Described as a “spellbinding exploration of love and belonging,” which is “Thoroughly engaging, terrifically moving” and is “A glory on a huge colorful canvas” The Namesake opened in theaters across the United States on March 9, 2007. In one of her face-to-face- Question and Answer session with a live audience of over 500 people, who stayed late night on a weekday, Tuesday, March 13, 2007 after a preview of the movie at the Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT, Mira Nair, the director and co-producer of the film, said, “The Namesake came out of a personal experience.”

The popular Indian-American film director, Mira Nair, shared with the audience her experiences and the objectives and goals in making the film, which is based on the best-selling novel by Pulitzer Prize Jhumpa Lahiri. The Namesake is the story of the Ganguli family whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to meld to a new world without forgetting the old. Though parents Ashoke and Ashima (Irrfan Khan, Tabu) long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, they take great pride in the opportunities their sacrifices have afforded their children.
The Namesake, explores the struggles of an immigrant family, where children, born and raised in New York, presents to the viewers the poignancy and pathos of people caught between cultures and continents Nair said, “I wanted to capture visually the dizzying feeling of being an immigrant where you might physically be in one particular space yet you feel like you are someplace else in your soul.”

Mira Nair said, she read Lahiri's novel as she was flying to India for a traumatic task - her much loved mother-in-law had just passed away. “I was moved with melancholy and upon return to USA, I shared my idea of making the novel into a movie with Jhumpa, who willingly agreed. After several several sessions with Jhumpa, the final draft for the film was made.”
 
The movie addresses many issues relating to immigration in depth and with care, and makes the Western audience understand the nuances of Indian culture. The movie captures the hustle and bustle of India, sets the tone of the movie from the very first scene, and, overall, is heartwarming and true. It gradually  transitions from a loud, vibrant and colorful life in India to a lonely, cold, and snow-white New York, which is breathtaking. Mira Nair eloquently portrays the challenges of a family that embarks upon a lifelong balancing act to meld into a new world without forgetting the old. Though parents Ashoke and Ashima long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, they take great pride in the opportunities their sacrifices have afforded their children. Paradoxically, their son Gogol is torn between finding his own unique identity without losing his heritage. Even Gogol's name represents the family's journey into the unknown.
 
“Millions of us have left one home for another, if not one country for another, and that's a universal tale.  And also the tale of a boy who was raised here who doesn't look like anyone else around him who has to negotiate his path is also a universal tale because all of us have felt like the outsider in some place in the world... and when it's children who have felt that way it's even more complicated,” Nair said and went on to add that “... but I think that the heart of The Namesake is also a story about parents and children, and I wanted to certainly make it a direct love story about two strangers who marry and then fall in love which was, for me, a very enchanting idea.”
Of the challenges she had to face, Mira Nair confessed, “I was making a 30-year saga in two hours, every scene had to have an intention and had to do three things at once because it had to propel the story, it had to make you feel the sweetness of it very quickly and with great economy, and at the same time had to take you into the next chapter. Jhumpa, of course, gave us many clues, and Sooni wrote the lines, and I used things that happened in my own life.”
Nair said, she had only had twenty-eight days to shoot in the US and eleven days shoot in India. That's extremely short for any Hollywood release.  Nothing was storyboarded in advance and the actors only had a few table reads before filming began. Nair tries to create a safe atmosphere for her cast realizing that, at least for this film, "their fragility was their power." She shot an involved and lovingly detailed traditional Bengali wedding ceremony in such a way that it could be cut out of the film if it didn't work. But the scene works beautifully and adds a rich layer of meaning and subtext to the film; in the end much footage of the wedding scene was used. As Nair said, “Without specificity and truth there is no resonance.”
Directed by Mira Nair, The Namesake has popular stars both from India and the United States, including, Tabu, Irrfan Khan, Kal Penn, Zulikha Robinson, Jacinda Barret, and sahira Nair. Screenplay was provided by Sooni Taraporevala.
Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, where her father was employed. She was the youngest of three children from a middle-class Punjabi family. Her father was a civil servant and her mother a social worker. Mira did her early schooling at Catholic schools. She studied sociology in Delhi University, where she became involved in political street theater and performed for three years in an amateur drama company. She left for the US at age 19 with a scholarship at Harvard, where she met her first husband Mitch Epstein, as well as Sooni Taraporevala.
 
At the beginning of her career as a film artist, Nair directed four documentaries. India Cabaret, a film about the lives of strippers in a Bombay nightclub, won the award at the American Film Festival in 1986. Salaam Bombay, screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, and won many other awards. It is today considered a groundbreaking film classic, and is standard fare for film students.
 
Her 1991 film Mississippi Masala starred Denzel Washington and profiled a family of displaced Ugandan-Indians living and working in Mississippi. The screenplay was also by Sooni Taraporevala. "My Own Country" starring Naveen Andrews, was produced for HBO films, adapted from the novel by Abraham Verghese by Sooni Taraporevala.
Nair's most popular film till date, Monsoon Wedding (2001), screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan, a film about a chaotic Punjabi Indian wedding, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival. Her 2004 version of Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair, starred Reese Witherspoon.
 
Her latest project is Maisha, a film lab to help East Africans and South Asians learn to make films. Maisha is headquartered in Nair's adopted home of Kampala, Uganda. In fall of 2007, Nair will begin production on the big-budget Johnny Depp-starrer Shantaram in India, the U.K. and possibly Australia. Nair lives near Columbia University in New York City where she is an adjunct professor in the Film Division of the School of Arts and where her husband, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, also teaches
 

|