Mindy Kaling

Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979),Additional archive on June 25, 2015. known professionally as Mindy Kaling (), is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter and producer. She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom ''The Office'' (2005–2013), for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director. For her work on the series, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series and five times for Outstanding Comedy Series.

Kaling gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring in the Fox comedy series ''The Mindy Project'' (2012–2017). She created the NBC sitcom ''Champions'' (2018), also appearing in five episodes, the Hulu miniseries ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' (2019), the Netflix comedy-drama series ''Never Have I Ever'' (2020–present), the HBO Max comedy-drama series ''The Sex Lives of College Girls'' (2021–present), and ''Snowball Fight'' (2022-2023) with Chad producer Rob Rosell .

Kaling's film career includes voiceover work in '' Despicable Me'' (2010), ''Wreck-It Ralph'' (2012), and '' Inside Out'' (2015). She had roles in comedy films, such as ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin'' (2005), '' No Strings Attached'' (2011), ''The Five-Year Engagement'' (2012), '' The Night Before'' (2015), ''A Wrinkle in Time'' and ''Ocean's 8'' (both 2018), and '' Late Night'' (2019), the last of which she also wrote and produced. Her memoirs, '' Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)'' (2011) and '' Why Not Me?'' (2015), reached ''The New York Times'' Best Seller list. She also received a Tony Award for Best Musical as a producer for the musical ''A Strange Loop''.

Early life

Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to father Avudaiappan Chokalingam ( tam, ஆவுடையப்பன் சொக்கலிங்கம்); an architect, and mother Swati Chokalingam ( bn, স্বাতি চোকালিঙ্গম রয়-সিরকার; née Roy-Sircar), an obstetrician/gynecologist (OB/GYN). She has an elder brother, Vijay. Kaling’s parents are from India and met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria. Her father, a Tamil raised in Chennai (Madras), was overseeing the building of a wing of the hospital. Her mother, a Bengali from Mumbai (Bombay), was working as an OB/GYN. The family immigrated to the United States in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Bengal. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show ''Mork & Mindy''. The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess." Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and the a cappella group The Rockapellas, was the creator of the comic strip ''Badly Drawn Girl'' in ''The Dartmouth'' (the college's daily newspaper), and was a writer for the '' Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern'' (the college's humor magazine).

Kaling graduated from Dartmouth College in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in playwriting. She was a classics major for much of college and studied Latin, a subject she had been learning since the seventh grade. Kaling lists the comedy series ''Dr. Katz'', ''Saturday Night Live'', ''Frasier'' and ''Cheers'' as early influences on her comedy.

Career

2002–2004: Career beginnings

While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on ''Late Night with Conan O'Brien''. Kaling has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing. She thinks the "everyone against me" mentality is what she learned as a child of immigrants. She named her ''Mindy Project'' character Mindy Lahiri after author Jhumpa Lahiri.

After college, Kaling moved to Brooklyn, New York. Kaling said one of her worst job experiences was as a production assistant for three months on the ''Crossing Over With John Edward'' psychic show. She described it as "depressing." During this same time, Kaling performed stand-up comedy.

Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it. She toured solo as well as with Craig Robinson before he was on ''The Office.''

In August 2002, Kaling portrayed Ben Affleck in an off-Broadway play called ''Matt & Ben'', which she co-wrote with her best friend from college, Brenda Withers—who played Matt Damon. The play was named one of ''Time'' magazine's "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year" and was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Initially, Withers and Kaling had, "for their own entertainment, mockingly pretended to be the best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; that pretending spawned ''Matt & Ben'', the goofy play that reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie ''Good Will Hunting''."

Kaling wrote a blog, ''Things I've Bought That I Love'', which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. The blog was written under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."

2004–2011: Breakthrough and ''The Office''

In 2004, when ''The Office'' producer Greg Daniels was working to adapt ''The Office'' from the BBC
...