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Never Have I Ever…. Accepted my Whole Self
Diversity in Netflix’s content has validated my youth. Which show speaks your truth?
My wedding day (where this picture was taken) is quite possibly one of the only times when my non-Tamilian friends have seen me dressed in a sari. Growing up as one of the only brown people in the village in South Wales, and then Hampshire, conformity reigned supreme in the playground.
Even at university, with all its societies and students striving to carve out their own unique selling points, I had to be convinced to attend a “Sri Lanka Society” ball. By my 20s friends knew I have a grandmother who lives in an Ashram in southern India, and a few knew that my heritage was Sri Lankan Tamil, rather than Indian. But by and large, I brought nothing of my cultural background to my daily life. I (shamefully) can’t converse in my mother tongue. And my dinner parties have never featured any of my Mum’s home cooking. You certainly wouldn’t find me schooling English friends on Tamil pop culture, or sharing childhood memories that involved not being allowed to have a boyfriend until graduating university, or revealing that I was thrown a public ceremony for starting my period.
But Mindy Kaling and her team of merry (wo)men have changed things with their new Netflix series, Never Have I Ever. I’ve followed Kaling’s career as one of few (albeit now…
