Kalpen Suresh Modi, we will miss ye

Kal Penn is the stage name of Kalpen Suresh Modi, the amiable young actor famous for such silly roles as Kumar in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, who recently left a more serious though equally amiable role in the TV series House to join the public relations team in the Obama administration. Early in his career, he used the name ‘Kal Penn’ on his resume and photos to challenge assertions that an Anglo name offers a leg up. His audition callbacks rose by 50 percent.

Kalpen Modi says of his background (in an online interview, so who knows?), “I've been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while. I love what I do as an actor. But probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service. I went to a performing arts high school, but I still took a bunch of those dorky political science classes. It's probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me. They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, and that was always in the back of my head. In '06 I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. And I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else. The ultimate irony, of course, is that I love being on House. There's not a smarter group of people that I've been surrounded by in television.