Mindy Kaling took to her Twitter feed to laugh off an incident profiled in a New York Times article about her, in which a man at a party mistook her for 17-year-old children's education activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
"Honored to have been mistaken for @MalalaFund! (yes, a little
bit because she is 17)'' Tweeted the 35-year-old television sitcom star on October 26. Kaling, who is of Indian descent, put on a good face upon being compared to the Pakistani-born Yousafzai.
The Times article, published October 24, describes a scene at a Manhattan party earlier this month.
"As she stood by the banquettes, a tipsy man in his 80s cornered her and showered her with compliments, apparently mistaking her for Malala Yousafzai. 'Congratulations on your Nobel Prize,' he said, before expressing wonder at how well she had recovered from Taliban gunshots.''
"Ms. Kaling was speechless," the article continued. " 'Did he really
think I'm Malala?' she said when he was safely out of sight. 'And that if I were, I'd be at the Boom Boom Room?'''
Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for advocating girls' right to education, became the youngest Nobel Prize winner earlier in October, when it was announced that she would receive the peace prize alongside 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi the first Indian-born winner of the accolade.
Yousafzai was attacked in 2012 on a school bus in the Swat Valley of northwest Pakistan by masked gunmen as a punishment for a blog that she wrote for the BBC's Urdu service as an 11-year-old to campaign against the Taliban's efforts to deny women an education.
The Nobel Peace Prize, worth about $1.1 million, will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the award in his 1895 will.
