Aziz Ansari grabs award for 2017 Golden Globe Awards with Netflix series of “Master of None’

Actor, director, author and comedian Aziz Ansari, won a Golden Globe award for his acting in the TV series Master of None, a Netflix comedy original he co-wrote with Alan Yang. This was Ansari second nomination in the category  “Best performance by an Actor in a TV series — Musical or Comedy” and he beat out some heavyweights in Anthony Anderson of  “Black-ish,” Kevin Bacon, “I Love Dick,” William H. Macy from “Shameless” and Eric McCormack, “Will and Grace”. In 2017, Ansari won the Emmy award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, for Master of None. “I seriously didn’t think I would win because all the websites said I would lose,” Ansari said in his short address on stage. He thanked fellow actors and “Italy for all the great food,” and concluded with, “I thank my parents for giving me so much love.”

Ansari plays Dev Shah in Master of None, a 30-year old actor in New York. The series moves from the personal to the political, featuring his real parents and friends. In its two seasons, it has portrayed the life of millennial today as they search for real love and purpose, learn about their parents’ sacrifices, and roam the world to take on new challenges. It deals with serious issues of immigrant lives and cultures, growing up in America, women’s rights, equality, LGBTQ rights, and racism in the film industry.

From the woman in charge of the Golden Globes ceremony, to a special invitee at the glittering event, Indian-Americans featured in the second most-watched show after the Oscars. Mumbai-born Meher Tatna, president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, gave a speech in the first hour of the awards ceremony, speaking about the mission of the organization. She also announced to $1 million grants to journalists organization, International Consortium of Investigative Journalism, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Tatna, a reporter for the Singapore daily, The New Paper, was elected president last June.

In a way, Tatna is the perfect person to run the show, Vanity Fair said in a Jan. 5 article, at a time when Hollywood is under fire on the treatment of women. A graduate in economics from Brandeis University, Tatna appeared in a soap opera and did voices on The Simpsons. She has suffered butt-pinches as a waitress, offensive casting calls as an actress, and uncertain economics as a print reporter, Vanity Fair said. All the actresses at the event wore black and almost everyone wore a broach on the lapel that read #Times Up, an initiative by Hollywood stars to support workers in other industries as well as in the film industry who are victims of sexual harassment.

Activist and academic Saru Jayaraman, whose story has been chronicled in the book, The Accidental American, was a special invitee introduced to the audience by the host of the show Seth Meyers, who noted that she was part of the #Times Up initiative. Jayaraman is the co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley.  After 9/11, Jayaraman helped organized displaced World Trade Center workers, to establish ROC, which now has more than 18,000 worker members, 200 employer partners, and several thousand consumer members in a dozen states nationwide. A graduate of Yale Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Jayaraman wrote a seminal book in 2013, Behind the Kitchen Door, documenting the lives of restaurant workers and fast-food chain workers. Her most recent book out in 2016 is Forked: A New Standard for American Dining A PER TIMES NEWS.