“To be honest, I was totally against writing a memoir,” he adds. “My American agents forced me to do it and told me: ‘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 disorientation.” Das doesn’t want you to read his book and imagine that he’s a guy who has it all figured out. He walks you through his life, its dizzying highs, its dizzying lows, and its palpably terrifying ones, to remind you that even after selling out the NSCI Dome in 20 minutes, winning an Emmy, writing a memoir, getting canceled 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 they invite me to this?”
If there is one thing that I wanted to I envy Das because it is his conviction in his craft. Not everyone can sit and read a movie 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-Indian spy comedy style, the kind of ridiculously silly movies that still take the action very seriously. In 2010, when he first came out to narrate the script for various producers and directors, he was met with blank stares. Then it came Tiger, Pathan and the Indian spy universe, and happy patelAlternative edginess finally had a widespread reference point. Aamir Khan, whom Das had not spoken to since delhi bellypicked it up and the film is anticipated to release in 2026. True to form, Das is not sitting with his legs up; is still on the drawing board, thinking about his next big breakthrough. There’s a YouTube series in the works that he can’t say 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 bringing it directly to them.”
