
About this episode
New York City has just chosen a socialist as its leader. At 34, Zohran Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim to hold the office. The son of filmmaker Mira Nair and scholar Mahmood Mamdani, Ugandan-South Asian parents who built lives across continents.
He ran on ideas like rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare. Once, that would’ve sounded like fantasy in the home of Wall Street, the location of the world’s most powerful stock market. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s part of something larger. Young people from Nepal to Madagascar saying they’ve had enough of politics that listens only to the rich, while prices climb and jobs vanish.
Is this what happens when capitalism fails to keep its promises across the globe?
Guest: Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto
Host: Anupama Chandrasekaran
Produced and edited by Jude Francis Weston
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