secondary tactic? No snacks. So I want to make sure that lessons from both sides have passed down to the generations. Otherwise, there’s stuff that will be forgotten. Like, I am, by a considerable margin, a member of the most comfortable generation that has ever existed in the history of my family, and that is a very odd sentence to hear from the mouth of a British millennial, but that’s ’cause no one ever bothers to talk to the shit ton of British millennials who, like me, have parents who were born developing-world poor, right? I’m on HBO. This is smashing it. All right?
[cheers and applause]
To an extent they could never have conceived of when they were children, right? And that is a very important thing to bear in mind. My mum and dad were born fucked, knew it, set their expectations accordingly, and managed to somehow dramatically exceed them. As a consequence, I was born much less fucked in a society where my expectations were set so much higher that I’ve never been able to attain them, and every minor slight now feels like an abject catastrophe, right? And that is an important sense of perspective to bear in mind, so every so often I’ll go back to Wembley and Northwest London where my parents live and I’ll be like, “Oh, Mum, I’ll never get a flat. I’ll never get a flat.” And she’ll be like, “Yeah, you know what else you’ll never get? “Malaria. “That’s good, isn’t it? “That one was genuinely touch and go “for quite a while, yeah. Hey, Ahir, you ever been in a full-blown religious riot?” Been on a “Stop Brexit” march. Not saying that contemporary problems are irrelevant. I’m just saying that a healthy sense of perspective is sometimes in order ’cause I think that that distance between expectation and reality is at the root of a lot of the psychological problems we currently have as a collective, and, by God, they are myriad. They are why therapists are rich and everyone else is a prick. Shortly after I started university, I went on holiday to India with my dad, and my cousin was driving us around this residential area in the city of Ahmadabad in Gujarat. And suddenly out of nowhere, my dad just yells, “Stop the car!” I’ve never done that. I wanna do that so goddamn bad. I’ve never done something– have any of you ever done “stop the car”? I’ve never done a “stop the car.” Multiple times a week I’ll do a, “Here’s fine.”
[cheers and applause]
But I’ve never done a “stop the car.” Oh, I want to do a “stop the car.” I want to do a “stop the car.” I want to do a follow that car.” I wanna do a “stop the car, I want to do a follow that car, and I wanna do a, There’s a 50 in it for you if you get me there in time for the plane.” My dad yells, “Stop the car!” My cousin slams on her brakes. We get out of her car, walk up a pathway, knock on the door of a house. A guy about my dad’s age opens it up, invites us in, sits us down in his living room, and offers us tea. This man’s name is Vijay Sakoni, and I wish him ill. We’ve all met a Vijay Sakoni in our lives, right? You know the sort of guy. Any achievement you’ve got, worthless. He’s got a better achievement. Any story you’ve got, boring. He’s got a better story. You ever heard the phrase, Johnny Two-Shits? all: No.
If you haven’t, take it with you. It’s incredibly useful. Basically, if you’ve had a shit, Johnny’s had two. And Vijay Sakoni was an absolute Jitendra Two-Shits, and I could not stand him… one little bit. And my dad clearly hasn’t seen this guy in ages, just giving him a rundown of how his life’s gone. He’s just like, “Oh, well, this is my son, Ahir. “He’s just started studying for a politics degree. “That’s good, isn’t it? He’s like, “Oh, well, my son did engineering, so why would he waste his time doing something in the arts “when he could do something useful that’s got maths in it? He’s never gonna get a respectable job now.” Good guess. He’s like, “Oh, well, okay. Ahir’s big sister Akanksha, she couldn’t come over to India with us ’cause she just started a new job. She’s only in her mid-20s, but already she’s running the marketing for a company you’ll all have heard of in three countries. Isn’t that an incredible achievement when you’re only in your mid-20s?” “Oh, does she have a husband?” “No, she doesn’t have a husband.” “Oh, then who cares?”
My sister ended up marrying the bloke who lived two doors down from her in her first year halls of residence at university. Finding a husband was heaps easier than finding a good job in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and Vijay Sakoni can suck my balls.
