NEW YORK (The Thursday Times) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked Diwali on Sunday with a two-minute film of New Yorkers decorating a doorstep with rangoli and marigolds and lighting rows of clay lamps as night falls.
“Wishing you a very happy Diwali, New York City,” the mayor wrote on his official account as he posted the video.
What the film shows: there is no narration, only music. It opens on a woman in a pink sari placing marigolds on brick steps lined with candles and chalk patterns. Hands press yellow and orange colour into a large rangoli with a white conch shell at its centre, while women in saris and shalwar kameez, Sikh men in turbans and young men in kurtas kneel around it. One by one they light clay diyas with long tapers until the whole design glows. In the last shot the group gathers behind the finished rangoli, palms pressed together, and says the film’s only words: “Happy Diwali, New York!”
Mamdani, 35, took office in January as New York’s first Muslim mayor and the first of South Asian descent. The son of the filmmaker Mira Nair and the academic Mahmood Mamdani, he has made a point of marking the festivals of the city’s many communities, from praying Eid in the Bronx in May to Diwali this week. A poll last month put his approval rating at 69 per cent, and earlier this month he shaved his beard for Movember.
In Pakistan, Hindu communities from Karachi to Tharparkar have spent the past few days getting ready for the festival, with lamps, sweets and a long weekend. Mamdani has long drawn unusual interest in Pakistan, as we explored in The strange intimacy between Pakistan and Zohran Mamdani.
