One day in 2009, when I worked for a city magazine in Mumbai, I received a call from a scriptwriter friend saying that director Mira Nair and her husband, the Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, were visiting from New York and wanted to drop by the office.

I assumed that Nair wanted to discuss her latest project so we could write about it or that Mamdani hoped that we would interview him about a recent book.

I was wrong. When they arrived, they had someone else with them: their teenaged son. Mamdani said that they were looking for a journalism internship for the boy. They had started the day at the Economic and Political Weekly, the weighty academic journal, and were ending it at Time Out Mumbai – from the sublime to the ridiculous,the professor seemed to imply. What opp

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