How to Throw a Dope 50th Birthday Party

This may not be as hilarious as How to Cancel a Party (probably my favorite thing I’ve written) or as boss as How to Throw a Dope Indian Wedding but it’s gonna be more epic. How many people will actually read this whole thing? Welllllll… If nothing else, scroll through the pics.

[Edit: It’s been only a few hours but I’m pleasantly shocked (if that’s a phrase) how many messages I’ve received from y’all, telling me you DID read it all. So touched. THANK YOU.]

It’s difficult to describe in words how grateful I am for just how well my 50th birthday party celebration went. Fortunately, this is the internet, so I’m able to employ some multimedia, a word that mysteriously died around 2005, with no adequate replacement. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is probably worth a million. And maybe the mysterious death of “multimedia” is neither mysterious nor a death. ANYway, here goes.

In February 2025—yes, before my 49th birthday—I sent out an email to a couple hundred of my closest friends to mark their calendars for the weekend of March 7, 2026. The invitation list eventually expanded to around 250. In my initial invitation, I joked about how my goal was beating my friend Steve Schuler’s 67 guests at HIS 50th. So, 70 to me was always a win. When Cho asked me early on how many I expected, I said 77. Anything over 70 was an A. 90+ was beyond my wildest dreams. Though I guess the Indian parent in my wishes it were 100. We ended up with 92 revelers, 80+ of whom flew in. #Oceans11 #Oceans92

I’ll take that all day long. Especially given I don’t have a large family. These were nearly all friends. My friend Matt Doane made a 36-hour journey from Sydney to remain stateside for 36 hours.

Vimal Uncle, my dad’s brother, flew in for the entire month of March.

The fact that he’s still here helped with the post-event depression that inevitably follows. So did the South Asian Oscar Party on Tuesday, March 10.

Big-ups to mom’s caretaker Gloria and Naveen’s babysitter Abbi who traveled in to help us:

After all, this is the last large celebration we could see coming down the pike. My next decade birthday of 60 will likely not be a four-night Las Vegas blowout. Though given how hard I went for this one, I wouldn’t entirely rule that out. Speaking in betting terms, let’s say I’ll take the over. #Casino

Insh’Allah, my mom will turn 80 in three years, but that also likely does not necessitate 100 hours in a Nevada desert town, nor does my son’s fifth this coming August. Perhaps my brothers’ fiftieths in 2030? Let’s see if the country’s still here.

My wife and I celebrated a decade together last August. And for two years, I’ve been asking Harsha what she (eventually) wants to do for her half-century milestone. And it seems like she’s landing where most normal humans do: a small dinner or get-together.

But I’m not a normal human, and the idea of doing something normal for something this significant is not, how shall we say, the Rajiv way. Go hard or go home. While not literal, that, to me, is more than figurative. For the turn of the millennium, I wanted to go to NYC to watch the ball drop. But given all the Y2K fears, which I figured were BS, nobody I knew well was willing to make that Cincinnati-to-New York trek. So, I rang it in by sitting on the couch with my parents and brothers at our home in Fairfield, Ohio.

Given I no longer live at my parents’ in Fairfield, Ohio, there was no doubt that, for this one, we were gonna go hard.

Even as we booked our flights to arrive at LAS on Thursday evening and depart for BUR on Monday afternoon, we all knew it was going to go fast. Even a four-day Indian wedding does. (And oh, did people make that comparison.) So, the key was to enjoy the entire planning process and then revel in the, well, multimedia afterwards. (OK, OK, I’ll be a normal human and call it “content.”)

And maybe start partying before we even got to Vegas. Thanks, Snehal Patel, for inviting me out to Fox Fire Room in Valley Village, on Wednesday, March 4.

So, I had fun sending out the mass emails as well as the individual text messages, many of which were personalized voice memos. I am the King of Voice Memos. I’d say President of Voice Memos but I’d run largely unopposed. I get why many people aren’t fans of them: you have to remember a lot, especially since mine generally run around three minutes. But here’s the thing: most phones now provide transcripts. And a text simply can’t compete with how your personality can shine in a voice memo.

