Zohran Mamdani’s victory on November 4th, 2025, in New York’s mayoral race feels, at once, intimate but enormous: intimate because it is the story of a son of immigrants who walked the city’s neighborhoods, listened to people talk about rent, groceries and childcare, and offered a platform that named those burdens directly; enormous because it reframes what political possibility looks like for South Asians everywhere, including college students like myself,here in India who were watching from afar, and are beginning to ask if such a thing could happen for us, too.
A City in Our Screens
For many Indians, especially those of us who came of age in the post-liberalisation and rapidly globalising era, New York occupied a kind of mythical space in our collective imagination. The city is central to all the TV shows that I, for instance, grew up watching: Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Suits – just to name a few. These shows painted New York as a place of glittering possibility of fast-talking friends in cozy cafés, high-stakes careers, and reinvention. Especially in the earlier decades, for many young Indians it felt aspirational, a promise through this representation that America, and New York in particular, was the place dreams were made.
Yet, when the lens turned toward politics or civic life, representation rarely matched that aspirational gaze. In American politics on screen, and often in real life, popular leadership was overwhelmingly white and male, occasionally Black or Latino, but very rarely South Asian. For decades, the face of power in the U.S. mainstream narrative rarely imagined a brown, Muslim, immigrant leading one of its greatest cities. South Asians appeared in the media, but usually through narrow stereotypes or token roles.
Keeping Up With Zohran
Cultural consumption shapes aspiration because representation sketches the boundaries of the possible long before politics does. This TV-show imagination and representation hasn’t faded. If anything, it has intensified. Today, our screens are smaller but more pervasive: reels/TikToks, edits, micro-memes, stitched videos of campaign speeches, fan-cams of politicians set to trending music. This is the new grammar of political attention, and it is one that blurs borders. For many people across the world, this is where Zohran Mamdani first appeared. A thirty-second clip of him talking about housing justice. A reel of him explaining why public transit should be free. A stitched video comparing his proposals with global progressive movements. Within months, this fresh face achieved a massive level of worldwide recognition.
The “That’s my mayor (I’m from X country)” trend on Twitter (or X), for instance, captured that mood perfectly. It wasn’t only a meme. It was a small declaration of longing, a way for young people across the world to express a desire for leadership that feels humane and forward-looking. With powerful nations turning to more and more conservative policies, especially in the U.S. under the Trump administration, Zohran Mamdani was a breath of fresh air.
Politics That Travel Back Home
Sitting in a college hostel in India, one might ask: what does this election mean here? It is that Mamdani’s politics, though tailored to New York, do resonate across borders. Rent control, universal childcare, equitable transit – these are not merely American issues. They are urban issues. They are our issues. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune: each city struggles with affordability, access, and inequality. For a generation in India that is tired of performative politics, culture wars, grandstanding without ground-level work, Mamdani inspires a different type of politics that is far more earnest and people-centric.
Furthermore, South Asian representation abroad has generally been framed through assimilation, and many from the diaspora succeed by blending in and smoothing out the edges of their identity. Mamdani does something else: he names his heritage. He holds his politics close to his roots. He refuses the binary of being either “American enough” or “authentically South Asian.” He shows that both can coexist well.
Why It Matters for Indian Youth
Mamdani’s win resonates with the youth specifically because it offers two things.
First: it signals that someone with whom we share roots: South Asian heritage, immigrant narrative, global upbringing, can lead a major world city. He is the first Muslim, the first person of South Asian descent, and the youngest mayor-elect in New York in more than a century. Second: his platform is material. For students like us, who juggle the current economic uncertainty about education costs, job markets, urban living, his language of affordability and dignity matters. It says: politics can address the everyday, finally.
It also matters because Mamdani did not build his campaign on charisma alone. He spent years before as a housing counselor, sitting with tenants who feared eviction, and with the working class of the city. His politics came from those rooms. For young Indians like me, this model of leadership is striking because it feels grounded. It is especially refreshing, because we are quite used to politicians who speak in big, booming and usually empty promises.
We see our own rent spikes, our own transit frustrations, our own widening gap between what the leaders in our cities demand and what they give back. Mamdani’s win, honest canvassing, and progressive policies can help us ask ourselves: why don’t we expect the same? Why don’t we imagine the same? His win is thus a much-needed mirror to hold up to our own political landscape.
Beyond Representation: The Work Ahead
Of course, this victory is only a start. Critics argue the agenda might be financially heavy, and the political opposition fierce. However, for someone in India, that tension is already familiar: promising change is one thing; delivering it is another. The lesson is not to wait for perfect power, but to engage with the possibility of progressive policymaking. Mamdani’s win reframes the question for young Indians: not just who leads and from what party, but how we conceive leadership.
If you’re a college student like me in India, thinking about your future, the kind of place you want to live in, the kind of leadership you hope for, then this moment matters. You don’t have to emigrate to feel seen by global politics. You can draw hope from what is unfolding in another city across the world. The city we once watched on screen can have people like us as leaders. Policies that feel distant can feel possible.
For now, we’re viewers across an ocean, but maybe what we watch and aspire toward can become part of our story, too.