When 14-year-old Zohran Mamdani helped mom Mira Nair pick 'The Namesake' over 'Harry Potter 4' for direction: 'Many good directors can make Harry Potter but...'

Zohran Mamdani, son of Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, created history by becoming the 111th mayor of New York on Tuesday. The Ugandan-born son of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker is New York’s first Muslim mayor and first person of South Asian descent to lead the city in its 400-year history.

While Nair is known for making memorable films like Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, among others, while making The Namesake, she was offered Harry Potter, and the filmmaker turned down after his son’s opinion.

“I also turned down Harry Potter. They saw Vanity Fair and they saw how vibrant and whatever voluptuous and successful for them, this was Warner Brothers and they thought well they’d had a big success with Alfonso Cuaron from Mexico making Harry Potter 3 so why not get the third-world rainbow coalition making Harry Potter 4,” said Nair during the 2018 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

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“I was deep into making The Namesake at that time from a beautiful novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. I had suffered my very first death in my family, my mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me, and an unexpected death due to medical malpractice, and it completely blew me away. I was deep in that melancholy, and that’s what inspired me to make The Namesake because Jhumpa has written in it of this terrible melancholy of losing a parent in a foreign country, which is exactly what I was experiencing. So I was deep in the throes of like almost a month away from shooting The Namesake, and they offered me Harry Potter, and I thought I had to take these meetings because my son had learned to read from Harry Potter,” she added.

“I asked my 14 year old son what should I do and he said to me, ‘mama many good directors can make Harry Potter but only you can make The Namesake’ and and it was such a liberating and clarifying statement,” stated Nair.