The West has the Razzies to rip apart the worst in film and hand the offenders of our collective sensibility shiny Golden Raspberry awards for their inexcusable cinematic contributions. The East has nurtured rebels in comedy groups such as East India Comedy who are all set to take down Bollywood’s most insufferable.
Back in Mumbai, East India Comedy has earned quite a reputation for its spare-no-one shtick at The Ghantas or their comedy-fuelled angst on EIC: Outrage. Tomorrow evening, East India Comedy’s Sorabh Pant, Sahil Shah and Sapan Verma will be treating Doha, for the first time, to their annual laughathon of a ritual of roasting the year’s worst performances in Bollywood. Brace yourselves, fans of Dilwale.
Following their gig in Dubai, East India Company will perform at the Lagoon Garden, Ritz Carlton – Doha, starting 7pm tomorrow. Tickets are priced at QR125 and are available on platinumlist.net. The seating will be quite relaxed too with picnic-style lounging arrangement in place, complete with bean bags. For those keen on grooving a bit, there’s DJ Leo and DJ D in the house and an after-show party featuring Bollywood music and more.
Known for their stand-up gigs, East India Company is a team of seven comics – Sorabh Pant, Kunal Rao, Sapan Verma, Sahil Shah, Atul Khatri, Azeem Banatwalla, Angad Singh Ranyal – who are pushing the boundaries of India’s young, new and fast-emerging live comedy scene. 
The Ghanta Awards, the Indian version of the Razzies which began as an independent comedy show six years ago, are dished out under a series of popular categories such as Worst Film, Worst Actor, Worst Actress, Worst Song, Worst Director, Worst Rip Off, and so on. As Sahil Shah puts it, the best way to repress the memories of terrible movies of last year is to make fun of them.
Qatar will see Sorabh Pant, Sahil Shah and Sapan Verma do all the hosting and lampooning. Pant is one of India’s best and most travelled comedians – more than 1,000 shows in 60 cities across 15 countries. An author and a full-time Vinod Kambli impersonator, he has done more than 300 corporate shows with a clean version of his comedy. Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan has hailed him as “the funniest guy I have seen on stage.” 
He has also opened for Wayne Brady and Rob Schneider, whose official statements were that their drinks were spiked, says a funny note on their website.
One of the founding members of East India Comedy, Shah has performed more than 600 shows, including some in New York, London, Singapore and Dubai. Apart from comedy clubs and sold out auditoriums, Sahil has performed in colleges across India and has even given a TedX talk. He has also been featured on shows such as Channel V UR Fired and also The Front Row on Star World. “Sahil also loves bragging about all these achievements,” a note on his bio reads.
Also a co-founder of the group, Verma is a comedian, a writer and a director. Like Shah, Verma, too, has performed internationally. He has done more than 700 shows not only in 30 cities across India but also in New York, Paris, Spain, Dubai, Singapore and China. 
Apart from having written, directed and acted in a bunch of online viral videos that have upwards of 1bn views on YouTube, he was a regular presenter on NDTV Prime’s news comedy show The Bottom Line. He also appears at The Comedy Store and Canvas Laugh Club Mumbai, and is also a part of comedy specials like the Ghanta Awards and Backbenchers.
While stand-up comedy made it into the mainstream in India with TV shows like The Great Indian Laughter Challenge some years ago, it was only in 2009 that the first comedy club opened in Mumbai. 
In her piece on India’s booming stand-up comedy scene, Rama Lakshmi wrote in The Washington Post, in August 2014: “India has a long tradition of satire in poetry, mimicry and comic movies. But as its movie industry wanes and middle-class affluence expands — along with Indians’ self-confidence and willingness to laugh at themselves — this kind of US-style stand-up routine is emerging as the cool new thing among young people in the big cities.”