India, Nov. 9 -- For someone in a movie set in a romanticised New York, this is quite the dream - going from a one-room apartment to the mayoral mansion - but for Zohran Mamdani, the professed socialist Democrat who will now be running the megacity, it's a decision that comes with strings, not just perks.

"I don't yet have an answer on where I'm going to be living," the mayor-elect said in an interview, "but I can tell you where I'm going to be working, and that's City Hall." Such a response is right up the alley for the first Indian-origin, first South Asian, and the first Muslim to become New York City mayor. At 34, he is also the youngest in over a century.

But a 10-fold upgrade now would hold much meaning, just as most of his hyper-...