PERSONALITIES FAMOUS ABROAD

Amartya Sen Mira Nair

Dr.Shashi Tharoor Raj Reddy
Dr. Deepak Chopra Sabeer Bhatia
Ismail Merchant Salman Rushdie
Lakshmi Mittal Swraj Paul
Jagdish N. Bhagwati Vikram Seth
Madhur Jaffrey Vinod Khosla
Manoj Night Shyamalan  

AMARTYA SEN
Economist

Amartya Kumar Sen, son of Amita Sen and Ashutosh Sen, born on 3rd  November 1933 at
Shantiniketan, West Bengal. He received his initial education at Shantiniketan and then
Presidency College, Calcutta. He was exposed early on to the plight of the poor. As a 10-year old
child, during the Bengal famine, he was shocked to see people dying of
hunger on the streets of Calcutta yards away from shops stocked with
food. Three years later in Dhaka a Muslim labourer was killed in
communal riots outside his house. The traumatic incidents directed Sen
to a relentless study of the economic mechanism underlying famines and
poverty. 

Amartya Sen joined Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953. He became the

youngest chairman of the Department of Economics, Jadavpur
University, at the age of 23. Between 1956-1998 he was Professor of
Economics at various Universities in India and abroad. 

Sen's contributions on welfare economics and definition of poverty in relation to

development have offered a new philosophy and an alternative way to solid
economic development. He was of the opinion that the World Bank system of
ranking countries according to the GNP and saving rates was not enough and he
helped to create the United Nations Human Development Index which has now
become the most authoritative international source of welfare comparisons
between countries. Some of his works include '  Choice of Techniques', '
Collective Choice and Social Welfare', ' Poverty and Famines', '
Development as Freedom' etc.
Sen is the sixth Indian to get the Nobel and the first Asian winner of the Economics Prize. Some
of the honours to his credit are 'Indira Gandhi Gold Medal Award' of the Asiatic Society (1994),
'Nobel prize for Economics' (1998) for his work on ' The poorest people in
Society', 'Eisenhower Medal' from USA (2000), 'Honorary Companion of Honour' from UK
(2000). He also received 'Bharat Ratna', the highest civilian award in India. He has been honored
with Honorary D.Litt degrees and fellowships of a large number of Indian and Foreign
Universities and Institutes of repute. Now living in Cambride,
Massachusetts with his third wife, an economic historian Emma
Rothschild, this genius has spent a lifetime fighting poverty with
analysis rather than activism.

Shashi Tharoor
Writer and UN Diplomat

Shri Shashi Tharoor, is a well-known Indian English writer, scholar and

international civil servant. He was born in London on March 1956 to
father, a newspaper executive and mother a housewife, with their roots
in Palakkad, a town in Kerala, India.

Tharoor mostly grew up in India did his schooling and under graduation
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in cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. He completed his honors
interview of Shashi
degree in History from the prestigious St. Stephen's College in Delhi
Tharoor
and won a scholarship to Tufts University in Boston. As a student he
took part in debates, quiz contests and also tried his hand in theatre. In
the mid 1970's, he went to the United States and acquired two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in
Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, all by the age of
twenty-two.

Tharoor joined the United Nations in May 1978 in the office of the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva and has been with the organisation since then. He became
the head of UNHCR Singapore office  (1981-1984) at the peak of the Vietnamese "boat people"
crisis. Then he served as Special Assistant to the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping
Operations from 1989 to1996 at UN headquarters in New York, towards the end of the term
from 1991 to 1996, he led the team responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former
Yugoslavia. He served as the Executive Assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (1997-
1998) and as the Director of Communications and Special projects in the office of the Secretary-
General from 1998 to 2001. In January 2001, he was appointed as interim head of the
Department of Public Information (DPI) by Kofi Annan, and after a year and a half was
confirmed as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information of the
United Nations. In this capacity, he is responsible for the communication strategy, enhancing the
image and effectiveness of the organisation. In 2003, the Secretary-General appointed him
United Nations Coordinator for Multilingualism. In 2006, he was the official candidate of India
for the succession to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and came second out of
seven official candidates in the race. Tharoor served as the UN Under-Secretary General for
Communications and Public Information between June 2002 and February 2007. Dr. Tharoor, in
addition to a variety of other activities in his private life, is Chairman of Dubai-based Afras
Ventures. He is also the Joint Chairman of UNSICAD (United Nations Simulation International
Conference at Abu Dhabi and Dubai), the World Summit to be held in the United Arab Emirates
in June 2008.
As a journalist, Tharoor has written many articles, short stories, literary reviews and
commentaries in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
International Herald Tribune, the Times of India, the Indian Express, and Foreign Affairs. As a
writer, he is very much an Indian expatriate. Shashi Tharoor has explored the diversity of culture
in his native India. By exploring the themes of India's past and its relevance to the future, he has
produced both works of fiction and nonfiction. He is the winner of several journalism and
literary awards, including Commonwealth Writers' prize. In 1998, the Association of Indians
in America  (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP) awarded him the Excelsior
Award for Excellence in Literature. He was named by the World Economic forum in Davos
as a Global Leader of Tomorrow. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in
International Affairs from the University of Puget Sound in May 2000.

