"My favorite line in the episode was, 'How long have you been married to the cheerleader?' And that was your dad!" Kinsey gushed. "I was really worried about it seeming unprofessional or that they would tell boring stories to people and Jenna would be like, 'Hey, can you get this guy away from me?' to an Assistant Director."ĭespite Kaling's concerns, everyone on the show loved having her parents around. "I did not feel so established on the show as a writer or as an actor that I felt so comfortable having them there," she said.
So much so, that he wanted to bring her parents back for a future scene, but Kaling declined. Kaling revealed that director Miguel Arteta "fell in love with" her dad's acting and personality. "Now, I'm the first to say that my parents' acting was also very stilted, but was like, 'At least they bear some familial resemblance to you, so we'll put them in there." "We only cast my parents in it, which just seems like a complete act of nepotism and favoritism, because we had auditioned the parts and Greg felt that the actors we found in that age group (late 50s/early 60s) were either too theatrical for the style of acting on our show, or too stilted, because they had no acting experience," Kaling said. "I really like that Kelly has this defiant attitude about that it's really important, while also not knowing anything about it at all." How Mindy's parents got cast on The Officeįans may already be aware that Kaling's actual parents - her dad, Avu Chokalingam, and her mom, Swati, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2012 - played Kelly's parents in "Diwali." But Kaling told Fischer and Kinsey the details of how exactly they wound up getting cast on the show. "I like that Greg thought that was just as interesting - if not more interesting - than me going and like pretending that my family and I were these experts at Hindu holidays," she said. I had to kind of confront the fact that I'm Indian-American, I don't know very much about the holiday, and the bad experience of being Indian-American and talking about how you don't know very much about the holiday kind of became a big part of the episode, which I loved," Kaling explained. People celebrate the festival by decorating their houses, exchanging gifts, and offering prayers in order to commemorate the "victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance."One of the harder things when you write the 'Diwali' episode is that we couldn't believe Greg said yes. Notably, PM Modi has been visiting soldiers on Diwali, ever since he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat.ĭiwali is observed on the 15th day of Kartik, the holiest month in the Hindu lunar calendar, and it is believed that on this day Lord Rama returned from a 14-year-long exile during which he fought and won a battle against the demon king Ravan. In 2014, Prime Minister Modi spent Diwali in Siachen with soldiers.
He visited the Punjab border to celebrate Diwali with soldiers in 2015. In 2016, the PM went to Himachal Pradesh to celebrate the festival with Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel at an outpost. In 2017, the Prime Minister celebrated the festival of light with army soldiers and Border Security Force (BSF) personnel in the Gurez Valley of Jammu and Kashmir`s Bandipora District. Following that he had offered prayers at the Kedarnath shrine. In 2018, Prime Minister Modi had celebrated Diwali with jawans of the Indian Army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), at Harsil in Uttarakhand.
He had exchanged Diwali greetings with the Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel at Pathankot Air Force Station. He had called soldiers as his family and lauded them for guarding the borders even during festivals. In 2019, the Prime Minister had celebrated Diwali with soldiers in the Rajouri district along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir.
Last year, PM Modi while celebrating Diwali with soldiers at Longewala in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan had said that as long as the Indian soldiers are present, this country`s Diwali celebrations would continue in full swing and be luminescent.