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Much has been made\u2013justifiably so\u2013about the anemic diversity represented in film and television, most problematically when roles originally written for people of color are rewritten for white actors. So consider if you will the concept of a 5\u2019 4\u201d woman of Indian descent writing and playing the part of a famously strapping white male actor \u2013 in 2002, no less. The off-Broadway play (that would be Matt & Ben, in case you were wondering) hardly seems like the breakout opportunity of a lifetime for anyone. But Vera Mindy Chokalingam, 23 years old and barely out of college at the time, is about as un-anyone as they come.\n\nMatt & Ben was named one of Time magazine\u2019s \u201cTop Ten Theatrical Events of the Year,\u201d and its co-writer/co-star (better known these days as Mindy Kaling) praised by The New York Times for her fine, deadpan sense of the absurd and the vicious. As fateful showbiz stories often go, in the audience one night was producer Greg Daniels, who was working on an American adaptation of The Office. He hired Kaling as a writer-performer on the show. Make that the only female writer on a staff of eight, and soon its most prolific. \u201cYour average writer, when they get really good, I know how they got it,\u201d Daniels told The New York Times. \u201cI can see the steps. But I love how with Mindy, I don\u2019t see how she does it.\u201d\n\nWe have a speculation or two. Kaling grew up on Fawlty Towers and Saturday Night Live, and says she realized pretty early on that the only thing she really liked doing was writing dialogue. Listening to the characters on her shows, you get the feeling that there\u2019s so much rapid-fire conversation looping in her head that it\u2019s all she can do to keep up; no wonder Kelly Kapoor, Mindy Lahiri and their co-workers seem to spring fully formed like mini-Athenas from the crowded forehead of a comic Zeus. It also spills over into books (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns and Why Not Me?) and a Twitter feed as random and entertaining as it is followed \u2013 by more than 7.5 million fans.\n\nKaling\u2019s on-screen alter egos are at once reflections and antipodes of Kaling herself. They love and feed on the pop-culture they send up. They\u2019re unapologetically self-involved and superficial, proof that Kaling has no problem being the target of her own gimlet-eyed humor. In its review of The Mindy Project\u2019s first episode, The A.V. Club wrote, \u201cWhat\u2019s most intriguing about this project is just how harsh it is about its lead character, who is certainly not without flaws\u2026Kaling has her eye on doing something more ambitious than the standard TV claptrap.\u201d Say what you want about her characters, they are not clich\xe9s. Ambitious, demanding, egocentric, romantically messed up, yes, but not anything you\u2019d find among the seven standard Hollywood-issue female roles she barbecued in a 2011 New Yorker piece. Which gives us high expectations for what she\u2019ll do with her role in Sandra Bullock\u2019s all-female remake of Ocean\u2019s Eleven. High hopes, too, given how sorely comedy needs what she does.\n\nIt is funny how the honesty we love in bold female characters can still unsettle us in the women who play them. And maybe that\u2019s why there remain many who are reluctant to make waves. Kaling is not among them. Talking to her, you sense an entitlement, but it\u2019s one of privilege earned \u2013 through talent, risk, constantly proving one\u2019s place at the table, and mostly, very hard work.\n\n\u201cI feel I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers out there,\u201d Kaling has said. (And if you can convince an audience you\u2019re Ben Affleck, why wouldn\u2019t you?) Though she\u2019s more than proven her point, let\u2019s hope she\u2019ll never stop making it.