Mindy Kaling Was Mistaken for Malala

Left: Mindy Kaling Photo by Featureflash / Shutterstock.com / Right: Malala Yousafzai Photo via DFID on Flickr

Amy Adams looks like Isla Fisher. Jude Law looks like Ewan McGregor. And Mindy Kaling looks like…Malala Yousafzai?

Well, at least one inebriated man thought so. According to the New York Times, Kaling, a 35-year-old Indian American actress and writer known for The Mindy Project and The Office, was approached by a tipsy 80-year-old man at a New Yorker Festival after-party earlier this month who mistook her for Malala Yousafzai, a 17-year-old Pakistani activist who recently won a Nobel Prize.

The two women look nothing alike, and for its awkward racial implications, I’ll go ahead and rank this man’s faux pas as far worse than the time Mark Wahlberg was mistaken for Matt Damon. This was the New Yorker Festival, dude—you need to know this stuff.

Fortunately, the sin was committed toward a seasoned celeb with a strong sense of humor—versus the other way around, which would have been less amusing.

After the man went on singing “her” praises and congratulating her on her Nobel Prize, Kaling was “speechless” and said afterward:

Did he really think I’m Malala? … And that if I were, I’d be at the Boom Boom Room? … That’s the best thing that’s happened all night.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Mindy Project scene just waiting to happen. Surely Dr. Lahiri would not have corrected the gentleman and would have milked that Malala confusion for all it was worth. (Danny would have disapproved, of course.)