Adi Godrej

The co-founder and the managing director of the Godrej Group of companies, Adi Godrej, was born into a business family and left India at the age of 17 to study business management. He obtained both his bachelor's and the master's degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and came back to India to join the family business. Before Adi joined the family business, Godrej was into the manufacturing of locks and soaps. Adi made the management structure more systematic and modernized and initiated the process of improving the standards of the products. Even in the era of controlled economy, the company reached a high standard under the leadership of Adi Godrej. Today, Godrej manufactures a wide range of products spanning from household products to locks, furniture and home appliances. The name itself has become synonymous with quality and commands a lot of faith from the consumers. Adi has made the best possible use of the process of globalisation in the country. The Godrej company has several offices and manufacturing units located in over fifty countries throughout the world. Adi is also a great supporter and well wisher of the World Wildlife Fund. The company has built a huge 150 acre mangrove forests in the township of Vikhroli in Mumbai apart from building a school for the children of the employees. The company has also built a management institute at Hyderabad.

Arun Sarin

The CEO(Chief Executive Officer) of the Britian-based telecom major Vodafone Group plc., Arun Sarin was born on October 21, 1954 at Panchmari, Madhya Pradesh. After doing his schooling from the military boarding school in Bangalore, Arun graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1975. During his school and IIT days, he excelled in studies, sports and various extracurricular activities. Thereafter, he moved to the United States where he did his MS in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977, going on to complete an MBA from the same university in 1978. The same year he started his career with a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm. In 1981 he moved on to Natomas as a corporate development manager. He started his telecom career in 1984, when he joined the Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco. The year 1995 saw Arun Sarin launching a new wireless-communications company with his mentor Sam Ginn. Arun Sarin served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of AirTouch from 1997 to 1999. The year 1999 saw AirTouch and Vodafone merging to form Vodafone-AirTouch, where he became the chief executive. Arun Sarin resigned from Vodafone-AirTouch in 2000 and became the CEO at InfoSpace, an Internet infrastructure company. He moved away from Infospace in July 2001 and started a telecommunications company called Accel-KKR Telecom. In 2003, Arun became the CEO of Vodafone. He became the CEO of Vodafone after its takeover driven expansion phase between 1999 and 2002. He has focused his energies on emerging markets like India. Under his stewardship, Vodafone successfully bid U$11.1 billion for a majority stake in the Indian mobile operator, Hutch.

Sabeer Bhatia

Sabeer Bhatia-co-founder of Hotmail, is one among select group of people who have made it big in America's Silicon Valley. Born in Chandigarh, Sabeer Bhatia did his schooling from St. Joseph's Boys' High School, Bangalore. He graduated from Caltech and went to Stanford to pursue his MS in Electrical Engineering. Sabeer attended many lectures by famous like Steve Jobs and was determined to make it big. After completing his Masters, he joined Apple computers. He left Apple soon after. He teamed up with his partner to create a web-based e-mail system Microsoft bought Hotmail on December 30th, 1997, for a reported sum of $400M. After the success of Hotmail, Bhatia in April 1999, he started another venture, Arzoo Inc, which however had to be shut down. In 2006, Arzoo was relaunched. 

Bhatia has won many awards. Among the notable ones include the "Entrepreneur of the Year" awarded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997, the "TR100" award, presented by MIT to 100 young innovators expected to have the greatest impact on technology in the next few years. Besides, he was named by TIME magazine as one of the "People to Watch" in International Business in 2002. 

Amartya Sen

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Besides being a world-renowned economist, Amartya Sen is also a philosopher. He served as a Master at the Trinity College at Cambridge University, the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. Currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University, Amartya Sen traces his roots to an illustrious lineage. His father, Ashutosh Sen, taught chemistry at the Dhaka University. Amartya completed his high-school education from Dhaka in Bangladesh in 1941. After his family migrated to India in 1947, Sen studied at the Presidency College, Kolkata and at the DelhiSchool of Economics before moving over to the United Kingdom to complete his higher studies. He earned his doctorate from the Trinity College, Cambridge in 1959. He has taught at various reputed Universities including the University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Oxford, London School of Economics, Harvard and many others.