[cheers and applause]
I hate that lad. Now, I’m trying any way I can to just get out of this room. I’m like, “Oh, Mr. Sakoni, could I use your bathroom please?” And he’s like, “Oh, I’d give it a minute. I’ve been twice already.” Eventually, we get out of that house and walked back down the pathway, and I stopped my dad at the foot of the path, and I say, “Dad, why did you bring us to visit this wasteman on our holiday? We’ve got such a limited quantity of time together, and we spaffed an entire afternoon up the wall with this clown.”
And… my dad then proceeded to tell me for the first time the story of an evening that he’d had when he was the age that I am now, where he had gone to a birthday party in the city of Ahmadabad in Gujarat in India, and the person whose birthday it was, their sister had invited over a friend who was on holiday from the UK. That friend was my mum. And my parents met for the first time at Vijay Sakoni’s birthday party on the same sofa where Dad and I had spent our afternoon being told how worthless we were, right? And my dad told me that he and Mum sat on that sofa and hit it off immediately and got out of the house as quickly as possible ’cause Vijay Sakoni’s always been a dickhead, right? They just spent their evening taking long cuts through the streets of Ahmadabad so as not to have to part ways just yet. Within two hours of meeting, were discussing what sort of house to get when they were married. Does anyone fucking do that in the real world? These two people genuinely did once.
And Dad realized that the last stage of Mum’s holiday was going to be taking her to Mumbai, and so he was there thinking like, “Oh, my God, I can’t lose this woman. What the hell am I gonna do?”
And so, the next morning, he just jumped into a cab and was like, “Look, there’s a 50 in it for you if you get me there in time for the plane.”
[cheers and applause]
And the driver was like, “Bruv, it’s rupees. It’s already on 10,000. I don’t give a shit.”
The cab part isn’t true. What actually happened was that the following morning for their first full day together, my mum made my dad drive her 300 miles to the outskirts of Mumbai so that she could inspect the progress of an under construction hydroelectric dam. She doesn’t work in the industry. She was a primary school teacher. Do you ever learn something about your parents, and a bit of you just makes sense? Oh, so that’s why civil mega-projects make my dick tingle. Nice. Eventually, they left Mumbai, went back to Ahmadabad. Dad at the time was doing some freelance graphic design work for Air India, so Mum said, “Oh, well, that means you can get my ticket changed, right? And I can spend more time here in India with you.”
And Dad was like, “Yeah, that’s 100% how being a freelancer works, yeah.”
He just went to the Air India building, demanded to speak to the most senior person he could, and just went, “Paki, I have over promised in a huge way. All right?”
And do you know it, they hooked him up. For free. They changed the ticket. Do you ever wonder how many of our existences are down to the desperate lies of ridiculous men? Only a non-zero percentage. Mine and my sister’s, for sure. And my dad told me that that marked the first chapter of the only love story that he’s ever had, that moment where whatever expectation may have been reality shot past it like a bullet train and never stopped, and my dad doesn’t really swear ’cause he’s awful at it as evidenced by the fact that he once referred to then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as “a dowsh bag”…
In 2012, we’re watching him and Obama debate, and my dad’s just like, “Ahir, this Mitt Romney seems like a real ‘dowsh bag’ to me.” And I’m like, “Mm, mm, mm, mm. “That’s a very cogent point, Father. “In unrelated news, I’m going to go to the other room and ring everyone I’ve ever met.”
Well, my dad don’t really swear, but that day outside that house, he put one hand on my shoulder, used the other to point to the building we’d been in, looked me in the eye and said, “Ahir, Vijay Sakoni is a cunt, and I owe him everything in my life.”
[cheers and applause]
Maybe that’s the only way you can play it, right? Just keep your expectations in check and hope reality comes along with a surprise. Maybe that’s all there is to do ’cause the love story that I had assumed would be my last came to an end. I’m not going to go into the specifics. They are objectively hilarious, and I don’t find them funny.
[laughter]
I’ll give you the short version. Basically, she texted me on Monday, took me for a drink on Tuesday. Then I cried in bed on Wednesday and on Thursday and Friday and Saturday. I chilled on Sunday, as tradition dictates. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I’ve never believed in the one, you know? Worked out that way for Mum and Dad, but that doesn’t seem common if just on a statistical basis, you know? Population of the Earth is 7 1/2 billion, and that’s an exponential increase by the way, right? My dad was born in 1950 when the population of Earth was 2 billion. That is a 5 1/2 billion human being increase within his lifetime alone. And, fair enough, lad’s a shagger, but you can’t put… [laughter] Everything on his doorstep. There are only so many lunar cycles in a year.
