An American teenage girl with Indian roots and a difficult to pronounce surname grapples with school, love, sex, death and her parents' traditions in the magical Netflix series "Never in my life". The show came up with an American woman with Indian roots and a difficult to pronounce last name: Vera Mindy Chokalingam. Because everyone always failed because of her family name, she shortened it and became known as Mindy Kaling.
The mad talent Mindy Kaling
Whereby: In Germany, this popularity could be a bit better. Kaling, 40, is an amazing talent. We are best known as an actress. In the crime comedy "Ocean’s 8" (2018) she belonged to the handpicked crooks group led by Sandra Bullock, and in the showbiz tragic comedy "Late Night" she played the main role next to Emma Thompson last year. What was far from clear to all viewers: Mindy Kaling also wrote the screenplay for "Late Night". Because writing is her core competence, she graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in screenwriting. After initial success with self-written stand-up comedy, she became part of the writing team for the US version of the series "The Office" – at just 24 and the only woman (she also played the role of Kelly Kapoor on the show).
An engine of her scripts and her two autobiographical novels is such an "all-are-against-me" mentality, Kaling once said; that she internalized as the daughter of migrants. And that has now also been included in the script for "Never in my life", on which she worked. Above all, her young heroine Devi goes her own way, which must be very sympathetic (and close) to her creator Mindy. Not only that, as the daughter of a gynecologist and an architect, she chose the non-mandatory route to showbiz – she also has a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and does not disclose the name of the child's father to herself. Because never in her life has Mindy Kaling ever been forced to do anything.
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