As Zohran Mamdani won the much-watched New York City mayoral election, I could not help but think back to a humid Delhi afternoon decades ago. Twice, I had the privilege of meeting his parents — encounters that, in hindsight, form the quiet preface to the story of a young man who would one day take on billionaires and a political establishment to lead one of the world’s greatest cities.

It was the early 1990s, during my early years in journalism, when I was sent to cover a dhaba (tea stall) run by former street children at Delhi’s Inter-State Bus Terminal. The place was small, noisy, and filled with energy. ‘

The story, I soon learned, led back to the Salaam Baalak Trust — an organization founded by filmmaker Mira Nair after the success of her 1988 film Salaam Bombay! - which had portrayed with searing honesty the lives of children surviving on Mumbai’s streets.

When the film earned global acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination, Nair decided the story could not end with the film credits. Along with her mother, Dr. Praveen Nair, she used the proceeds to set up the Trust in 1989, giving shelter, education, and opportunity to street children who might otherwise have been forgotten.

Warmth and simplicity

During that assignment, I went to meet Mira Nair at her home in Vasant Vihar, Delhi. Unlike most in her profession, she had no secretary or manager. She picked up the phone herself, fixed the time, and greeted me with warmth and simplicity.

A decade later, in the middle of the 2000s, I received a call from Mahmood Mamdani, a professor and the distinguished Uganda-born scholar whose book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror had just made waves across the world. He was in Delhi researching Muslim youth and the law and wanted to speak with me after reading my book, My Days in Prison, which was recently published by Penguin.

When I arrived at his Vasant Vihar residence, I realized that he was married to Mira Nair. As we spoke, a teenager hovered around the living room — polite, observant, a little restless. Professor Mamdani introduced him warmly: “My son Zohran.” He was studying at the Bronx High School of Science in New York.

The young man listened intently as we talked about identity, surveillance, and the politics of fear — topics that, though far removed from the lives of schoolboys, clearly held his attention. That was my first glimpse of him — a teenager at ease in a home where art met activism, where stories were not just told, but lived.

Twenty years later, that same boy would rise to become the Mayor of New York City, embodying both his parents’ legacies — his mother’s compassion and his father’s clarity.

Rehabilitation model

The Salaam Baalak Trust, which I first reported on all those years ago, has since grown into one of India’s most successful rehabilitation models for street children. What began in a single room now includes 17 centers across Delhi and several more in Mumbai and other cities. Over the years, the Trust has supported more than 100,000 children, shelter, food, education, counseling, and vocational training.

The dhaba at the bus terminal which I had written about, symbolized a rare idea of empowerment. These were not children receiving charity; they were working, learning, and reclaiming dignity. Many went on to transform their lives. They included Vicky Roy, who ran away from home as a child and was rescued by the Trust. He discovered photography there, trained under mentors, and eventually became one of the photographers chosen to document the reconstruction of New York’s World Trade Center.

When news of Zohran Mamdani’s victory reached the Trust centers, quiet celebrations broke out. “Mira didi gave us a future,” one alumnus said. “Now her son gives a voice to others who are struggling, just like we once did.”

Zohran Mamdani’s journey — from the living room of his parents’ Delhi home to the steps of New York’s City Hall — reflects a rare synthesis of intellect and empathy. Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991, and raised across Africa and America, he absorbed his father’s academic rigor and his mother’s humanism.

Before politics, he worked as a housing counselor in Queens, sitting at kitchen tables with immigrant families on the brink of eviction. He translated loan papers, called banks, and fought bureaucracy. Later, as a state assemblyman, he led hunger strikes with taxi drivers crushed by debt and joined picket lines with tenants. His politics was never abstract; it grew from lived experiences of precarity.

The Obama comparison

It is tempting to compare Zohran Mamdani to Barack Obama: both men of African heritage, both raised between cultures, both gifted with language and organizing instincts. Yet their paths — and philosophies — diverge sharply.

Obama entered politics at a time when success required reassurance. When his middle name, Hussein, became a political weapon, he distanced himself from it. “Barack Obama” became the acceptable, unthreatening face of diversity — aspirational, but careful. He rarely invoked his Muslim background, choosing a broad, colorblind narrative of hope.

Mamdani represents a different era — one less interested in fitting in, and more in standing firm. Obama deflected when his middle name became a slur in the mouths of opponents. Mamdani pronounces his own name slowly until others get it right. Obama avoided being read through a Muslim lens. Mamdani says being Muslim, African-born, and South Asian is the story — not a liability.

He understands that invisibility is not acceptance: it is erasure. Where Obama’s politics sought to transcend identity, Mamdani insists on grounding it. He doesn’t ask voters to look past his background. He asks them to see what it means — to know that empathy for the marginalized is not a political strategy, but a lived inheritance.

In a city as plural as New York, Mamdani’s visibility matters. His campaign language — “rent, groceries, buses, dignity” — was rooted in the material struggles of ordinary people, yet it carried an undercurrent of faith in shared humanity. He attends mosques, speaks Urdu and Arabic on the trail, and meets with rabbis and imams alike. He calls himself “a Muslim New Yorker” without hesitation, treating faith not as a credential but as context.

Obama sought to soothe; Mamdani provokes thought. Obama promised unity by smoothing differences. Mamdani builds it by naming them — race, class, faith — and then organizing across them.

Thread that binds

From Mira Nair’s decision to turn Salaam Bombay! into a movement for street children, to Mahmood Mamdani’s writings on power and history, to Zohran’s insistence that identity and justice are inseparable — the thread is unbroken. It is the belief that compassion, once practiced, becomes contagious.

A boy who once roamed the corridors of a Vasant Vihar home filled with books, films, and the hum of social purpose is now reshaping New York with the same conviction. He is, in every sense, his parents’ son — and perhaps the clearest proof yet that dignity travels farther than power.

(The writer is a journalist based in Ankara, Turkiye. He is the author of the book, "My Days in Prison" (Penguin, 2009) and the Urdu book "Ikkeeswi Sadi ka Bharat aur Musalman: Siyasat aur Samaaj ke Aeenay Mai". By arrangement with Sapan and Kashmir Times)