How an elite public high school set Zohran Mamdani on the path to politics

Cricket had never been recognized as an official sport in New York City’s public schools. Mamdani, like many South Asian schoolmates who had grown up around the game, wanted in anyway.

And so, he and a friend effectively created a team themselves, with all the logistical fortitude available to distractible adolescents, amassing a cache of bats, pads and player sign-ups (“brown ain’t no requirement to play this game,” Mamdani urged on Facebook) and working to convince enough students and adults that they were fronting a legitimate operation.

“He was sort of campaigning,” Avneet Singh, an eventual teammate, said in an interview. “I saw Zohran on campus running around with this group of kids saying, ‘We’re going to be the cricket team.’ So before it was even a team, I think he had to pretend that it was a team.”

For most politicians — for most people — high school is a formative time. Awkwardness is overcome (or not). Mistakes are made (and repeated). Personas congeal into personalities.

For Mamdani — for most people who went to his very particular high school — it is something closer to a skeleton key.

Fifteen years after his graduation in 2010, the creation of the cricket team still earns prominent mention on his state Assembly biography page, reflecting both the limited legislative record of a 34-year-old lawmaker and the early education of a relentless grassroots campaigner who is now the favorite to become New York City’s next mayor.

By Mamdani’s junior year, New York’s public school system had added cricket to its roster of sports. After months of meetings with Bronx Science staff to codify their status, Mamdani and his team could make their city-sanctioned debut.

“It was one of the moments that taught me the power of organizing,” Mamdani said in an interview, “and how to change your reality.”

Despite Mamdani’s professed early-onset cosmopolitanism as the Uganda-born son of India-born intellectuals, the New York of his earlier upbringing could be remarkably small, a reel of grassy Upper West Side parks and bagel runs among mostly white friends who rarely ventured south of Lincoln Center.

It was at Bronx Science that the city first revealed itself to Mamdani in earnest, in all its brilliant and maddening imperfection, and where Mamdani evolved in kind, forming the sketches of the New York he aspired to see.

It was where he flashed high talent for the kind of dexterous social toggling that would serve him professionally; where he first commingled en masse with residents of considerably lesser means; where he negotiated (and ultimately embraced) a bespoke personal identity, with all the introspection and blunt-force brevity of a teenager feeling things out.

“Ugindia’s Finest,” read a flat-brimmed, custom-made hat that he sometimes wore at school.

“What Can Brown Do For You?” read a campaign slogan for Mamdani’s ill-fated student government run.

While Bronx Science could feel like a haven for students who looked like him, Mamdani came of age at an institution that was and remains, by his account, an emblem of systemic school segregation.

Bronx Science is among eight specialized high schools where a standardized test is the sole admission criterion. Amid yawning racial gaps in admissions, the exam has come under consistent criticism from lawmakers and activists for creating student bodies that fail to reflect the city’s demographics — an issue that has surfaced in Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.

For years, Mamdani called for the abolition of the test, saying he had “personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are” as a student. But in a signal of his pliability ahead of the November election, he has recently backtracked, saying the issue was a “struggle” for him.

For generations of students, the tailored circumstances at Bronx Science — the test, the hypercompetitiveness, the other city-verified wunderkinds in the room — have served as a bonding agent, keeping graduates tethered to the school and to one another with adhesive force.

Many recall their time there as an almost utopian experience of public education, in which students from all backgrounds and income strata converged to learn with and from one another.

“It was where I discovered who I wanted to be,” cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, a 1961 graduate who has helped bankroll a super political action committee boosting Andrew Cuomo’s rival mayoral bid, said in a statement.

“Best years of my life,” John C. Liu, a state senator who has vocally backed Mamdani, said recently before attending his own 40th reunion.

Another specialized school, Stuyvesant High School in New York City’s Manhattan borough, is considered slightly more elite, creating a kind of perpetual little-sibling rivalry that only one side seems to recognize.

