Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the 111th mayor of New York City on Tuesday, creating history. The 33-year-old is also the city's very first Muslim mayor and the first person of South Asian descent to lead New York in its 400-year history in American politics.
Born to Oscar-nominated Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda, Zohran grew up in a household steeped in culture and academia. Mira Nair is globally hailed for films such as The Namesake, Salaam Bombay, and Monsoon Wedding. It would appear that family decisions involved Zohran from an early age.
Also Read | Meet Zohran Mamdani- son of Salam Bombay maker, who made history as New York’s youngest, first Muslim mayor
How a teen’s insight shapes a filmmaker’s choice
According to a report by the Hindustan Times, at the 2018 Jaipur Literature Festival, Mira Nair revealed a lesser-known anecdote from her career, when Warner Bros. approached her to helm Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, while she was already working on The Namesake.
Mira said, “I also turned down Harry Potter. They saw Vanity Fair, and they saw how vibrant and whatever voluptuous and successful for them, this was Warner Brothers, and they thought well, they'd had a big success with Alfonso Cuaron from Mexico making Harry Potter 3, so why not get the third-world rainbow coalition making Harry Potter 4.”
I was deep into making The Namesake at that time, from a beautiful novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. I had suffered my very first death in my family, my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me, and an unexpected death due to medical malpractice, and it completely blew me away. I was deep in that melancholy, and that's what inspired me to make The Namesake because Jhumpa has written in it of this terrible melancholy of losing a parent in a foreign country, which is exactly what I was experiencing. So, I was deep in the throes of like almost a month away from shooting The Namesake, and they offered me Harry Potter, and I thought I had to take these meetings because my son had learned to read from Harry Potter,” she further added.
Also Read | Zohran Mamdani’s mom, Mira Nair, celebrates her son’s victory with just 3 words
So, then she sought the counsel of her then-14-year-old son. "I asked my 14-year-old son what I should do, and he said to me, ‘Mama, many good directors can make Harry Potter, but only you can make The Namesake," Mira recollected, " it was such a liberating and clarifying statement." This advice kept her true to a deeply personal project born out of loss and cultural identity.
