Early Life
Kaling was born Vera Chokalingam in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a Tamil father from India and a Bengali mother. Her father Avu is an architect and her mother Swati was a gynecologist.
She has been referred to as Mindy ever since her mother was pregnant with her when her parents were living in Nigeria. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show Mork & Mindy. The name Vera is the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess".
She graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe "The Dog Day Players" and the a cappella group "The Rockapellas", and the creator of the comic strip "Badly Drawn Girl" in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), as well as writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (the college's humor magazine). She graduated in 2001.
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