A galaxy of leaders takes centre stage
EXCHANGE OF IDEAS Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the 15th edition of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit today. The twoday event will see luminaries from across the spectrum, including former US President Barack Obama, Afghanistan Chief E
NARENDRA MODI Prime Minister Irrespective of his future accomplishments, Narendra Modi will rank as one of the stalwarts of Indian politics, for he already has many firsts to his credit.
Just glance through what he has achieved – the first leader in 30 years to have won an absolute majority in the national elections; the first leader born post-Independence to have become India’s Prime Minister; the first BJP figure to have expanded the party’s territorial reach; the first OBC leader to have assumed national dominance. Modi’s political rise, after taking over as the chief minister of Gujarat in 2001, is a story of reversals and resilience. It reveals a man who has a pulse over popular sentiment, a leader who is acutely conscious of the importance of images, messages and signalling, and a pragmatist who is willing to adapt to the times.
If Modi was seen as a Hindu Hriday Samrat between 2002 and 2007, he transformed into a Vikas Purush, delivering the Gujarat model of development between 2007 and 2014. There has, since his victory in the 2014 general elections, been a third conscious reinvention: to a gareebon ka neta, or messiah of the poor.
The past few months have been challenging for Modi and his government. It is inevitable in a complex, competitive democracy that a regime would not able to meet the aspirations of all citizens. Critics have questioned the downturn in the economy, although there has been recent good news on that front – from both Moody’s and the World Bank. No leader has shown Modi’s capacity for reinvention, for being able to communicate directly with the masses and establish trust successfully. BARACK OBAMA Former US President Barack Obama is out of the White House but he is very much in the mindspace of the world. The life of the first African-American President of the United States is best described by the title of his book: The Audacity of Hope. When he was presented the John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award this year, some noted that Obama was the epitome of Kennedy’s definition of courage – grace under pressure.
He is a man a lot of Americans would have loved to elect as their president for a third term, if it were not for the laws. Born to Kenyan intellectual Barack Obama Sr and American anthropologist Ann Dunham, Obama was brought up in Indonesia and the US – an upbringing that, he wrote, allowed him to “experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect”. A graduate from Columbia University in New York, he attended Harvard Law School, where he distinguished himself as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
Among the highlights of Obama’s first term, which began in 2009, was the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the repeal of the policy that prevented gay people from serving in the military, the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and the operation that resulted in the killing of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
His second term was marked by the negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris accord on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, the breakthrough in diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the “Pivot to Asia” policy that called for a larger role for India in the region.
The former President, 56, now works with the Obama Foundation to offer hope and healing to people and to create a new generation of leaders who can herald change. ABDULLAH ABDULLAH Chief Executive, Afghanistan From the resistance against Soviet occupation to his stint as foreign minister to his current role as Chief Executive of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah has towered over his country’s politics.
The eye-surgeon-turned-politician took over the latest of many roles, which gives him prime ministerial powers in the National Unity Government, after Ashraf Ghani was declared winner in the second round of the 2014 presidential election. Since then, he had to manoeuvre between the two power centres in the Afghan government while dealing with tricky issues.
Abdullah learnt his early political lessons while serving as an assistant to the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Masood in the 1980s. After the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001, he took over as foreign minister in the interim administration formed around Hamid Karzai.
Abdullah has often endorsed the role played by India — “a trusted friend” — in Afghanistan’s reconstruction. YOGI ADITYANATH Chief minister, Uttar Pradesh Twenty-one years ago, the high priest of Gorakhnath Math and BJP MP Mahant Avaidyanath named disciple Yogi Adityanath as his successor. In the years that followed, Adityanath emerged as a firebrand Hindutva leader, taking up issues such as the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, the uniform civil code, the ban on cow slaughter and anti-conversion campaign.
After Avaidyanath left active politics in 1998, Adityanath contested on a BJP ticket and was elected to the 12th Lok Sabha as its youngest member at 26 years of age. He went on to be a five-time MP from Gorakhpur, and is now the CM of India’s most populous and politically critical state.
