First and foremost, props to Ahir Shah for bringing up the topic of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in a Netflix comedy special. That’s something I never imagined I’d see, but it happened, and I’m sort of glad and thankful. Unbeknownst to many, Jallianwala Bagh was not the only place where the British inflicted massacres against Indians. Around the same time, similar (but smaller scale) attacks were done in nearby places in order to discourage any sort of uprising. One such place was Gujranwala, where a man named Ramdas somehow survived the massacre. Ramdas’ grandson happened to be the current prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as comedian Shah was recording his set for Netflix at the Royal Court theater in London. The cultural significance of the whole thing is unimaginable, to say the least!
That said, Shah is not a fan of Rishi Sunak. He is not a supporter of the British Conservative Party, and from what little political knowledge I have about the current state of the country, I am on his side. Yet, Sunak features in quite a bit of the whole standup. The comedian doesn’t support Sunak’s politics, but he rejoices in the victory of his ethnicity. Sunak is, of course, the first Indian-origin man to run the office at 10 Downing Street, and while I don’t consider it to be that big a deal, the dormant patriot inside me is lowkey proud. It is also quite refreshing to see Shah making fun of Sunak, that too on a platform like Netflix. The best joke of the lot has to be Shah claiming himself better than Sunak because he was the captain of his school cricket team, while Sunak never did. Shah also mentions the possibility of him getting the opportunity to play Sunak in a Channel 4 drama a decade later and leaves the audience in splits.
Shah starts his set by telling the audience the Arabic meaning of his name, which he got to know from a Saudi Arabian comedian. It happens to be the King of prostitutes (I didn’t dare to check). That’s quite a bold joke to start with. Once that gets out, Shaw throws a barrel of jokes at the audience—one after another. He speaks very fast in a beautiful British accent. The jokes aren’t outrageously funny, but good enough to leave a smile on your face. Shah talks about financial journalist Martin Lewis and how he is a rare person who managed to make money by helping people (this one I checked after finishing the show and it’s a legit claim). He swiftly moves onto the topic of the anti-divorce culture of Asian people and (rightfully) makes fun of it. His example is a bomb joke. It just happens to be a real incident that he experienced when he was just seventeen and starting out as a comedian. It was actually Joe Bor, the Jewish comedian (and a dear friend of Shah), who was a last-minute replacement at a British-Asian comedy show, and he started the performance by telling the audience that his parents are divorced and then asking them to cheer if they could relate. Bor received zero cheers from the audience, resulting in Shah feeling second-hand embarrassment.
Shah’s Netflix special is called Ends. And just when you’re wondering what exactly the name means, the comedian reveals why he picked it. While the first half hour of Shah’s set is funny, insightful, and politically relevant, the second half is the real deal here. This is where the comedian gets fully personal. But he doesn’t make the show about him. Instead, it’s his late grandfather, Krishnadas Vaishnaw, who is the most impressive man Shah has ever known. His description of his grandfather is beautiful, heartfelt, and bound to bring the waterworks. But Shah doesn’t jump into it right away. He is a remarkable performer after all. So he first starts talking about the kind of bad experiences he had in school and compared that with the ones his uncle and his mother had, which were million times worse. The thing he wants to establish here is how the lives of brown people got relatively easier in Britain compared to how things used to be. Skillfully, Shah has already warmed up the audience with his take on Sunak being the example of this culture. He has also talked a bit about his marriage with a white Irish woman to make his point about the whole multicultural British society of our time.
In many ways, the first forty-five minutes of Shah’s comedy special are the perfect set-up for the final fifteen minutes, which almost turn into a eulogy for grandfather Vaishnaw, read twenty-two years after his death. The man came to the country back in 1964, while his wife and three children remained in India. It’s your usual trying to do better for the family story, but the way Shah pours his heart out while telling it is where it actually works. He’s visibly emotional when he talks about his mother seeing his grandfather at Heathrow airport in 1969, five years after he came to the country. While speaking about his grandfather, Shah keeps giving analogies about love and sacrifice, and they fit extremely well with the story he’s telling. He doesn’t forget to mention that his grandfather, aka Nanaji, and grandmother, aka Nanima, are the reason he’s actually doing what he does, as years ago he saw them watching standup comedy on TV and found them laughing, which became the inspiration. Shah also does the show wearing his grandfather’s waistcoat, which only seems like the fitting choice of dress for the occasion. The title Ends obviously signifies the ending of life, and in this case, Mr. Vaishnaw died as a man who won in life. Especially if you consider the fact that two decades after his death, his grandson is on Netflix and a random reviewer like me is writing about him here.
