In the eyes of the many media publications that are fixed on her, Mindy Kaling is often portrayed as the ‘best friend’ or ‘cool older sister.’  She’s an ‘it-girl,’ an ‘unlikely leading lady.’  She’s all this with a helping of cheery ambition wrapped up in colorful designer outfits ­striding briskly from one project to the next, a tireless triple threat making a name for herself and, in the eyes of many, for underrepresented South Asian women around the country.

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(Autumn De Wilde/FOX)

If Kaling is so appealing as a role model, it’s partly because she so thoroughly encompasses the notion of ‘work hard, play hard.’  On the one hand are her cheery, regular social media updates to an audience of around 5 million on Twitter and Instagram.  On the other is her famously ferocious work ethic, one that apparently gets her frustrated with birthdays in the office.  ‘I work like a dog,’ she told teenage girls at the Brentwood School’s Young Women’s Panel in 2014.  ‘I have done that since forever.  I can’t stress that enough.  It’s a tedious thing to be successful and people, especially girls, don’t necessarily think that.’  A daughter of Indian immigrants who worked as an OB-GYN and architect, Mindy has often cited her parents as her original role models. 

The focus then shifts inevitably to the obstacles she’s faced as an Indian-American woman working in an industry that is notoriously blatant in its whitewashing.  Kaling is frank with this—she has to be.  ‘More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look,’ she told Rolling Stone in 2013.  ‘As a result the interview of me reads like I’m interested only in talking about my outward appearance and the politics of being a minority and how I fit into Hollywood, blah blah blah.’  Real-life issues of race, size, and gender often transpire in her shows, such as a bitingly satirical episode of The Office titled Diwali after the Hindu festival.  Sometimes these translate more directly—at the New Yorker Festival in 2014 she was mistaken for Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, an incident she uses on The Mindy Show.  

The reality of being a pioneer is not one she can divorce from her work, especially when her most beloved show is centered on a fictional alter-ego named Mindy Lahiri.  The show has been criticized for its lack of diversity—fictional Mindy is the only doctor of color and dates over 15 men, all of whom are white, throughout the show.  Although admittedly a reasonable point, Kaling points out the hypocrisy in the fact that she—a woman of color with her own show—gets criticized most strongly about diversity.  ‘I’m the only one who gets lobbied about these things,’ she responded to an audience member who asked her about the diversity on her show during an SXSW panel in 2014.  Say what you will about the ethics of her show, the director certainly knows how to hold her ground. 

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A ruthlessly ambitious woman of color paving a new path simply because there wasn’t one there before.

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Indeed, if there is one thing Kaling knows how to do, it’s how to own everything about herself.  From her acne to her ethnicity, there’s nothing Kaling shies away from discussing, which makes her all the more comprehensible.  She offers an apparently full disclosure of her deepest embarrassments and confessions in her memoirs, 'Why Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?’ and ‘Why Not Me?’.  Both are addictively truthful and sugar-filled, like well-written gossip columns about serious issues like loneliness, friendship, and growing up.  They assert that the world is as crazy as you might think, and that the worse things are, the funnier they can be.  Kaling’s insight in all of her work, as witty and frivolous as it may seem in tone, exposes a greater part of herself in earnestness.  It’s through this human vulnerability that she appears even larger than life, a ruthlessly ambitious woman of color paving a new path—not to be directly political or radical, but simply because there wasn’t one there before.  She never skips a beat, and perhaps the rest of us will never truly catch up with her.

 

Meerabelle Jesuthasan is an eyeliner and stage lighting enthusiast with constant daydreams about the time she got to see Beyoncé live. She loves being busy and being critical.  Her blog, Pop Manifest, is a product of this examining the cross sections between social issues and media.

 

Comments (2)

  1. Angelina Eimannsberger

Umm I love this! Her feminism and work are just amazing!

 
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