In 2011, Anse Rainier (Gary Richardson), an American professor at Lahore University, is kidnapped soon after he leaves a movie theatre. A ransom video is sent to the US embassy, demanding the release of 690 detainees from a Muslim concentration camp in Kot Lakhpat and €700,000 for the children of Waziristan. Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber), an American journalist and undercover CIA informant in Pakistan, arranges to interview a colleague of Rainer, Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), who he suspects is involved in the kidnapping.
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) and her navigator, Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston), are on the last leg of an around-the-world flight. Moving in vignettes from her early years when Earhart was captivated by the sight of an aircraft flying overhead on the Kansas prairie where she grew up, her life over the preceding decade gradually unfolds. As a young woman, she is recruited by publishing tycoon and eventual husband, George Putnam (Richard Gere) to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean, albeit as a passenger. Taking command of the flight results in a success and she is thrust into the limelight as the most famous woman pilot of her time. Putnam helps Earhart write a book chronicling the flight, much like his earlier triumph with Charles Lindbergh's We. Earhart gradually falls in love with Putnam and they eventually marry, although she enacts a "cruel" pledge as her wedding contract.
The Namesake depicts the struggles of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli (Irrfan Khan and Tabu), two first-generation immigrants from West Bengal, India to the United States, and their American-born children Gogol (Kal Penn) and Sonia (Sahira Nair). The film takes place primarily in Kolkata, India; New York City; and various New York state suburbs.
The film's central story concerns a father, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), who is trying to organize an enormous, chaotic, and expensive wedding for his daughter, Aditi (Vasundhara Das), for whom he has arranged a marriage with a man, Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), she has known for only a few weeks. As so often happens in the Punjabi culture, such a wedding means that, for one of the few times in each generation, the extended family comes together from all corners of the globe, including India, Australia, Oman, and the United States, bringing its emotional baggage along.