Kids are the most exhausting practical joke you can ever have 
— Sorabh Pant 

I have two kids. This is why I don’t believe in April Fool’s Day. See, a practical joke is defined as “a mischievous trick that causes embarrassment, perplexity, confusion or discomfort”. I go through each one of those feelings each time I change my kids’ diapers. For there is no bigger practical joke than being a parent.

Over 50 billion humans have fallen for this practical joke. The way the joke is set up is by existing parents selling non-parents horseshit like: 

“There’s no greater joy than being a parent.” [There is far greater joy in getting seven-plus hours of sleep.]

“Children are angels.” [Yes, children are angels. Fictional beings that are so perfect, no one has ever seen one.]

“They’re a gift from God.” [No, they’re a gift from biology. If God is so keen on giving us gifts, how about a cheque to help pay for this other gift’s education?]

So many of us fall for the trick. We believe these people. And don’t see them sniggering inside thinking, ‘If he/she also has kids, then we won’t be suffering alone.’

Don’t get me wrong: I love my kids. They’re my favourite people on Earth. And, I’m not just saying that because this is a public platform and to say otherwise would lead you to believe I’m a monster. My ranking of all people is as follows:

1 Kid 1. (Definitely better than Kid 2 – though, I won’t name him/her.)
2 Kid 2. (Marginally worse than Kid 1 – though, I won’t name him/her.)
3 Rahul Dravid.
4 Myself.
5 Kosha Mangsho (not a person, but deserving of this ranking.)
6 My wife.

Kindly ignore the fact that my wife is ranked below myself, Bengali mutton and Dravid, because I know that my wife’s ranking is probably as follows:

1 Kid 2. (Shocking that she’s choosing between two kids.)
2 Kid 1. (Can’t believe some parents: ranking their kids? Terrible!)
3 Herself.
4 Her mom.
5 Yoga.
6 Her yoga instructor.
7 Instagram.
8 My Instagram post.
9 Me.

This ranking order has been proven repeatedly because my wife pays more attention to what I put on Instagram than what I actually do.

Rankings aside, my wife and I are in on the same practical joke. And the truth of the joke dawned on us slowly. 

The first time we realised that parenthood is a practical joke was when we had to get my son into play school and the fees of the play school equalled my annual income when I was 28. To send my son to play for two hours a day cost me more than I earned for working 10 hours a day. 

In general, financials to raise, maintain, educate children is a costlier prank than the one Nirav Modi played on PNB. In fact, 

Rs 13,000 crore is currently how much most parents pay just for their kid’s vaccinations. Each vaccination.

Side note: My son was born on March 22,  just 10 days short of being a full-blown prank on my wife and me!

Either way, the best practical joke though is one that makes everyone laugh. Which is why parenthood is actually a wonderful prank. Because kids are hilarious. Parents never tell you that: kids are occasionally annoying, but they’re so damn funny. My kids are amusing, which is why we continue to keep them. 

My son has a weird habit of waking up in the middle of the night from a nightmare saying things like: 

“Who stole my black shoe?”

“It’s OK. Lizard is our friend.”

“Where’s my jalebi?”

It’s impossible to not love someone who makes you laugh at 3.30am, even if you haven’t slept in four years.

My daughter is the same. She hasn’t started talking properly yet. So, her comedy is slapstick. It involves her pulling people’s hair and roaring with laughter. Pulling people’s hair is her comedy equivalent of a Dave Chappelle special. Of course, in this regard, my head is little help to her comedic sensibilities. 

Kids are practical jokes. They’re the most exhausting practical joke you can ever have but, they’re also funnier and more entertaining than anything you’ve ever seen. And, that’s why so many people decide to get willingly pranked. I’m going to be laughing till both my kids reach their teens and have the demon of puberty wallop me in the face. Till then, I’m laughing at this joke of parenthood. 

(Sorabh Pant performs at Club Boudoir at 7pm today) 

April 1 maybe should be ‘Tell The Truth Day’, because every other day isn’t 
— Anuvab Pal

What does April Fool’s Day mean to a comedian? It’s a hard question to answer because in the age of fake news and social media, every day is April Fool’s Day. Everyone in power is pulling a prank on everyone else and we’ve just come to accept it as normal. The question arises, do we now need a separate day to celebrate what’s happening to us every day? 
In old Europe, when the world was a place where the truth was told every day, it was cute to have a day where you were hoaxed and lied to, it was sweet and quaint. In the age of opinions and facts becoming one thing, April 1 maybe should be ‘Tell The Truth Day’, because every other day isn’t. 

