My Long Personal Essay on Zohran Mamdani

I sit outside my Manhattan building on this  pleasant November Saturday day watching employees of my hedge fund landlord Blackstone gather and bag a big pile of dead oak leaves.

They are mostly pointed multi pronged brown colored oak leaves, which by now I can classify as pin oak or Northern red oak. I will never confuse them with each other or with white oak leaves. They look so different. 

One of the guys gathering leaves notices me, pauses, and smiles. We've chatted for years, like many long term New Yorkers do, without knowing each other's names, nor caring about it. A lot of NYC friendships are like that. Close but anonymous. He makes a fist out of his right hand, punches his chest on the left twice and cries out "Zohran! Zohran, papi!"

The reason I can tell different oak leaves apart every Fall is also why I was boosting Zohran Mamdani and predicting his success months before most people had even heard of him.

I have lived here a long time and I pay attention to the city around me more than my phone screen. 

This will be a long rambling personal essay with several tangents, so please brace yourselves. Just remember, this is my unfiltered personal essay for myself, to note down all my thoughts this historic weekend in NYC before old age erases most details. 

Where do I start my Zohran story?

I could start it in the summer of 2023. The guy I voted for was President. Joe Biden. And he had invited a guy I did not like for a state dinner. Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And that invitation had been partly at the behest of Ro Khanna, an Indian origin Congressman I used to think of as less beholden to wealthy donors than he ended up being.

If you scour the archives of my blog, you'll know that my dislike for Modi is quite old. I was 22 when the Gujarat pogrom happened. I remember those February and March days in great detail. Excruciating and horrifying detail. Even just following from far away through television and newspaper. 

I've made my peace as much as possible with the fact that he is the democratically elected Prime Minister of India. At least the first time. 

But a state dinner? Really? 

The guy openly campaigned with Trump in 2020 and his online army was completely working for Trump on Twitter and Facebook. Indian uncles were being told VP Pick Kamala Harris is "anti India" which nowadays means anyone who isn't a Modi lover. And in 2021, Modi tried to falsely blame the brand new Biden administration, still completing a transition, for India's vaccination shortages.

Why exactly is my party and my President giving him a state dinner? 

Most Indian origin politicians, much like Ro Khanna, jumped on board, looking for invites to the dinner or allied events. Some maintained a diplomatic silence. 

One guy popped up on my Twitter feed in full throated opposition. This New York state assemblyman I had started following a couple of years ago for the one and only reason that he was the son of my favorite director Mira Nair. He posted a scorching letter opposing the warm welcome Modi was getting. 

He did not care about the trolling, the inevitable anti Muslim insults from right wing trolls, or how some Godi Media (that's the term for Indian media that's in Modi's lap) anchors might make him out to be a villain. He said his truth. 

Soon thereafter, he stood on stage at an event and read out loud notes from prison by Umar Khalid, arguably Modi's top political prisoner. He's still in jail without bail or without charges for five years and counting. Indian courts have pretty much rubber stamped his status as a long term political prisoner at every opportunity instead of thinking habeas corpus.

That impressed me even more!

This guy had nothing to gain from talking about Umar Khalid in the fall of 2023. He was a state assemblyman from Queens. Where no one else knows Umar Khalid but a lot of Modi loving uncles might get upset. Potential voters and donors.

But he still took these "pangas", always excoriated by BJP IT cell online for it. It showed me that this was a guy who was just very opinionated and wanted his opinions known. A lot like me. Even if they are unpopular. Especially if they are unpopular but correct. Satyamev Jayate.

That was around the time I thought, wow, Mira's little boy has what old time Americans would call moxie! And Delhi uncles would call jigra or gurda. A fight over flight instinct. I know NYC local politics very well. He had absolutely nothing to gain by taking those positions other than satisfying his own conscience. 

A personal tangent here, just to explain why that resonated so much. 