Mr. Tharoor is also the author of several books, including 'Reasons of State' (1982), a scholarly
study of Indian foreign policy; 'The Great Indian Novel (1989)', a modern ironic adaptation of
the 2000-year-old Indian epic 'Mahabharata' which is narrated from a 20th century viewpoint;
'The Five-Dollar Smile & Other Stories' (1990); a second novel, 'Show Business' (1992) filmed
in 1994 under the title 'Bollywood'  which is a satire on the Indian film industry, which received
a front-page accolade from The New York Times Book Review; 'India: From Midnight to the
Millennium' (1997), published on the 50th anniversary of India's independence; 'Riot. A Love
Story'(2001) which is about a married American government official who have a secret love
affair and 'Nehru, the Invention of India'. He has also published a collection of short
stories. In January 2009, Tharoor was awarded the Zakir Hussain Memorial "Pride of India"
Award. He was presented with the Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration by the
Maharana of Udaipur on March 15, 2009.

On 19 March 2009 Tharoor was declared as the Indian National Congress candidate of the
Trivandrum constituency in Kerala for the General Elections in 2009. Tharoor will be contesting
against P. Ramachandran Nair of CPM and P. K. Krishna Das of Bharathiya Janata Party (BJP).

On the personal front, he has separated from his journalist wife Tilottama who lives with their
twin sons, Ishaan and Kanishk. Though Shashi Tharoor has been out of India since he was a
teenager, he retains a strong attachment to his Indian roots. This versatile personality now lives
in New York, balancing his career at the UN as well as his life as an author with equal brilliance
and ease.

Deepak Chopra
Physician, Author, Philosopher

Indian born Deepak Chopra has earned fame as a great physician in the
field of alternative medicine in the US. Dr. Chopra serves as the
Director of Education at the Chopra Center, which offers training programs in mind body medicine. He
has established a new life giving pattern which has a crucial  connection between mind, body, spirit and
healing.  Chopra is also known as the prolific author of more than 35 books, 100 audio, video and CD-
ROM titles, which have been translated into 35 languages with over 20 million copies sold worldwide.

Born in Delhi, India in the year 1947, Chopra was raised in a family infused with both Western
Medicine and Traditional Hindu beliefs and practices. His father, Krishnan Chopra was a
prominent cardiologist who served as the dean of a local hospital and a lieutenant in the British
army and his grandfather was an Ayurveda ( Indian Medicine) practitioner. 

Following his father's career in medicine, Chopra graduated from the All India Institute of
Medical Science in 1968. He went to United States in 1970 to serve an internship at a hospital in
New Jersey. He got further training at the Lahey Clinic and University of Virginia Hospital.  In
the early 1980s, he became the Chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital and later the
Chief at Boston Regional Medical Center and he also taught at Tufts University and Boston
University Schools of Medicine.  Meanwhile Dr. Chopra built a successful endocrinology
practice in Boston.

In 1981, a turning point occurred in Chopra's life when he met Dr. Brihaspati Dev Triguna, a
famous Ayurvedic physician at New Delhi, who advised him to meditate. At first, he didn't give it
much thought but eventually he was impressed by the sizable amount of research that proves that
Transcendental Meditation (TM) reduces stress.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chopra
became a dedicated champion of TM thought and practice. In 1985 he met Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi, who invited Chopra to study Ayurveda. That year Chopra became the president of the
American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine. He was later named medical director of the
Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine.

In 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Chopra,
Triguna and Hari Sharma, "Letter From New Delhi: Maharishi Ayur-Veda: Modern Insights Into
Ancient Medicine."  which faced a lot of criticism regarding the Hindu belief in yogic flying, and
the basis of Chopra's Ayurveda in Transcendental Meditation.

