When being a ‘rich’ Indian American is actually a handicap.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Vijay Chokalingam, older brother of comedienne and actress known as Mindy Kaling (her real name is Vera Mindy Chokalingam), recently disclosed he pretended to be black on his medical school applications back in 1998 and 1999 and had a better success rate getting accepted as a result.
Chokalingam, now 38, and an Indian American by ethnicity, claims that when he initially applied to medical schools he found himself wait-listed at University of Pennsylvania, Washington University and Mt. Sinai. This apparently prompted him to try to apply to schools while swapping his ethnicity.
According to Fox News, it wasn’t long before Chokalingam was interviewing at Harvard and Columbia.
Chokalingam eventually dropped out of St. Louis University Medical School two years after he was admitted under false pretense. He eventually was accepted at and graduated from UCLA Anderson’s MBA program as an Indian American.
“I love my sister to death,” Chokalingam told the New York Post, but he does not think Kaling will react well to his public campaign.
“She says this will bring shame on the family,” he said.
According to a source cited by Time, Kaling and her brother are estranged.
Chokalingam said he’s raising the curtain on his escapade because he heard UCLA is considering strengthening its affirmative action admissions policies, reported Fox. He says it’s a myth that affirmative action benefits the underprivileged.
“I disclosed that I didn’t receive financial aid from the University of Chicago, and that I had a nice car,” said Chokalingam. “I was the campus rich kid, let’s just put it on the table. And yet they considered me an affirmative action applicant,” he added.
Chokalingam is writing about his experience on his website, Almost Black, and is also working on a book that underlines his anti-affirmative action stance.
“I am writing this book to show my opposition to affirmative action discrimination, specifically at my alma mater UCLA but in the American education system in general,” he wrote on his site.
2 Comments
This is shameless
What a tool, he went to one of the most expensive and pretentious
private schools in the country. He is the son of a Dr and and Architect.
He is well off and privileged and could have just taken additional coursework or test prep to raise his GPA or MCAT or just applied directly to business school vs being a fraud and taking a spot in Med School from a hard working student that actually had the integrity necessary to be a good Dr.