Born Vera Mindy Chokalingam in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1979 to Tamil obstetrician and architect parents who had migrated from India by way of Nigeria. Dartmouth, then in 2004 a writers' room at The Office at the age of twenty-four — the youngest writer the show had hired, the only woman of colour in the room, and from 2005 also a recurring cast member as Kelly Kapoor. Created and starred in The Mindy Project, the first prime-time American comedy with a woman of South Asian descent as its lead. Created Never Have I Ever for Netflix in 2020 — three full seasons of a comedy with a Tamil-Indian-American teenage girl at the centre, written by writers who had lived that house. The diaspora's most consequential figure in contemporary US scripted comedy. The bar she lifted was not just for herself.