In 1992, he served on the National Institutes of Health Ad Hoc Panel on Alternative Medicine.
He Published his famous work, 'Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to
Growing Old'  in 1993, which sold 130,000 copies in one day. In the same year, Chopra and
family moved to La Jolla, California. He soon became the executive director of the Sharp
Institute for Human Potential and Mind–Body Medicine with a $30,000 grant from the Office of
Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes to study Ayurvedic medicine.

His vision to establish a medical system based upon the premise that health is a lively state of
balance and integration of body, mind, and spirit led him to open the Chopra Centre for well
being in California in 1995. Through this Center, Chopra is trying to expand his healing
approach using the integration of the best of western medicine with natural healing traditions.
The University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has granted continuing medical
education credits for this program, which satisfies requirements for the American Medical
Association Physician’s Recognition Award. With charismatic presentation and astute
marketing, Chopra has made the ancient sciences of Ayurveda, yoga and meditation user-
friendly to the American mainstream.

Deepak Chopra's popularity as an international presenter and keynote speaker is exemplified in

an impressive list of honorariums. Esquire Magazine designated him as one of the top ten
motivational speakers in the country; and in 1995, he received the  Toastmasters International
Top Five Outstanding Speakers award, earlier received by President Nelson Mandela,
Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Tom Peters and Garrison Keillor .  He is the recipient of the
Einstein Award through Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with the American
Journal of Psychotherapy. 

Chopra married wife Rita more than thirty years ago when he was just finishing medical school. 
Rita is now supervising the staff at the Chopra center for Well Being in La Jolla. They live in
San Diego and have two kids, Gautam and Mallika . Mallika and son - in- law Sumant are both
students in business school at Kellogg while son Gautam host Talk shows in Channel 1 TV

ISMAIL MERCHANT
Producer, Director and Writer

Ismail Merchant was born in Mumbai in 25th December  in the year

1935 as Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Reh.  In his career spanning
three and a half decades, he has made some 40 feature films.  Many
of them made with the collaboration of his pal, director James Ivory
and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  

The famous Merchant- Ivory duo has made a mark of their own in
the film world. Adaptation of E. M. Forster's 'A room with a view',
Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Remains of the Day', 'Rose Land' and 'Heat &
Dust' are some of the best Merchant-Ivory movies.

Vanessa Redgrave, Isabelle Adjani, Christopher Reeve, Anthony

Hopkins, Paul Newman, Emma Thompson, Isabelle Adjani, Paul Newman are a few well known
actors who have featured in his films.  They all crave to work with him knowing that he will pay
them only a little more than his attention.  

Besides film making, Merchant was also a renowned chef and the author of several books on
quality cooking.

He passed away at the age of 68. He was unmarried.

Lakshmi Mittal
Chairman and CEO of Mittal Steel
 
Steel Tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, the 57 year old non resident Indian living
in Kensington, London, is the fourth richest person in the world, with a
personal fortune of US$45.0 billion according to Forbes magazine. The
Financial Times named Lakshmi Mittal its 2006 Person of the Year. This
London-based Indian billionaire industrialist, was named one of the "100
most influential people" by Time magazine in May 2007. He was also
listed as the richest person in Britain in the Sunday Times Rich list 2005.
Since 2005, Mittal has been the richest person residing in the United
Kingdom, the richest person in Asia and the 4th richest person on the
planet. He is the President of the Board of Directors and CEO of Arcelor Mittal, the world's
largest producer of steel. Arcelor Mittal is the combination of the world’s number one and
number two steel companies, Arcelor and Mittal Steel.

Lakshmi Narayan Mittal alias Lakshmi Niwas Mittal was born on June 15th, 1950, in
Sadulpur, a village which didn't have electricity until 1960's, in Rajasthan, India. His family
moved to Calcutta in West Bengal, where he studied accounting and business at the prestigious
St. Xavier’s College. His father Mohan Lal Mittal had set up a small steel mill in Calcutta.  After
class, Mittal used to work in his father's company. 

After finishing his Bachelor of Commerce degree in business and accounting with first class,
Mittal began his career in his father's steel firm in the early seventies. Realizing the fact that
opportunities in India are limited for him, Mittal moved to Indonesia in 1976 and with his
father's backing founded a steel plant, Ispat Indo and made the company a success. There began a
saga of triumphs for the shrewd businessman.

