Kaling first gained recognition for playing Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office β , on which she also worked as a writer. Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, [ 16 ] but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Bengal. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College , where she was a member of improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and a cappella group The Rockapellas, and wrote for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern , the college's humor magazine.
Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it. He said, "She's very original In an interview with The A.
Club , she stated that Kelly is "an exaggerated version of what I think the upper-level writers believe my personality is.
On September 15, , when her contract was set to expire at the end of Season 7, she signed a new contract to stay with the show for Season 8 and was promoted to full executive producer. Kaling and her fellow writers and producers of The Office were nominated five consecutive times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series.
In , Kaling pitched a single-camera comedy [ 36 ] to Fox called The Mindy Project , which Kaling wrote, produced and starred in.