“We have quite a few elected officials,” Kenny Burgos, a former New York state Assembly member who overlapped with Mamdani at Bronx Science, said pointedly of his school’s alumni. “Stuyvesant needs to increase their numbers there. They’re supposed to be the premier high school.”

In the interview, Mamdani was quick to acknowledge the main reason he chose Bronx Science: “I couldn’t get into Stuyvesant.”

At the time, he was a student at the private Bank Street School for Children. It was near his family’s home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood surrounding Columbia University, where his father had been a professor since they moved to New York when Mamdani was 7.

He was in many ways a typical city teen moving through some atypical circles with uncommon gumption.

Many Manhattan adolescents were made to socialize with their parents’ friends. But few peers had parents like Mamdani’s, attracting a procession of leading Palestinian American scholars to their apartment.

Many young trouble-seekers loved the stoner comedy “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.” But only Mamdani was positioned to immediately recommend its co-star, Kal Penn, for a prestige drama directed by his mother, Mira Nair, an esteemed filmmaker. (Penn got the part and remains a friend. “I always love how comedy and satire can bring people together,” he said in an email.)

Mamdani was one of the few nonwhite students from Manhattan who commuted to the Bronx Science campus on West 205th Street, where roughly half the attendees generally come from the borough of Queens and 60% are immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to the alumni group.

With some 700 students in his grade, Mamdani, wiry and baby-faced, still had a way of standing out.

“I wouldn’t say that 14-year-olds have charisma,” said Marc Kagan, his former history teacher, whose sister, Elena, was nominated to the Supreme Court during Mamdani’s senior year. “But there are certain 14-year-olds who just kind of have something about them.”

Like many South Asian classmates, Mamdani had grown up watching cricket with relatives. Unlike many of them, he had spent much of his earlier Bronx Science life with mostly well-off white students, from what he later called his “Manhattan crew,” who knew little of the sport.

Before long, Mamdani has said, he began socializing far more with the cricket guys, many of them lower-income students with family in places like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

He describes this period with almost reverential nostalgia, enumerating its lessons about his city, his roots, his theory of organizing, his recognition that he quite liked being the center of the action.

“I love being the bowler,” he was quoted as saying in his senior yearbook, naming his preferred role in cricket, “because I feel like I have so much pull in how the game goes.”

Mamdani has credited his high school travels with immersing him in the borough that would become his home and political base, back when the most pressing question about his coalition was how many teammates would join him for postgame kebabs, with heaps of homework awaiting them.

At least once, Mamdani hosted a team dinner at his apartment, where the chasm in the players’ family circumstances was unmistakable: One guest recalled being awed at the notion of a door-attendant building.

On campus, the cricketers became something of a fascination.

“It was just cool to kind of see brown culture thriving,” said Josephine Ali, another classmate and friend, whose wedding to another Bronx Science alum Mamdani attended last year, alongside 15 other Bronx Science graduates.

The team’s performance under Mamdani was mixed, though it did include a victory over Stuyvesant before his graduation in 2010.

Not so many years later, Mamdani’s time at Bronx Science has echoed through a campaign that has dwelled on the prospect of generational change. (Cuomo, his chief rival, marked his own milestone the year that Mamdani graduated: his election as governor of New York, at the age of 52.)

Since the primary in June, Bronx Science text chains, alumni gatherings and Facebook groups have crackled with word of Mamdani’s rise, dividing some graduates who cheer the institution’s role in shaping him and others who cannot fathom that their alma mater produced someone so thoroughly left-wing.

Mamdani evinced school pride in a video last spring trolling The New York Post, which had written about his run for student government. (“Go Wolverines,” he said, raising a fist, after feigning contrition for not conducting a “feasibility study” on his juice-for-all promise.)

And last January, while speaking at an event in Manhattan, Mamdani called out a surprise attendee he spotted sitting quietly in the crowd: Marc Kagan.

Mamdani appeared older, the teacher allowed afterward, if not that much older.

“He doesn’t actually look different,” Kagan said. “But he had grown the beard.”