His success has largely been built on buying up loss-making state-owned mills and quickly
turning them around. He had one of his most notable successes in the late 1989, when he turned
around a loss-making government-founded steel firm in Trinidad and Tobago which was losing
$1 million a day. Within a year, Mittal had doubled the output and made the business profitable
where US consultants and German experts failed to find a solution. 

In 1992, he went to Mexico and bought the country's third largest steel producer, Sicartsa for
$220 million.  This was followed by an acquisition of Siderurgica del Balsas SA at Lazaro
Cardenas in Mexico and then more companies in Canada, Germany, Ireland etc.  Mittal followed
the same strategy in former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, and took over the state-owned blast
furnace steel plant in 1995, renaming it Ispat Karmet. It was a risky proposition even by Mittal’s
standards, workers had not been paid for six months. But within a year it was profitable and
production has doubled from 120,000 tons a month to 250,000.  In 1995, two new companies
Ispat International Ltd. and Ispat Shipping were formed to provide technical and commercial
services to the Group and to meet its growing shipping needs. The same year, he entered into
Europe by acquiring a steel plant in Hamburg, Germany.  With this, the capacity of the group
reached to 11.2 million tonnes.

Meanwhile in 1994,  a partition in the family business group, transferred all the foreign business
into Ispat International, under the control of Lakshmi Mittal. The Indian operations remained
with his younger brothers P K Mittal and V K Mittal.  In 1997, Ispat International, the company
that controlled the Group’s steel making operations in Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada
and Germany went for listing in 1997 on the New York and Amsterdam stock exchanges. The
Ispat group went on making major acquisitions.

In 2004, Mittal Steel was formed through the merger of Ispat International and LNM Holdings,
at the same time Ispat International merged with International Steel Group Inc. (ISG) an Ohio
based company, becoming the world's most global steel producer with a net worth of over $22
billion. Mittal's industrial empire has steel making facilities in 14 countries and stretches from
Indonesia to Poland, via Mexico, US, South Africa and Trinidad, North America, Africa, Asia
and many European countries. In 2006, after six months of negotiations and major oppositions
Mittal steel took over European steel giant Arselor SA for 26 billion euros ($33 billion),
becoming the world's largest 100 million tonne steel entity. The merged entity would be called
Arcelor Mittal with the Mittal family owning 43.6 percent of the combined group.

Mittal has received accolades for his achievements. In 1996, he was awarded the title 'Steel
maker of the Year' by New Steel Magazine in the USA, and he received the Eighth Honorary
Willy Korf Steel Vision Award, the highest recognition for world wide achievement in the steel
industry in June 1998. The award was presented by the American Metal Market, a specialised
publication, and Paine Weber’s World Steel Dynamics in New York., for outstanding vision,
entrepreneurship, leadership and success in global steel development, from the American Metal
Market and Paine Weber’s World Steel Dynamics. In 2004, he was awarded the 'European
Business man of the year' by Fortune Magazine. 

Although steel manufacturing remains the group’s mainstream business,  they have diversified
into shipping and has ventured into coal, power and oil enterprises in Kazakhstan.

Mittal is an active philanthropist and a member of various trusts. The LNM Group Foundation
was created in 1998 to support health and education needs of the poor, particularly in India. He
resides in a palatial home known as Summer Palace, in London that he bought in 2003 for a
residential record of $129 million. On the rare occasions when he is at home, Mittal keeps a
disciplined schedule, doing yoga for an hour every day and trying to catch a swim in his indoor
pool. His wife Usha runs the Indonesian business and his son Aditya and daughter Vanisha are
members of the Board of Directors of Mittal Steel. 

The business empire has also been in the news for showering money on his two children. His
daughter Vanisha's wedding to Delhi-born investment banker Amit Bhatia in 2004 June is
reputed to have cost more than $55-million, with five days of events at some of France's most
famous settings, including the 17th century Vaux le Vicomte chateau. For the wedding of his son
Aditya in 1998, the Mittal family celebrated at Calcutta's Victoria Memorial, home to mementos
of Britain's rule over India. 

Professor Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Economist
Jagdish Bhagwati, renowned professor, member of UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan's High-level Advisory Group and the External Advisor to the
Director General World Trade

Organisation (WTO), is regarded as one of the foremost international trade

economists of his generation.

He was born in Mumbai, India in the year1934. He did his B.com from
Mumbai in 1954 and post graduated in l956 from Cambridge University
with a first in Economics Tripos.  He then did his Ph.D at MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1967. After studying in
England and the United States, Bhagwati returned to India in 1961 and served as Professor of
Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and then as Professor of International Trade at the
Delhi School of Economics. He returned to MIT in 1968, leaving it twelve years later to join
Columbia, as the Ford International Professor of Economics. Bhagwati is one of the only 10
scholars who hold the title of University Professor at Columbia. 

