Vir Das spent all of 2022 on the road, touring over 25 countries through 183 shows, and is now ready to take a pause and embrace the silence. The comedian-actor says the tour helped him fall in love with stand-up comedy once again.

“I spent the pandemic (two and a half years) acting, going from one set to another, and had kind of forgotten what a privilege it is to be on tour, and how tough it is. You really have to agonize about every single word, and put in the hours,” Das confesses. The 43-year-old says, “So I took most of this year off, just to be on tour and not to act. And I fell in love with stand up again.”

In fact, being on the road inspired him to infuse all his tour experiences into his latest stand up special, Landing. He explains, “The special comes off from the point when you are heading home after having been to 25 countries, doing 183 shows. When you are about to land, you think about home, childhood and how you got to this point. The theme of the show is what it means to come home, have a home, and what it means to be an Indian who gets to see the entire world.”

So, what does it mean to come back home?

“For me, it’s a feeling of comfortable silence. I tend to perform for millions of people every year. And that life tends to be the sound of an airplane, an airport, busy traffic and freeway, and then the sound of thousands of people laughing and screaming. To come home is truly like not having those sounds, and to have the ability to sit in silence. That, to me, is comfortable,” says Das, who has also acted in Whiskey Cavalier and Hasmukh.

Talking about the lessons he learnt while on tour, Das says, “The plan was to write the best show anyone has ever written, so that we set a rule that every stage is a good stage. And every crowd size, a good crowd size”. “I went to cities I have never been to, like Guwahati. We did about 47 cities in India. Some shows were in stadiums with thousands in attendance and some in pubs like the one in Shillong. The show in Shillong was as good, just not as profitable. But if you love the art, these things don’t matter,” he adds.

Right now, Das is on a break from touring, and is focusing on writing content for his acting gigs.