His works helped to develop the theory of social choice. In 1981, he published his famous work Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, where he showed that famine occurs not only due to shortage of food, but from inequalities in the mechanisms for distributing food. He had personally witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943. He has done valuable work in the field of development economics, which has had a tremendous influence on the formulation of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report. 

He wrote a famous but controversial article in the New York Review of Books titled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing", wherein he analyzed the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, mainly Asia, a claim that was contested by many. Thrice married, he is presently married to Emma Georgina Rothschild, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award in 1999. In the same year, he received the honorary citizenship of Bangladesh. He received the Eisenhower Medal, for Leadership and Service in USA in 2000. In 2002, he was awarded the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. 

Mahesh Bhupathi

Mahesh Bhupathi is the first Indian to win a Grand Slam tournament in 1997 partnering Rika Hiraki in Mixed Doubles. 

He is considered to be among the best doubles tennis players in the world. Born on June 7, 1974 inChennai, Tamil Nadu he has 10 Grand Slam titles to his credit. 

In 1999, he teamed up with Leander Paes to win three doubles titles including Roland Garros and Wimbledon. 

During that year, they became the World No. 1 doubles team. He teamed up with Martina Hingis to win the mixed doubles title at the Australian Open in 2006. 

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2001 by the Government of India. 

In late 2006, he teamed up with Leander Paes to win the doubles championship at the Asian Games in Doha. 

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar founded the Art of Living Foundation in 1982, to spread the message of compassion, commitment to society, and a cosmic understanding of life. 

He has traveled extensively all across the globe, promoting global peace and development. 

He was born in 1956 in Papanasam, Tamil Nadu. In 1997, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar founded the International Association for Human Values (IAHV), which implements development projects in remote villages. 

It has undertaken relief efforts in many locations around the world like Afghanistan, Bosnia, New York after the 9/11 attacks, Gujarat and in Asia after the devastating Tsunami. 

He has been conferred by many awards around the globe like the "Peter the Great First Grade Medal of Honor" from the Russian Federation, "Guru Mahatmya" award by Government of Maharashtra, India (September 1997), Phoenix Award awarded by the Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. (April 2002) among others. 

Viswanathan Anand

The living legend of Chess, Viswanathan Anand was born on December 11, 1969 in Chennai. His awesome speed has earned him the nickname "Lightning Kid." In March 2007, Anand won the Morelia-Linares Super Grandmasters chess tournament. He showed his genius early on as a child when he won the National Sub-Junior Chess Championship in 1983 at the age of fourteen. In 1984, Anand went on to become the youngest Indian to win the International Master Title. He became the National Champion at the age of sixteen. 

His winning spree continued when in 1987, he became the first Indian to win the World Junior Chess Championship and the next year, he became India's first Grandmaster. He qualified for the Professional Chess Association World Chess Championship final by beating the likes of Michael Adams and Gata Kamsky. At the age of 22, he won the Reggio Emilia, finished ahead of greats like Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. In 1995, he lost to Garry Kasparov in New York City's World Trade Center. He achieved victories at Dortmund in 2004, the Corus chess tournament in 2006 and Linares in 2007. This Chess whizkid won the Chess Oscar in 1997, 1998, 2003 and 2004. 

Anand won the FIDE World Chess Championship in 2000 after defeating Alexei Shirov in the final match held in Teheran. In 2003, he won the World Rapid Chess Championship. In 2006, he became the fourth player in history to cross the 2800-mark in ELO ratings. Among the many awards he has won, mention may be made of the Arjuna award in 1985, the Padma Shri in 1987, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award for the year 1991-1992 and the Padma Bhushan in 2000 

Vishwanathan Anand has added another feather to his cap by winning the World Chess Championship in Moscow against Boris Gelfand of Israel giving a reason to his friends to rejoice once again. Having won the title previously in 2000, 2007, 2008 and 2010 and now in 2012 this was his fifth victory at the World Chess Championship where he was also the defending champion.