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There is still that need and now like that– that fundamental need in all of us that desperately seeks out the other. And you know how fundamental it is to all human beings ’cause it means that no matter what postmodernity we clad ourselves in, we still engage in exactly the same pre-modern ritual we always have. Like, all of my friends are gonna end up in arranged marriages. It’s so weird, right? By which I mean, they’re going to marry someone they met on Hinge… or Tinder or Bumble or one of the other– sorry, just because it’s an algorithm, not an old woman in your village does not make it less arranged.
[cheers and applause]
So all you’ve done there is outsource responsibility to the one thing somehow less accountable. And it’s fascinating ’cause my mum’s parents had the sort of arranged marriage that you think of when you hear that sentence. They were happily married for a half century until my grandfather unfortunately died.
And whenever I tell certain kinds of friends that, they’re like, “Oh, my God, I cannot believe– “as recently as two generations ago in India, “young people were making these important decisions “based on scant information and a photograph. “That is so disgusting and primitive. “Anyway, Ahir, Cambridge Analytica “just told me to fuck this guy. What do you reckon? Is that, uh…” Do whatever you want. Just don’t act like we’re any different to who we’ve always been. They’re all trying to get me to get an arranged marriage now. I refused point blank. I’m sure everyone’s very nice. I just don’t enjoy small talk in person, so the idea of doing it via the typey-typey doesn’t seem like fun. There’s only so many times you can, you know, like, “Oh, what do you do for a living? “What are your flat mates like? What part of Mexico are your family from?”
One of the strangest experiences in life is being fully confronted by someone else’s independent lived reality, and that’s basically what happened in a Bloomsbury pub. Those are realities that we’ve all got, and they are all completely equal and valid. They are just very difficult fully to appreciate in other people. They’re often quite difficult to appreciate in yourself, and I think weirdly hardest to appreciate in people you love just ’cause that’s not how love works, right? Hasn’t love always largely been a function of imagination? That’s where two people get to build one another up to these ridiculous, unassailable heights. And it’s why it’s the single best thing in the world. Being in love is just having an imaginary friend who’s real. Right? It’s what I think believing in a personal God must feel like if you’re capable of doing that. Something so vivid and tangible, yet you know at the same time, weirdly amorphous, but it’s better than God ’cause you can’t fuck God. I mean, you can give it a good old go, but have you got any idea how expensive it is to get a custom blow-up doll with an elephant’s head? O-M Ganesh, I cannot afford that, right? Going forward, I prefer belief to knowledge. You always know you’ll never count every star. It just matters less when you believe you’ll count every freckle. We’ve all had a pretty hefty some might say double dose of perspective recently. We work out what our expectations are in our new reality. I’ve done that too. You know, like, the life that I want, it doesn’t sound that complicated. I’m sure that many of you already have it, and I hope to see you there, yeah? All I want from life is all I’ve ever wanted from life, really. Like, all I want from life is to be sat in a room with a glass of wine and a book and a fire, and I have a family, but they’re not there.
[cheers and applause]
How to get there, eh? How to crescendo and not simply grow up. That is the question. I know how we’re told these mantras of our era, all of this individualistic, hyper-competitive stuff you get sold. Well, just do you. Live your best life. You’ll be fine. All it boils down to is very well alone as though anyone ever actually achieved anything that way. These may be the mantras of our era, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
No one is ever really sure of anything, Ahir.
Yeah, like obviously.
Belief doesn’t make things easier.
I think it makes things less difficult.
Makes things a different kind of difficult.
Well, I don’t know. You guys always gave off the impression you had your shit together.
We never did. We made you think we did, and that means we did our job properly.
How do you actually cope?
We kept calm and carried on.
[laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Dad is such a “dowsh bag.” Will things ever make sense again? Did they ever? I’m sure we’re all feeling pretty untethered and unmoored as far as things are going, but while the winds pick up, that will be my mantra because it turns out it really is the truest way to stay sane on the face of this Earth. I cannot recommend it to you highly enough. My name is Ahir Shah. Thank you very much for coming. I hope you enjoyed it. Keep calm and carry on. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[mellow guitar music]
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