Mindy Kaling

This photo was taken from Mindy Kaling's Instagram, because I think it's important to reproduce images of people that they  created themselves, and have chosen to share.

Mindy Kaling is impressive in so many ways. She has written three books, one play, two television shows, and several blogs and extra projects. She is featured in three television shows and ten movies.

Kaling became a writer for The Office when she was 24 years old. She was the only woman on a staff of 8. She wrote several episodes, directed their webisodes, and directed one full episode. She is also featured on the show as Kelly Kapoor. By the time her contract was renewed for the eighth season of the show, she was promoted to Executive Producer and granted her a development deal for a new show.

Today, Kaling is the writer, producer, showrunner, and star of her own series, The Mindy Project, which features successful gynecologist Mindy Lahiri as she navigates life in the best way.

Kaling has received some criticism about The Mindy Project regarding its generally white cast and production team. To these comments, she gracefully responds that "I'm a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking network television show, okay? . . . I have four series regulars that are women on my show, and no one asks any of the shows I adore -- and I won’t name them because they're my friends -- why no leads on their shows are women or of color, and I'm the one that gets lobbied about these things … People have a higher expectation for me. They say, 'Why aren't you doing enough?"

Mindy on the Insulting Nature of Interviewers

Kaling has been nominated for 25 awards (Emmys, Writers' Guild of America Awards, Screen Actors' Guild Awards, NAACP Image Awards, etc.)  and has won eight.

These accomplishments speak for themselves. It's no secret that Mindy Kaling has been outrageously successful and inspirational. But besides that, she is generally socially responsible. She uses her success, fame, and eloquence to question the way she's spoken to or interviewed, and to voice her opinions candidly. She fights back when interviewers assume she speaks for all women of a certain size or of Indian descent. She points out double standards unashamedly. She acknowledges her status as a role model for young Indian women, but rebukes the assumption that she is the voice for Indian women, or that her character serves to comment on Indian culture.

Mindy Kaling is an important person in so many different ways - not because she's Indian, or because she's a woman, or because of her looks, but because she's so good. She's successful, intelligent, eloquent, thoughtful, interesting, funny, and cool. She makes you want to be her friend, she makes being a woman on television look easy, and she makes questioning the way you're treated look awesome.

If you need a little more Mindy in your life, here's a link to a Huffpost article called "12 Things We Learned from Mindy This Year"

Thanks, Mindy.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindy_Kaling

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1411676/?ref_=nv_sr_2