Professor Bhagwati has made major contributions to pure theory and is engaged with major
practical policy problems as Economic Adviser to the Director-General of GATT(1991-1993)
and Special Adviser to the United Nations on Globalisation. He is a Fellow of the Econometric
Society and has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

He also writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial
Times. He has written or edited 40 books, written hundreds of articles, and founded and edited
two journals, 'Economics and Politics' (1989) and 'The Journal of International Economics'
(1971), the premier journal in the field today. Among his famous books are 'In Defense of
Globalization' (2004);'Free Trade Today' (2002);'The Wind of the Hundred Days' (2000);'A
Stream of Windows' (1998);'India in Transition' (1993);'World Trading System at Risk'
(1991);'Protectionism' (1988); 'Economics & Politics' (founder-editor); 'The Journal of
International Economics' (founder-editor) etc. 

He has been honored with Honorary D.Litt degrees from several universities they are, Erasmus
(Netherlands) and Sussex (UK), South Gujarat University. Among the awards he has received
are the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal ( India ), the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany), the Kenan
Prize (USA), the John R. Commons Award (USA), the Freedom Prize (Switzerland), and the
Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy (USA). Professor Bhagwati has
delivered many prestigious lectures, among them are the Frank Graham Lecture at Princeton , the
Bertil Ohlin Lectures at the Stockholm School of Economics, the Harry Johnson Lecture in
London, the Eyskens Lectures in Belgium, the Radhakrishnan Lectures in Oxford, and the
Prebisch Lecture at UNCTAD IX in Johannesburg.

Bhagwati is currently Director of the Program on International Migration: Economics, Ethics and
Law at the Columbia University Law School. He presents himself as the human face of global
laissez-faire economics.
 On the personal front Bhagwati, is now living in America,
with his wife Padma Desai, who is the Gladys and Ronald
Harriman Professor Of Comparative Economic Systems
at Columbia University and a scholar of Russian and
other former socialist countries' transition problems. They
have one daughter, Anuradha Kristina Bhagwati, a U.S.
Marine officer.

At 70, he is widely tipped as a future Nobel laureate, so

respected among his fellow economists for his insights
into the workings of foreign trade.

MADHUR JAFFREY
Actress and Culinary expert

Madhur Jaffrey a multifaceted personality born in Delhi, is an actress, TV presenter, movie script
and cook book writer but it is for her cookery that she is best known. 

She went to England on a scholarship to learn acting and after

graduation married Jaffrey.  She settled down in New York and gave
birth to three daughters, Meera, Zia and Sakina.  She began her career
in films with the Ivory-Merchant production, 'Shakespeare Wallah'
winning her the best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival in
1965.  Some of her other films are 'Heat & Dust', 'Autobiography of a
Princess', 'The Assam Garden', 'The Perfect Murder', 'Six Degrees of
Separation' and 'Wolf'.

She turned to cooking as a new career after she divorced her husband,
actor Saeed Jaffrey, to make both ends meet. It was an eye opener
into a range of Indian dishes.  She wrote cookery books like 'Madhur
Jaffrey's Indian Cooking', 'A Taste of India 'and more recently 'World vegetarian'.  Later she
appeared on T.V.shows but acting always remain as her first love.

She has received accolades of awards for her talents  from media and cookery, they are Muse
Award for Outstanding Vision & Achievement, NYWFTV 2000; Award for Excellence in acting
& cookery, Gov. Pataki '99; Tarknath Das Award, Columbia U for contribution to Indo-
American understanding thru acting and cooking, Glenfiddich Award for Best Radio/TV
Broadcasting 1982 etc

After divorced from Saeed Jaffrey she is remarried and now lives in New York City. She has
three children -- Zia, Meera, and Sakina Jaffrey.  She has hosted a cooking series on BBC
television,  having appeared both in film and on stage.

MANOJ NIGHT SHYAMALAN

 Script Writer and Director
Manoj Night Shyamalan, alias Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan, director, screenwriter and actor was
born on 6th August 1970 in Pondicherry. His parents Nelliyate C
Shyamalan and Jayalakshmi were both doctors and the family moved
to the United States when Shyamalan was still a young boy and he
was raised in a suburban area of Penn Valley of Philadelphia. He had
his early education at a Catholic Private School and Philadelphia's
Episcopal Academy. Although he received scholarships to several
medical schools, Shyamalan chose to attend the Tisch School of Arts
at New York University to study film-making.