If someone told you, “From tomorrow your Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes are invalid”, you’d laugh at it as an April Fool’s joke. You’d stop laughing when you queued up at your bank for two days to get your own money. If you were informed that a Goods and Services Tax would be rolled out without any clue what an input credit was or how to receive it, or even what the tax slabs were, you’d say, “That’ll never happen”, only to be told “It’s already happened”. In 2015, if I told you Donald Trump would be President Of The United States, your first reaction would be, “Stop pranking me”. And yet, here we are. 

It isn’t an April Fool’s Day now — it’s an April Fool’s world. 

In 2018, everything feels like a prank. Someone senior in the legal profession representing the government tried to explain to the Chief Justice of India that Aadhar data was safe because it was behind walls of 9ft-thick metal, as if Aadhar was Anthony Hopkins in Silence Of The Lambs and not a code written with algorithms. A reaction to that should have been, “Ha ha”. Instead it got a patient hearing as if it were a cogent legal argument. The thing of modern Indian life is that reality is stand-up comedy — it makes stand-up comedians irrelevant. 

By example, comedians start out with a premise. An outlandish premise that (one imagines) would never happen. A “tongue-firmly-in-cheek” ha ha situation. So, you’d say, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if people went to the mint where they printed money and just took it?” 

A court has convicted Lalu Prasad Yadav of taking money straight out of two treasuries in Bihar. The comedian’s outlandish premise is no longer so outlandish. 

In my stand-up routine, I used to say, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if teachers in schools had guns? Imagine how quickly one would know their maths if a teacher was pointing a gun at you”. The audience would laugh, our secret agreement being, “When would that ever happen?”

Last week, the American President announced that teachers would be trained to have guns to defend schools against mass shootings. Promptly, a teacher in California, while learning how to use a gun, ended up shooting himself, his class and injuring others. No one was dead but I stopped doing the joke because just reading the BBC report on the incident was funnier than anything I could’ve written. 

I’ve mostly given up watching TV news because it is depressing. Not because there is no news (there isn’t) but the anchors have taken away all the work from stand-up comedians.  We can’t compete. News used to be information. “This happened.” Today, all information is angry opinion. Every news item starts with, “I personally feel…” without ever explaining what happened. Twenty years ago, on Doordarshan, if you began the 10pm English news with “I personally feel…”, people would laugh at the newscaster. Today we accept it as reality without thinking it’s even slightly funny. 

After actor Sridevi’s demise, a channel began with, “Let’s observe two minutes’ silence” without explaining what had happened. If you switched on your remote, you saw the bizarre sight of four panelists on a news channel standing in silence, looking punished. The Breaking News ticker below read, “Modi says NO to Trudeau”. You wondered, “Are these people Canadians in some protest against Modi?” Nothing creative people can come up with is better than that. 

Several nights on an English news channel I won’t name, India’s most famous anchor stood up either to stop a debate coming to blows or encourage one to come to blows. And I mean a physical fight. A comedian is thinking, “Ha. Wouldn’t it be funny if these debaters starting hitting each other?” Too late — the channel is ahead of you.  

The comedians’ “what if” is obsolete if our daily life is satire. And everything is a joke. Maybe April 1 should be a joke-free day. 

In old Hollywood, conversation between man and machine was funny — R2D2 in Star Wars or Knight Rider. Today, on social media liberal Indians are having entire fights over a political party’s efficiency with fake code (a bot) thinking it’s a human. And we the public are foolish enough to think we’re having an intellectual argument on Twitter when individuals (trolls being the operative word) are paid to abuse people professionally for their political opinions. The line “You can’t fool all the people all the time”, sadly, may not be true any more. 

Try typing in ‘Ticket to Bhopal’ on makemytrip.com and all day you’ll be chased with ads for Bhopal tickets on Facebook, Google and even SMS. We are the fools for not understanding that our whole lives are a hoax available for sale and viewing. April 1 is no longer cute or just April 1, it’s 365 days. 

So in a world where students march to convince politicians they should not be shot, billionaires flee conning whole banks whose punishment is meted to small businessmen who didn’t flee, where privacy means your number is sold to anyone willing to call you on Sunday to convince you to get into share trading, maybe, just maybe, we don’t need a special day, because every day, the joke is on us. 

Over the decades, April Fool’s Day has played a crucial role in films, songs and books, cutting across geographies.