Zohran Mamdani's 'Nani' who inspired his viral rap song, Praveen Nair, dies at 94

Dubai: Praveen Nair, who spent six decades in social work and co-founded one of India's best-known children's charities in her late fifties, has died at the age of 94.

She is the mother of filmmaker Mira Nair and the grandmother of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Both connections are real and both produced remarkable things. However, they aren't the reason her name is worth knowing.

Salaam Baalak Trust began in 1988 with three members of staff, 25 children and a small space at New Delhi Railway Station provided by the railway police.

The trust was established using proceeds from Salaam Bombay!, the film that had just made her daughter internationally famous.

The founding announcement of her death came from her co-founder Sanjoy Roy, who runs the Jaipur Literature Festival. "End of an era! Praveen Nair passes away at the age of 94," he wrote on X on Saturday.

He continued: "We have cared for over 170,000 children in our homes and contact points in Delhi. Her extraordinary eye for detail, empathy, love for children and commitment to social work will be her abiding legacy."

The trust provides shelter, food, clothing, education, healthcare, counselling and recreation to street and working children across the Delhi region.

The charity was not a late-life hobby. It was the culmination of a working life most people never heard about.

Her involvement in the development sector spanned six decades, much of it spent in Odisha, where she headed committees for the Red Cross, DAV Public School and the Deaf and Dumb Association.

Within the organisation she was known simply as Didi. She went on to become a persistent advocate for the rights of street and working children in Delhi's policy and legislative forums, and her involvement shaped the trust's programmes directly.

Salaam Baalak Trust received the National Award for Child Welfare from the President of India in 2011. Her own recognition included the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 2017 for development and welfare of women and children, and an honorary doctorate in social innovation from CQUniversity in Australia, which is where the "Dr" in front of her name came from.

Salaam Bombay! documented the lives of children living on the streets, and it was what moved her to act.

The film premiered at Cannes in 1988 and won both the Caméra d'Or and the Audience Award. The following year it was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film, only the second Indian film to reach that shortlist.

An exchange from the Cannes red carpet has followed her ever since. Photographers, assuming she was one of the cast, asked what part she played. She told them she was the producer of the director.

Zohran Mamdani recorded music before he entered politics, under the name Mr Cardamom, and one of those tracks has been resurfacing steadily since his political career took off.

Nani, written in 2017 and released two years later, was a tribute to Praveen Nair. The video cast the actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey, then in her eighties, as a gloriously unbothered version of the character, and the song's most quoted line is a blunt assertion that no other grandmother comes close.

Speaking to The New York Times in 2019, Mamdani said his grandmother had gone against the grain in a great many different ways.

It is a strange sort of memorial, a profane comic rap video, and also a fairly accurate one. A woman who started a national charity at 58 was clearly not much interested in doing things the expected way.

Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, the daughter of Praveen Nair and Amrit Lal Nair, an Indian Administrative Service officer, and has two older brothers, Vikram and Gautam. Nair has spoken about her mother's influence on her own independence and fearlessness.

Mamdani, born in Kampala in 1991, became New York's youngest mayor in more than a century and its first Muslim one when he took office on 1 January. At his victory rally, flanked by his mother and father, he quoted Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech.

Three generations, three very different kinds of public life. The one that started at a railway station in 1988 has probably touched the most people.