Because people descended onto Vegas from so many spheres of my life (all the way back to friends from 8th, 6th, 4th, and 2nd grade), I felt the need to assemble a slideshow that included everyone’s photos and background info.

This helped people feel the party had already started and to make connections with each other. And boy, did they ever. I “sold” this whole thing as a networking event. Nothing makes me happier than my friends becoming friends with each other.

My friend RJ Jethwani took it upon himself to design the first flyer.

And then an idea popped into my head. A cool flyer gets people excited. Especially one that features such an amazing and original joke. I honestly don’t know how nobody else came up with the .50 Century concept, but that’s why I make the medium bucks.

And then there was Cho. I. Love. This. Man.

This weekend would never have turned out anywhere close to this if it weren’t for him. And while I wasn’t his boss, it probably felt like that from time to time. I’m fun but demanding. I’m your biggest cheerleader, but I want the commas on the website where I want them.

He not only had to organize everyone’s info, but he also had to manage everything for the entire weekend. I don’t know anyone who’s done that for anyone, outside of a Maid of Honor (and certainly not even a Best Man).

I met Madhukar Srivastava when we both lived in Cincinnati. I saw him damn near every weekend at the nightclub Clau/Purgatory, but we never really had a long conversation given hip-hop was blaring for hours (and in no way was I upset about this).

I’d sent a note to his sister-in-law down in Florida. And then Cho (“Chotu” as he’s about my height) messaged me on Facebook to ask where the heck his invitation was. Granted, I’d seen him when we both went to the last Cincinnati Bengals Super Bowl in LA, but other than that, it’d been a couple of decades since our Clau days.

He then said he could put together packages for all of my friends. And it was these packages that made the weekend. You could pay per event or buy one that covered two, three, or four days. At first, it felt a little weird to charge people, but we adamantly said “no gifts” and Cho told me nobody once complained about the pricing. In fact, I didn’t hear of any arguments happening the entire time. Given all the moving parts, that was a feat.

(I strongly believe nobody should expect gifts at a destination party/wedding/etc. People flew in for you. Their presence is your present.)

If you bought one early, you could get all of this for $1500:

Oh, and four nights at the MGM Grand Hotel. And photos by a professional photographer. That’s a steal. In fairness, it’s a steal for one person. For two, it’s still a good deal but not quite as amazing.

By Sunday night, we decided to cater Indian food in the penthouse and hit the Chandelier Bar at The Cosmo (my favorite bar in the world). Here are some views from the penthouse balcony, btw.

Oh, and even a couple pics with people…

We put together an FAQ. This was the most fun page:

Seriously, Madhukar and I could start a party planning business. Since I clearly love a good rapper pun, maybe we can put a spin on 2 Chainz and be 2 Chos. Or really, 2 Choz.

Here we are making our first foray into The Cosmo…

And I did my best Beyoncé impression with the sheer number of outfit changes I had for the weekend.

• Generally, single women won’t fly to Vegas by themselves. There were a few exceptions—and God bless them—but for the most part, dames travel in packs when they visit LV. Men? I think I got through “Las Veg-” before most dudes finished booking their flights. I’d say I would’ve expected another five or six close female friends to come (three Purvis alone), but once I noticed this pattern, I stopped asking.

• As astute as we are at communicating, we dropped the ball in telling people we were moving from email to WhatsApp. My friend Matt Leach had to remind me that most White Americans don’t use WhatsApp. So, people missed a lot of the initial messages. We reposted them but we should’ve been clearer.

• Some meals were buffets; others were plated. When it’s the latter, you need to tell people to show up on time instead of breezing through at their leisure.

• I can now see why some were hesitant to buy packages. Sure, they wanted their downtime. Moreover, you often don’t know where you’re gonna end up in Vegas. Building in flexibility to allow yourself to skip lunch is a luxury some people exercised. But without critical mass, we would never have gotten the deals we did.

