The Namesake

A drama unveiling with the family caught at the corssraods of cultures. A son's compulsive need to traverse the path of life with his own identity.. Jhumpa Lahiri's telling tale is beautifully encapsulated in this back and forth transition from Calcutta to New York.
"Gogol" played by Kal Penn, is an American born desi, who often wonders about his peculiar name. Presuming that Gogol being his fathers favorite author, had bewitched him to name his son the same, always presented him with an eccentricity beyond comprehension. Until the mystery is unfolded in two stages. The first, dawns at the behest of his fathers account of the train journey that brought him to the realization of travelling and seeing the world, rather than viewing the world from an author's eyes. He carried with him Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" that serendipitiously enabled him to make sense of the events that followed later in his life. " We have all come out of Gogol's overcoat" stated Ashok Ganguli(Irfan Khan), carrying the memories of that night and the course of incidents that proceeded it. The second being his fathers death coupled with a conquest over his obsession (his name).

Mira Nair's adaptation of this vivid tale, takes a different turn, with an emphatic core of the fathers death, diverging from the namesake's namesake.