![]() I want to be successful, and I was only thinking about myself,” she says. “I think in my twenties I was only focused on, Okay, I don't want to get fired. It simply dovetailed with her own journey and growth-through becoming a mom, through finding security in her success. She has led the charge for a generation of brown girls to boldly go where no brown girl has gone before: (To a non-Ivy! Just kidding.) To a place of comfortability speaking up and out about topics-mental health, grief, depression, sex, dating, longing, desire-that remain taboo in Asian American culture.īut being at the forefront of destigmatizing wellness for women of color in film and television wasn’t always the plan. It’s that kind of unambiguous and seemingly radical insight that has made Kaling, in some ways, an Indian parent’s worst nightmare (children out of wedlock? Gasp!) and also the defining voice of first-generation Asian Americans. “I wish every 19-year-old girl would come home from college and that the gift-instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or whatever-is that their parents would take them to freeze their eggs…They could do that once and have all these eggs for them, for their futures…to focus in your twenties and thirties on your career, and yes, love, but to know that when you're emotionally ready, and, if you don't have a partner, you can still have children.” She wishes, she says, that the cost of freezing eggs was cheaper and is open to joining the boards of or investing in companies that could provide more accessible healthcare options in that regard. One day, when they feel ready, she says she’d gladly speak publicly, even write a book with her daughter (or have Katherine write it herself) about their family’s journey.īefore moving off the topic, she offers up her number one piece of advice to all women: freeze your eggs. She simply wants to safeguard their privacy, give her kids a chance to learn and tell their own stories in their own time. Kaling isn’t trying to be secretive or press-shy. She jokes-I think-that she doesn’t make many conscious parenting decisions (“we’re just getting by”) but she does, for now, have a few guiding principles: She won’t post pictures of her kids on social media and she won’t discuss their conception stories. (“This is reminding me that I should probably have some kind of a conversation memorized to talk to her about. She’s still figuring out how to broach topics like fame with them. “My hope is that she'll be 12 or 13, and kids will be talking about it at school, and then she'll want to watch it and I can show it to her.” Due in part to her kids’ ages (4 and one-and-a-half) and that they are growing up during the pandemic, she says they haven’t really been exposed to their mom in the public eye. She’s perfectly pleased to talk about playing Kelly Kapoor with the “random teenage boys” who approach her at the airport, but it’s her daughter she’s excited to one day share it with. “When I was, I watched the cuts so many times,” says the former writer (she’s responsible for 26 episodes), director (of two), and co-executive producer. Not because of any ill will towards it, she’s just been there, done that. While the Diwali episode continues to be a defining moment for Indian Americans (and The Office’s popularity has only ballooned in recent years thanks to syndication deals), Kaling hasn’t seen the NBC comedy since the series concluded in 2013. “It was very groundbreaking at that time.” Netflix Head of Global TV Bela Bajaria, who was a part of greenlighting Kaling's Never Have I Ever at the streamer, says she can still “remember vividly” when that Office episode aired in 2006 “and how defining that was, to actually talk about Diwali in a comedy in that way. But she seems wholly unaware or at least convincingly unassuming that the mainstreamification of Diwali is not a happy coincidence but owed largely to the ubiquity of Kaling herself. “It’s getting so mainstream now,” she muses, mentioning the media’s coverage of the parties thrown by South Asian A-listers (Lilly Singh, Priyanka Chopra, herself) last fall. It felt kind of challenging scary in a good way.” The irony is not lost on her that she has become the pop culture poster child for the Hindu celebration thanks to the season three Office episode she penned, titled “Diwali.” “It will just force me to learn a lot about it….
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