You see, I live a nice comfortable life in NYC where if I choose, I could just completely ignore whatever is happening in Indian politics. Ignore what Modi is doing to unravel the basic fabric of my birth country.

Most progressive Indians my age that have become naturalized US citizens have generally taken that path. They just shut out news from India. It's either "too depressing, man" or "what is the point?". And I envy them. I wish I could do the same. 

I can't. I physically, mentally cannot stop following what is happening in Indian politics. Nor commenting about it on social media with my full name, drawing trolling from thousands of Modi supporters. 

I sensed the same in Zohran.

I'm sure someone in his life told him, why are you taking this random panga? You are nicely settled in an assembly seat at such a young age. Just keep your mouth shut, build a resume, plan for higher office strategically. And it would have been valid advice.

But I could sense in the guy that he physically, mentally, could not stop himself from speaking up against Modi and in favor of Umar Khalid. It came from a lot deeper than political calculus or career planning. It's something he had to do. 

Oh yes, here I should take a flashback to when I really truly first heard about Zohran Mamdani. Pandemic time. 

I had made a tweet about some Mira Nair movie and someone said, do you know that she now lives in NYC and that her son is running for state assembly? 

I said I do know she lives in NYC but had no idea her son is running for state assembly. Really? Not Congress like AOC or Suraj Patel? State Assembly? Important but very unglamorous job. But hey, it's nice that a second generation Desi kid is getting into local politics. 

I saw his videos. Very cute. But my reaction to it was still more along the lines of, oh how great is this drawing, I'm going to put it up on the refrigerator, sweetie variety. Not that he's a politician to be taken seriously. 

It was around October 2024 that I next took note of Zohran. I saw in Twitter that he was planning to run for Mayor, challenging the incumbent Eric Adams. It was not surprising that the deeply corrupt Adams, under federal investigation from an administration of his own party, was being challenged by many people. My initial reaction was again, aww how cute. 

I'm quite in tune with and involved with local politics. My partner Rupal is a community board member and we are both quite involved with local Democratic politics.

At that time, my very informed read on the NYC Mayor race was as follows. 

Everyone knows Andrew Cuomo is running. He won governorship 3 times, carrying the city by huge margins. He has networks and loyalties and donors no one can imagine. He was, at least in his first 2 terms, a competent and popular Governor. He offers an obvious safe alternative to a city sick of the Adams dysfunction. 

I didn't like him personally in 2024, though I had voted for him as governor twice in primaries and of course general election. Yes, even against Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout. Sorry, Cynthia and Zephyr. I was wrong. But the nursing homes deaths plus the sexual harassment cases that precipitated his resignation meant he was never getting my vote again. 

My choice was Brad Lander! Who I thought was a quixotic choice, a protest vote of sorts. 

Brad Lander was.... No no is as I type this.. The Comptroller of NYC. That might seem like a dorky inconsequential post but it is very powerful and acts as a counter weight against the mayor. 

I had been impressed with how Lander challenged the corrupt Adams and undercut his corruption whenever he could. Brad was also part of the Bernie wing of the party. Tho I never supported Bernie himself in either of his runs (that's a different essay), I'm generally very supportive of the candidates he inspires and endorses. Brad also had a bold aggressively progressive agenda. And he genuinely is a very nice guy. At least from what I've seen up close. Like I said, I'm very involved in local politics. 

I thought I would support Brad Lander. Against Cuomo. Of course Cuomo would still win, because who can beat a Cuomo in New York? But our Brad will get name recognition and campaign experience. And maybe he could be a senator cos Schumer and Gillibrand will or should retire soon.

So even though I knew Zohran was running for mayor, I was supporting Brad Lander, whom I fully expected to lose against Andrew Cuomo. Because really, who can defeat Andrew Cuomo in New York? That's October 2024 me, hehe.

It was after Trump won again and started acting right away like he was emperor that I first took a serious look at Zohran Mamdani as something more than just the cute kid of my favorite director. 

