Zohran Mamdani: The Immigrant Mayor of New York
What was Zoran Mamdani, the Mayor-elect of New York, doing when he was four years old?
Hanging out on the sets of ‘Kama Sutra’ with his mom, the noted film director Mira Nair! I have been interviewing her since her very first film for various media outlets internationally. So, when I was interviewing her in New York in 1996 for Asia magazine, (which was distributed with the Sunday papers in several Asian countries), on a whim, I asked her for a picture of Zoran, and this is what she gave me!
In this article I wrote, “She is back in New York temporarily to edit and dub ‘Kama Sutra’. Husband Mahmood Mamdani is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, and they are staying with four-year-old son Zoran in a house in New Jersey with a creek and weeping willows and deer in the woods.”
Nair has come this far by sheer passion and persistence. In the early days, when she was struggling to raise money through grants for her documentaries in New York, she worked as a waitress in an Indian restaurant, and that gave her a real window into the world of immigrants. She saw the problems of the have-nots and was inspired to make her first documentary.
As Nair walked me to the door of her New York office, she added that the credit titles of Kama Sutra, which will show internationally, will also be in the Hindi language. “I’m putting the title in Hindi because I want some Indian in Amsterdam or wherever to suddenly see his or her own script on screen,” she said with typical passion. “It’s empowering. It’s beautiful script and it’s ours and we must be proud of it.”
Zohran Mamdani, Immigrant Mayor of New York, was at the age of four, already imbibing lessons of the intrinsic value of all people’s lives and celebrating them.
My old interviews with Mira Nair are not online. Will post them soon on Lassi with Lavina.
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