YELLOW cabs idled along 74th Street while a dhol beat quickened a crowd of sari-clad aunties and panjabi-wearing uncles. Into that din strode Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Queens assemblyman now running for mayor, and the Bangla chant that has become his signature rose: 鈥楢pnar mayor, amar mayor, Mamdani, Mamdani!鈥� (Your mayor, my mayor, Mamdani, Mamdani) When a drone camera panned out, the footage resembled Mirpur on election day more than New York City. Yet this outer-borough procession was only one face of a campaign that also featured pop-up merch trucks in SoHo, #HotGirls4Zohran TikToks, and Cynthia Nixon selfie drops. The bilingual glamour begged one question that echoed through diaspora WhatsApp groups and Bangladeshi newsrooms: How did a Bronx-Science-educated, Bowdoin-trained child of global elites become the working-class darling of Bangladeshi New York, and what does that say about politics in Dhaka?
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Elites in socialist clothing
BORN in Kampala in 1991 to Ugandan-Indian scholar Mahmood Mamdani and Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran moved to Manhattan鈥檚 Upper West Side at age seven. He later survived the high-stakes exam for Bronx High School of Science and majored in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, a liberal-arts enclave better known for hedge-fund analysts than rent-freeze firebrands. After brief stints in hip-hop production and refugee-housing counselling, he settled in Astoria, Queens, where the 2020 police-brutality uprisings carried him to the State Assembly on a democratic-socialist platform.
His mayoral bid, announced in January 2025, has felt less like a policy seminar and more like a cultural carnival. Within weeks, the campaign overflowed with memes. Gays for Zohran posted thirst-trap collages. Hot Girls 4 Zohran declared that the sexiest move any Brooklyn Gen-Z could make this season was ranking him first on the ballot. Cynthia Nixon appeared at a rally, and Emily Ratajkowski posed with a yellow and blue Mamdani tote. A friend whispered at a Williamsburg bar, 鈥業f you鈥檙e hot, you鈥檙e voting Zohran; otherwise, you鈥檙e signalling that you don鈥檛 get it.鈥� In a city where sexual, aesthetic, and class capital overlap, the team turned left politics into lifestyle branding. It was policy re-imagined as a perfume advertisement: Vote for rent control, smell like clout.
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Samosa solidarity
THE novelty lies in how seamlessly downtown chic converged with outer-borough nostalgia. No moment captures the fusion better than the ninety-second Bangla explainer that Mamdani filmed with Brooklyn Council Member Shahana Hanif. Standing before a tray of mishti, they compared ranked-choice voting to choosing three sweets for Eid. The skit, accented but earnest, reached 120,000 views in forty-eight hours and made him the only contender to offer formal Bangla outreach.
For Kensington delivery riders and Queens home-health aides, the gesture signalled respect, while their US-born children felt recognised in New York鈥檚 mainstream cool. That double appeal is what I call Samosa Solidarity, a coalition stitched from culinary nostalgia and aspirational chic. Yet solidarity built on affect can hide hierarchy. Mamdani鈥檚 life is closer to Gulshan privilege, with private tutors, a foreign degree, and film-festival soir茅es, than to Bronx precarity. He has never driven for Uber or worked an overnight bodega shift, yet campaign imagery revels in taxi-driver vests and halal-cart photo-ops. The empathy is genuine, but the gap is structural.
In fairness, the man does more than pose. In 2021, he joined the hunger strike organised by the New York Taxi Workers鈥� Alliance and helped secure a $450 million medallion-debt rescue. He co-authored the stalled Good Cause Eviction bill in Albany and promised city-owned grocery stores. These fights furnish credentials that Instagram glitter cannot imitate, although they now coexist with a star aura boosted by light skin, mixed heritage, and cinematic lineage.
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Politics as dating app
THE campaign鈥檚 sex appeal is not an afterthought. New York鈥檚 younger voters often treat political allegiance as if it were a dating-app bio: witty, ethical, and visually appealing. Posts from HotGirls4Zohran鈥檚 Instagram show Hinge matches closing the deal after bonding over Mamdani memes. Earlier this year, a 鈥榋ohran Look-alike Contest鈥� at a Brooklyn park drew a line of South-Asian twenty-somethings, each hoping their neatly trimmed beard and two-piece suit ensemble could pass for the candidate鈥檚 signature look. Social media clips show a Bengali student from Queens declared 鈥榗losest to Zohran鈥�, anointing South-Asian masculinity itself as a buzzy accessory for the campaign. The unspoken logic is simple: if you are socially desirable, you must vote for the socially conscious candidate. Glamour becomes proof of virtue, and virtue heightens glamour.
That dynamic becomes even more striking in light of Mamdani鈥檚 personal disclosures. In media interviews during the campaign, he casually mentioned that he met his wife on Hinge. The revelation humanised him, yes, but it also subtly signalled a generational rapport with urban voters. A mayoral candidate who courts the public while openly sharing his dating-app origin story breaks from the guarded masculinity of previous political archetypes. The act of aligning personal intimacy with public political performance shows just how consciously Mamdani weaves sexual charisma into his appeal.
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Why Dhaka should care
BANGLADESH is no stranger to charisma. The youthful mayoral saga of Ishraq Hossain, son of a political dynasty, offers a cautionary contrast. Ishraq, despite a polished platform, became a casualty of reform politics and could not even assume the office that voters awarded him. Mamdani, by contrast, has manoeuvred through New York鈥檚 ranked-choice system, union pluralism, and influencer culture to advance toward City Hall. One city frustrates a mandate through entrenched patronage, while the other lets an elite-born socialist court rickshaw metaphors and meme culture to upend a former governor.
The sight of a kurta-clad progressive leading Bangladeshi New York points to a tantalising thought experiment. Could a charismatic Gulshan returnee ever galvanise Mirpur鈥檚 rickshaw-pullers with meme politics, or would class distrust tear the coalition apart before it begins? Ishraque鈥檚 stalled mandate suggests structural resistance still overpowers style in Dhaka.
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After lights dim
QUEENS rents have risen by 22 per cent since 2021. Taxi-driver suicides continue. Mamdani鈥檚 rent-freeze agenda needs Albany鈥檚 approval, and his wealth-tax plan already faces lawsuits. Symbolic wins do not pay arrears. Today鈥檚 samosa snapshots could age like cold biryani if public power remains more hashtag than utility.
Yet dismissal would be easy and incomplete. Mamdani鈥檚 rise is instructive because it merges elite cultural capital, working-class immigrant longing, and the algorithmic machinery of twenty-first-century desire. Language, nostalgia, and sex appeal can knit coalitions once thought incompatible. That toolkit, ethically fraught though it is, could reshape diasporic politics on both sides of the Bay of Bengal.
As November鈥檚 general election approaches, New York鈥檚 Bangladeshi diaspora has invested hope, and plenty of homemade samosas, in Mamdani鈥檚 promise. Whether he delivers debt-free taxi financing or merely another round of tote-bag socialism will matter far beyond Astoria. In Dhaka, where newsroom debates already invoke his trajectory, the underlying question remains. When the last TikTok filter fades, will Mamdani鈥檚 coalition stand on something sturdier than desire? Whatever the answer, it is worth watching.
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Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi transgender artist, writer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work centres on marginalised South Asian experiences and gender politics.