• Indecent Proposal: I would’ve gone with Cho’s suggestion and booked a local KJ/DJ. My (former) friend was supposed to fly in from Minneapolis to KJ our karaoke night and DJ our penthouse party. He claimed he fell ill. I’m not sure how much it hurt us on Thursday given we planned on a small turnout. (I think we ended up with 12 people on Thursday night and 15 people on Sunday night. The vast majority of people came Friday night and left after Sunday brunch. Everyone attended the Saturday comedy show.) My theory is it’s because his request for speakers in the penthouse was turned down by The Cosmo. The gut instinct felt by both Cho and me was to seek forgiveness, not permission. But once they said no, we didn’t wanna torch Cho’s contacts. The DJ had no easy way to connect to the Bluetooth system. Still, he should’ve come in and figured out a solution. It’s not impossible, after all. Having a live DJ obviously makes a difference. Cho worked to find us a dude who literally stood behind a laptop to make it feel more real. We ended up DJing off an iPhone, which was really not all that much of a minus for the young folks. For them, that’s just how it’s done. Then again, who knows if it would’ve been better? “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” - Cormac McCarthy. I’ll get back to that.

• I would’ve gone Joe Mayo and asked people to do more. Most people ended up rocking the customized wristband I designed but I forgot to hand out sunglasses as party favors for our Saturday night dance party. Most importantly, I forgot to hit the beer bong.

• On Saturday night, my Who Got Dis friend Sarah Whiteman asked me if I wanted people to offer me a toast. I declined, saying that even I’d had enough of me for the weekend. A few hours earlier, I’d delivered a 45-min comedy set. But she insisted and made a good point: this offered my uncle and our friends a chance to say something. I reluctantly agreed but I’m glad she pushed: funnily enough, the friends who spoke, including her, Kerey, Kevin, Sourabh, and Amogh, were all new friends. We’ve become close only in the last five years. That was a nice touch.

  

• I knew I had a great deal of stamina, but I didn’t know I could do what I did. I took two Advil the entire weekend. I packed electrolytes and Tums but didn’t use any of them. So, other than a couple of painkillers, I took no drugs at all. I slept for five hours a night and took a 45-minute nap on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. I basically drank water in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and vodka at night. I was able to throw down about 8 drinks each night for four nights in a row. And I’m apparently still in college since I counted my drinks. #TheHangover

• As the US and Israel went to war with Iran, things looked precarious. I was pleasantly surprised no flights were disrupted, especially for the two people coming in from abroad.

• It was interesting how many people from my past came—and astonishing how few from my present did. I had exactly ONE comedian. Almost nobody from the Industry. Very few people from LA. It truly illustrated the Girl Scout quote: “Make new friends. Keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.” I’ve long said my Hollywood friends aren’t my real friends, and I know who my real friends are. Then again, Mandy Harring came, and she was the It Girl in our high school class.

• I always say that my own wedding was the second-best I’ve ever attended. Ours was amazing, but when we went to (and I performed at) Melanie & Neeraj’s in Turks & Caicos, everything was covered: open bar all weekend, even the minibar. Our villa was only one tier down from their honeymoon suite. It was an absolute blowout. Mine turned out to be the best birthday celebration I’d attended. The next one was Andrew Yang’s last year. (I mean, Dave Chappelle performed—and stayed for the whole show. Side note, he was arguably the best audience member, to boot. He paid attention and laughed at almost everything everyone said. What a guy.)

  

• I’ve got a pretty bad singing voice. I’ve got a shockingly good falsetto.

I love recording my parties. This is Friday night at Cosmo’s lobby bar Clique.

This is Saturday night in the penthouse, dancing to the iconic song from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham:

Apparently, right beforehand, the illustrious Sarah Whiteman, who truly made this entire weekend so much better simply because of the energy she poured into partying and documenting, recorded everyone wishing me a happy birthday.

My cousin’s wife Sharmila took it upon herself to record individual testimonials from the guests at Saturday lunch.

And we might've shut down Marquee at 5 AM on Saturday night… though don’t give us TOO much credit: we sprang forward two hours earlier.

I just realized this but my presentation had 92 slides, the same number as the attendees. Weird.

We showed this 15-min montage video as people filed in.

And then the countdown was on. Musician Landyn Zane, our former tenant and current editor, outdid himself when it came to assembling my materials for this show. He even set all the pictures to the beat. (Oh, go listen to his new single!)

My friend Rajeev Khanna did a great job in opening the show with some standup. And then three national headliners all came through (for free but of course I paid them later).