Shyamalan had a very early passion for filmmaking and as a child, he

revelled in making up stories. At the age of 10, inspired primarily by
Steven Spielberg's films, he began making film with his father's 8mm
camera and by age 16, he had made over 45 short films. Shyamalan
graduated from NYU and during his final year, he wrote, directed and starred in his first full-
length feature film, 'Praying With Anger'. In 1995 he was asked to write the script for a
combined live action-animated version of the E B White children's classic 'Stuart Little' and it
was released onto the big screen in 1999. In 1997 he made his second film 'Wide Awake'. 

Shyamalan's third directorial effort , the supernatural thriller 'The Sixth Sense' in 1999, was one
of the year's biggest box office hit. It scored six Academy Award nominations, including one for
Best Picture and two for Shyamalan himself for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. This
film about a 11 year old disturbed boy who can see the dead, has also won two Golden Globe
nominations and 26th annual People's Choice Award for the favorite dramatic film. Following
the success of the this film he directed another supernatural thriller 'Unbreakable' in 2000'. This
film about a man who undergoes mysterious changes following a train accident.  In 2002,
Shyamalan directed another film 'Signs' an emotional story which deals with crop circles in a
rural Pennsylvania town. In 2003 Shymalan comes the chilling tale of a close-knit community
that lives with the frightening knowledge that creatures reside in the woods around, and the
courage of one young man who challenges the unknown creatures in the film 'The village'.

Now Shyamalan is working on a new project called The Life Of Pi which will be shot in
Pondicherry, India, his birth place. Shyamalan, now living in Philadelphia with his wife Bhavana
and  their daughter Selitha has become the most recognised Indian name in Hollywood with his
phenomenal success.

MIRA NAIR
Documentarist, Director

Ms Mira Nair was born in 1958 in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. Her

parents are from Punjab. At the age of 13, she attended a boarding
school in Shimla, where she became a passionate student of dramatics
and acted in school theatre productions. After graduating from New
Delhi, she went to United States on a theater scholarship to Harvard. 
Mira began her career as a documentarist and later turned to commercial films. The film titled
'India Cabaret' brought her the American Film Festival Award for the best documentary of 1985.
She won her first film award, the 'Golden Camera' from the Cannes Film Festival for her
renowned film 'Salaam Bombay' and this film was nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Film in
1988.  Her movies, 'Mississippi Masala' won rave reviews in Europe and 'Kamasutra - A tale of
love' got world wide attention for being provocative.

She won the 'Golden Lion' award for her film 'Monsoon Wedding' at the Venice Film Festival in
2001.  This movie narrates the happenings of a Punjabi wedding and the bride having second
thoughts about her arranged marriage. It was the first time an Indian film or particularly a
woman is winning the Golden Lion award in the Venice Film Festival. Mira's future projects
include a Hollywood production with a film based on Edith Wharton's novel "A Mother's
Recompense

Professor Raj Reddy

Computer Scientist

Professor Raj Reddy, one of the prominent scientists in computer science in the US, is presently
serving as the Director of the West Coast campus of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. 

Professor Reddy a native Indian, earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Guindy
Engineering college of the University of Madras, India, in 1958
and a Master's degree in technology from the University of New
South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He received a doctor's degree in
Computer science from Stanford University in 1966 and the same
year began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the
same University.   

Since 1969 for over three decades, the professor has been a
member of the Carnegie Mellon University faculty. He served as
the Founding Director of the Robotics Institute at the University
from 1979 to 1991. For the next ten years, he served as the Dean
and professor of Computer Science and Robotics, at the School
of  Computer Science and now as the Director of the West coast
campus.

Dr. Reddy's research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial
intelligence. His main area of work is in artificial intelligence in particular with computers that
can see, hear, walk , talk etc. His current research project include speech recognition and
universal digital libraries, an Information Appliance for rural environments for use by illiterate
people, where all creative works of the human race are available to anyone anywhere.  

Professor Raj Reddy's achievements are many. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers, the Acoustical Society of America and the American Association of
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He was elected a member of the National Academy of
Engineering in 1984 and also awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterand of France. He
is a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy
of Sciences and was Chairman of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Group from
1987 to 1990. He was president of AAAI from 1987 to 1989. He is on the Technology Advisory
Board of Microsoft Corp. and received the IBM Research Ralph E. Gomory Visiting Scholar
Award in 1991.  He was the Co-Chair of the PITAC (President's Information Technology
Advisory Committee) from 1999 to 2001under both Clinton and Bush.