I saw his tweets, his videos, his website. And I was genuinely objectively impressed! Especially about his Free & Fast Buses proposal! I've been a Free Buses guy for years, and not just for New York City, but every city on the planet! And I saw his #RotiAndRoses hashtag which I found very clever but it didn't have scalability so I understood why he later stopped using it. 

It was mid November when I felt comfortable enough to share on Twitter and my group chats that I am now supporting Zohran Mamdani. Knowing a lot of responses will be "who?"

Saib Bilaval, whom I know only through Twitter, was the chemistry textbook catalyst in making me go from Zohran-curious to pro-Zohran. I've always found Saib extremely intelligent, courageous, and funny on Twitter, and he makes the best food and has the best cat. But most importantly, Saib has always seemed to me like the kind of Indian young man India could use a few million more of. 

If young Saib is so excited about Zohran, knowing how much he'll get trolled by Sanghis and JNU folks who consider him not leftist enough, what am I waiting for? I can feel it in my fingers, I can feel it in my bones that this Zohran can actually beat Cuomo if more people get to know him. 

So yeah, in November & December of 2024, I decided, Brad will get my #2 but I gotta throw my lot behind Zohran Mamdani. Sure, Cuomo will probably thump him by double digits. But we'll make him a known name at least.

On January 20, 2025, as Trump was about to be sworn in a second time in a very underwhelming ceremony, I made my first contribution to the Zohran campaign. And tweeted it, saying this is the kind of leadership we need to take on Trump. I also added that my contribution isn't just for a protest vote candidate. I'm picking my next Mayor. 

Late winter and early spring were an interesting time. Trump acted like an emperor. Cuomo acted like his chosen satrap. Adams celebrated as he got a pardon from Trump from his crimes. Zohran kept campaigning and meeting people and his numbers kept ticking up up up! 

He was against a pretty daunting field. In addition to skeazebags Cuomo and Adams, he was also up against serious locally well known politicians like Council speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation to corrupt Eric Adams), former comptroller Scott Stringer, current comptroller Brad Lander (my first choice).

But he kept campaigning and rising in the polls as 2025 ticked on.

May 10 is when I made a "Bookmark this" tweet that he would win. 

I make tweets saying "Bookmark this" when I'm confident or extremely cocky that I've read the data better than the usual crowd and my prediction will come true. And I will randomly gloat about it in the future for a little bit of dopamine.

What did I base my prediction on, at a time Cuomo was leading Zohran by 35 points? 

The individual donor data! From publicly available data, I saw that tho Cuomo had raised more money than Zohran, the latter had more than 5 times as many individual small donors. And the map showed them spread across the city, not just in historically Berniecrat hipster places. 

To me, individual donor count is a huge indicator of results. Especially when so geographically spread out.

This is also when Cuomo and the Democratic establishment and national media and Twitter finally took notice of Zohran. And promptly denounced him and otherized him and started throwing insults at him that even Karl Rove would have found beyond the pale. 

Here was a happy smiling guy running on affordability and working class struggles and wanting more Norway Sweden style socialism. And they were calling him a Jihadist Communists?

What the fuck is a Jihadi Communist exactly? Leonid Brezhnev would like to meet a few thousand of them. There exist people who believe in both "la ilaha ilallah" and "religion is the opiate of the masses"?

And then there was the Gaza genocide.

I think Kamala Harris lost to Trump because of Democrats blindly supporting the Gaza genocide. She recently said as much. About 5-10% of Biden 2020 voters stayed home in 2024 because they were disgusted by the Dems supporting Netanyahu's genocide. And cracking down on campus protestors. And calling anyone who felt empathy for Gazans an anti semite.

Zohran took what I thought was a very mainstream liberal position on the events in Palestine. And they turned him into some bogeyman. Only because of his name and his religion. 

I'm not Muslim, but that pissed me off extra and made me campaign for him even harder. 

So that's May. Let's call this Part 1 of the essay.

To be continued