Description

From the WhatsApp forwards your father refuses to stop sending, to the wedding sangeet where you are made to dance to a song you have not heard since 2008, to the cousin who manages to ask about your salary, your weight, and your fertility within ninety seconds of meeting you at the airport — Indian social life is, and has always been, the world’s longest-running unscripted comedy show.

In this gleefully sharp, deeply affectionate collection of thirty-two essays, stand-up comedian Kabir Mehrotra files his dispatches from the frontline. Why are Indian uncles incapable of staying in their lane at any gathering? What exactly is the cultural logic of the *aap khaana kha lo* loop that has trapped three generations of Indian hosts and guests? How did the Tier-2 family wedding evolve into a 47-event multimedia production? Why does every Indian flight contain at least one man having a loud business call he should not be having? And what, in the name of all things holy, is the Indian aunty’s instinct for finding the exact bedroom you were hiding in?

Equal parts loving and lethal, *Aunty, Please Sit* is the funniest Indian book of the year — and a strangely warm portrait of a country that, for all its absurdities, genuinely refuses to leave anyone alone.

Read it on a flight. Read it at a wedding. Try not to laugh out loud.