 In 1994, Professor Redy received  jointly with Edward Peigenbaum, the Turing Award which is
the most prestigious in the computer science  "For pioneering the design and construction of
large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential
commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology". He also received the prestigious Padma
Bhushan Award for his outstanding contributions in computer science and information
technology from President K.R. Narayanan of India in an award ceremony in New Delhi. He has
been awarded honorary doctorates (Doctor of Science Honoris Causa) from SV University in
India, Universite Henri-Poincare in France, University of New South Wales in Australia,
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in India, University of Massachusetts in USA,
University of Warwick in England, Anna University in India and the Indian Institute for
Information Technology (Allahabad) .

On the personal front, Dr. Reddy's hobbies include walking and mainly reading. He lives in
Pittsburgh with his wife of 37 years and they have two daughters. His daughters live on the West
Coast, in Silicon Valley, California. He visits his native country once a year, his seven brothers
and sister live near Bangalore. 

Today, this brilliant scientist is among the most respected names in the US in the field of robotics
and artificial intelligence

SABEER BHATIA
Computer Wizard

Sabeer Bhatia, the pioneer in the field of first web based e-mail - The Hotmail, was born in
Chandigarh in the year 1969. He grew up in Bangalore and had his early
education at Bishops Cotton's School in Pune, then St. Joseph's College in
Bangalore. For a short-time he was a student at the Birla Institute of
Technology (BITS), Pilani and in 1988 he went to US on a Cal Tech
Transfer scholarship to get a bachelor's degree at the California Institute of
Technology. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from
Stanford University.

After graduation, Sabeer briefly worked for Apple Computers as a hardware

engineer and Firepower Systems Inc. While working there he was amazed at the fact that he
could access any software on the internet via a web browser. His success graph took off
exponentially when he, along with his colleague Jack Smith, set up Hotmail on 4th July 1996.
Today, Hotmail remains the world's largest e-mail provider with over 50 million registered users.
As President and CEO, he guided Hotmail's rapid rise to industry leadership and its eventual
acquisition by Microsoft in 1998. Bhatia worked at Microsoft for a little over a year after the
Hotmail acquisition and in April 1999, he left Microsoft to start another venture, Arzoo Inc. It's
an e-commerce firm with a revolutionary new way to shop on line and may just turn out to be
Bhatia's next  multi-million dollar winner.

Bhatia's success has earned him widespread acclaim; The venture capital firm Draper Fisher
Jurvetson named him 'Entrepreneur of the Year 1997', MIT chose him as one of 100 young
innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology and awarded 'TR100',
San Jose Mercury News and POV magazine selected him as one of the ten most successful
entrepreneurs of 1998 and Upside magazine's list of top trendsetters in the New Economy named
him 'Elite 100'.

SALMAN RUSHDIE
Writer

Salman Rushdie is a famous writer. He was born in a Kashmiri

Muslim Family  of Bombay and later migrated to Great Britain. 
Some of his well known books are 'Rome', ' Midnight's Children', '
Haroun and the sea of Stories' and the 'Moor's Last Sigh'. He
commented against India in ' Midnight's Children' and made some
critical references about Islam in ' Satanic Verses'. He created a
world-wide furore and commotion with the publication of his book '
Satanic Verses'.

Most of the books of Salman Rushdie have been subject to

controversies and discussions. The publication of ' Satanic Verses'
has raised a storm in the entire Muslim World. This made Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah
Khomeini sentence him to death. So presently he lives in hiding in England. The matter even led
to Britain severing diplomatic ties with Iran. Rushdie's work Midnight's Children was awarded
the 'Booker of Bookers' prize in 1993, which distinguishes as the best novel to have won the
Booker prize over its 25-year history. In 1996 he received the European Union Literary Award in
Denmark.

SWRAJ PAUL
Business Magnate

Lord Swraj Paul, the great business magnate was born in 1931 in Jalandhar, Punjab.  Having
learned business lessons from his father at a young age, he later founded the successful
multinational company Caparo, an UK-based steel and engineering group. 

