Top 10 Indian Role Models 2009-2010

Top 10 Indian Role Models 2009-2010

(1) President Abdul Kalam: “Dream, dream and dream. Then translate your dreams into thoughts and then into action...” is President Kalam's favorite mantra. His life itself is an example of this philosophy – rising from a fisherman's village to ending up in the presidential palace and along the way launching a bunch of missiles and winning a few 'Padma' (and Bharat Ratna) awards. His simplicity is remarkable, considering the presidential office in India still has Raj vestiges. (They even had a person just to tie the president's shoelaces. President Kalam got rid of this humiliating practice.) There are all kinds of stories of his mingling with children and giving them pep talks, and how he drove up to Mrs. M.S. Subbalakshmi's residence to personally present her the Bharat Ratna award. He is everything we dream in the highest ranking Indian – high-tech savvy, passionate, secular, inspiring, hard working and approachable. If you don't already know, this bachelor and vegetarian writes poems and diddles with his veena in his spare time.

(2) Prof. Amartya Sen: Nobel Prize winner in economics and currently on the faculty in the Trinity College in England. He was a full professor at the Jadavpur University at the age of 24! At a time when Nobel prizes in economics were doled out to any economist who cooked up yet another idea for the western multinational companies to make a fast buck, Prof. Sen's work showed that economics is best studied by integrating it with ethics, humanism and philosophical ideas. And that market reforms are not enough to alleviate poverty.

At a macro level, he is a part of this huge and burgeoning breed of Bengali academicians that is teaching all over the world. I personally feel that our IITs and other institutions of higher learning ought to say a big 'Thank you' to these inspiring Bengali professors and to the Bengali passion for higher education.

(3) A.R. Rahman: He has India dancing to his little finger. In my opinion, he is the greatest music composer of India, all times, with a complete mastery of the Eastern and Western music basics. A great arranger as well as a sound engineer. A high school dropout who since attended the Trinity College with scholarship. He has worked with almost all great names in India and quite a few famous ones abroad. To his credit, he also introduced numerous new singers and artistes. Before landing in movies, he had composed over 300 jingles in his advertising career, when he went by his given name Dileep. My favorite – songs from an obscure Tamil movie, 'Taj Mahal'.

(4) Arundhati Roy: Probably the most well-known world citizen from India. A truly remarkable writer who won the Booker Award, the first ever by an Indian. But I am more impressed with her as an activist, probably because her position on several issues resonates with mine. Her relentless campaign against the so-called WTO sponsored 'globalization' is truly inspiring. The so-called globalization, in my opinion, is just a euphemism for the Western multinationals to plunder the world resources leaving everyone high and dry, except for a small coterie of people associated closely with those corporations. Every time we turn the TV on, we see yet another white man lose his white-collar job to an Indian. Fair enough. But the thousands in India who lose their jobs because of the onslaught of the likes of Pepsi and Hallmark, unfortunately, never get any airtime. (I am not opposed to capitalism and globalization – only to their present, indiscriminate WTO version.) Her speech at the recent World Social Forum was stirring. She was also among the earliest to take on the Indian government for its gratuitous nuclear explosion and the Bush administration for its immoral, illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq. No wonder greats like Norm Chomski quote her. Arundhati's mother, Mary Roy, is also a social activist of sorts – she waged a long, legal battle against an obscure inheritance law.

(5) Azim Premji: This bachelor, who travels by economy class and drives his own car and sometimes eats at roadside restaurants, was at one time the second richest man in the world (even now worth around eight billion dollars). He transformed a moribund company like Wipro (which made edible oil, among other things) into a high-tech superpower.

(6) Karnam Malleswari: Winning an individual, Olympic bronze medal in a nation of athletic non-achievers is such a remarkable feat, indeed. She almost never made it to the team and, at the last minute, had to participate in a different weight category and yet she managed to win the only Olympic medal ever to be won by an Indian woman. (P.T. Usha lost her medal by one hundredth of a second). I know Leander Paes won an Olympic medal for tennis. But then, Olympics are not the seminal events in tennis. By the way, a trivia question – are there any male Indian athletes who won individual Olympic medals? The answer: Norman Pritchard, an Anglo-Indian, who won it for 200 m running and 200 m hurdles in the year 1900 in Athens, when the games were not even called the Olympics.

(7) Kiran Bedi: The first Indian woman IPS officer who has always transformed her adversities into opportunities. Even her 'punishment' tenure as the superintendent of the notorious Tihar Jail in Delhi, with over 9000 hard core prisoners (now over 8999 inmates, after the daring escape of Rana, the Phoolan Devi murderer last week), turned out to be a remarkable experience where she tried to reform the prisoners by conducting yoga classes and other humanistic activities. A supercop, a reformer, youth Asian tennis champion, a public speaker, environmentalist and now she even acted in a short documentary film as well (as a rag picker). Of course, in Hindi movies, we have had boatloads of actresses doing a Kiran Bedi!

(8) Sachin Tendulkar: He is probably a veritable national treasure in our cricket-crazed country. He is so prolific he is supposed to score a century every third time he bats. He is the only Indian to have scored a century on debut in the Ranji, Duleep and Irani trophy games. Says Ravi Shastri, the ex-skipper of India, of Sachin, “He is someone sent from up there to play cricket.” He has never been dropped from the Indian team and considering he has just recently won the Man of the Series award for the latest World Cup, he is in no danger of being unemployed for a while.

(9) Sandeep Pandey: This ex-Berkeley graduate and IIT Kanpur professor gave it all up one day and co-founded ASHA, one of the most successful social and educational NGO efforts in India. ASHA has over a thousand volunteers and has chapters in many other countries.

(10) Shabana Azmi: If both the Hindu and Muslim extremists issue fatwas against her, she must be doing something good! This actress-turned-social activist has taken on such causes as the plight of Mumbai slum-dwellers and national integration. Probably the best actress of India, ever, (especially after the premature death of Smita Patil) she was never afraid to take on unorthodox movie roles, right from a whorehouse madam to a lesbian. “Gracious, fearless, intelligent and a beautiful person” is how someone describes her.