Swraj was educated at Punjab University and obtained a master's degree

in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in the US. In 1953 he returned to India to join the
Apeejay Surrendra Group, founded by his father, which he helped build up to a diversified
industrial group. Swraj went to England in 1966 hoping to find a cure for his leukemia-stricken
two-year-old daughter, Ambika. Shattered by her death, he buried himself in work and there
began his spectacular business career in Britain. 

In 1968, he started buying and selling steel in a one-man business and acquired a small tube unit,
Natural Gas Tubes (NGT), which developed into one of the leading UK producers of welded steel
tube and spiral welded pipe. Gradually he bought more units, mainly in the steel products
manufacturing industry and founded Caparo Group in 1978. Her Majesty the Queen knighted
Swraj Paul in the same year, thereby making him The Lord Paul of Marylebone and a member of
the House of Lords. 

Lord Paul has been honoured by various international organisations over the years. He has
written the biography of Indira Gandhi and was awarded the Padma Bhushan by her in 1983.
Among the honours bestowed on him are the Pro-Chancellorship of the Thames University
(1998) and its Governorship (1992-97), Chancellorship of Wolverhampton University and the
Bharat Gaurav award by the Indian Merchant's Chamber. He is a member of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office's Foreign Policy Centre Advisory Council and MIT's Mechanical
Engineering Visiting Committee. 

Swraj stepped down from the management of Caparo in 1996, handing over his empire to his
three sons. Though he is one of the richest persons in the U.K., in his personal life Lord Paul
practices relative simplicity. But he believes in making money so that he can occasionally use it to
help the needy or even bail out the London Zoo.

VIKRAM SETH
Poet, Novelist

Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta in 1952. He earned degrees in

Philosophy, Politics and  Economics from Oxford University. He has
published 6 books of poetry and 3 novels since 1980. His novel "A
suitable boy" won the W.H.Smith prize in 1993. The latest novel
written by Vikram Seth is 'An Equal music' and it is about the troubled
love life of a violinist.

Vikram Seth received one of Britain top honours for his services to
literature.  The award of the commander of the order3 of the British
Empire was announced earlier in the year by Queen Elizabeth II and
given to Seth on 14 February 2001.

Vikram Seth creates a living, breathing world that enchants and grips the reader in all his novels.

Vinod Khosla
Venture Capitalist
Vinod Khosla, a native Indian and the world's No.2 ranked Venture Capitalist, is considered as
one of the most influential personalities in Silicon valley.  He is a
partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Aged 50, he was among the first venture capitalist to understand that
internet technology and fiber optics could make communications so
fast, cheap and easy and spot the potential of companies that sell gear
for high-speed optical networks.

He was born in 1955 in a military family in New Delhi, India.  He

earned a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT), Delhi. After that he attempted to start his own company in India,
a dream since the age of 15. Being frustrated by the experience, he
gave up his mission. Then he went to United States and completed
M.S degree in Biomedical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon and also
earned an M B A degree from Stanford University in 1979.

Vowing to become a millionaire before 30, ambitious Khosla found a business idea

and partners from Standford business club. They found Daisy Systems, a computer-aided
engineering and design company, but failed quickly because the economics of the market went
against it

At 27, Khosla became successful when he co-founded Sun Microsystems with a German student
Andreas Bechtolsheim, a multi millionaire.  Khosla ran Sun until 1984.  In 1986, he joined in
Kleiner Perkins, a firm that funded Sun as a general Partner. During this time, Khosla has played
key roles in starting companies that are involved in multimedia, semiconductors, video games,
Internet software and computer networking.  He conceived the idea to optimize SONET for data,
a scheme that led to the creation of Cerent Corp, a telecommunications-equipment company
which Cisco acquired in 1999 for $6.9 billion. Khosla was also instrumental in launching Juniper
Networks, a company many thought as the next Cisco. Others include Viant, Extreme Networks,
Lightera etc.

Khosla has won admiration because of his ability to build and fashion companies and
technologies. He plays an active role and is not satisfied to sit back and let others work the plans
while he okays the progress. Though he was successful in almost all his ventures, there has been
one time that Khosla had been wrong. He backed 3DO Co, a game-maker whose shares now sell
for a fraction of the initial offering price in 1993.

Khosla's current effort is funding and managing application service provider start-ups. He is
chairman of two such firms, Corio and Asera. 

This much respected entrepreneur lives in Woodside, CA with his wife and four daughters.
Khosla believes in closeness in family. His rules for life include having breakfast and dinner with
his family. He is one of three billionaires of Indian origin in Forbes magazine’s list of America’s
richest 400 people.