Born Ajay Singh Bisht, Adityanath is the son of a forest ranger from Panchur village in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal.
In 2002 Adityanath launched the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), a cultural and social organisation dedicated to Hindutva and nationalism. Adityanath, 45, has been try- RAVI SHANKAR PRASAD Union law minister As a young civil liberties lawyer in Patna, Ravi Shankar Prasad would fight cases for the poor free of cost. Years later, now Union minister of law and justice, Prasad says that experience is coming handy in shaping reforms in justice administration.
Under the ministry of communications and information technology, of which Prasad holds dual charge, PM Narendra Modi’s flagship project – Digital India – has empowerment of the poor at its nucleus.
A three-time Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, Prasad, 63, was minister of state for coal, minister for law, and minister for information and broadcasting under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the first NDA government.
His reform push includes repealing old and obsolete laws, tackling pendency of cases in courts, and ensuring a transparent and accountable mechanism for appointment of judges. ARUN JAITLEY Union minister of finance and corporate affairs As a medium-pace bowler in his school days, the team would depend on Arun Jaitley to demolish the batting lineups of rival teams with inswingers and short-of-length deliveries.
Jaitley brought that paceman’s instinct to student politics at Delhi University, and then to the courtrooms of the Capital as a top lawyer. Politics was no different for him. The sharp and witty Jaitley, now Finance Minister of India, has often left rivals ducking for cover over his distinguished career as a BJP spokesman, party general secretary, Parliamentarian and minister.
Indeed, the 64-year-old Jaitley wears many hats. While serving as president of the Delhi University Students’ Union in 1974, he earned the reputation of being an astute organiser with an eye for spotting talent. Sent to jail during the Emergency the following year, he came out to become convener of the Loktantrik Yuva Morcha, which campaigned for the Janta Party and was instrumental in Congress’s first defeat in the 1977 general elections.
Jaitley is today a key strategist for the BJP, the “go-to man” in the government, and as finance minister, the spearhead of the NDA government’s two most important economic reforms – Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the bankruptcy code.
Jaitley loves food, watches and shawls. A warm host, he can still be spotted treating friends to some of Delhi’s signature delicacies (Chhole Bhature at Kwality restaurant and Dal Meat at Embassy, to name just two).
In his free time, which he barely gets now, Jaitley likes to tune in to old Hindi film songs. DR RAMAN SINGH Chief minister, Chhattisgarh Among several records that Dr Raman Singh holds, this one stands out — this August 14, two months before his 65th birthday, the Chhattisgarh CM completed 5,000 days in office without a break. He is the only BJP leader to be chief minister for so long (Narendra Modi had an uninterrupted 4,610 days as Gujarat CM before moving to the Prime Minister’s office in May 2014).
Singh is also the only BJP CM other than Modi to have won three assembly elections on the trot. His domination of Chhattisgarh in parliamentary elections, too, is unchallenged.
Born in a peasant family in Kawardha on October 15, 1952, Singh has a degree in Ayurveda. Singh was noticed by the RSS and the BJP leadership for treating the underprivileged in his home town for over two years.
He made his political debut in 1990, when he was elected to the Madhya Pradesh assembly. He was re-elected three years later and became Union minister of state in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Caught up with politics and governance for 14 years, Singh says he misses playing volleyball and cricket. VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA Founder and CEO, Paytm Hours after digital payments platform Paytm won the Forbes India “Outstanding Start-up of the Year Award” on November 8, 2016, PM Modi announced demonetisation of 85% of cash in circulation.
In the year that followed, Paytm and its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma emerged as clear winners of the much-debated policy decision. Paytm’s valuation rose from $5 billion in August 2016, to nearly $7 billion today, while Sharma and his investors have overseen the launch of the Paytm payment’s bank, in which he has 51% stake. The past year, Sharma said, was the most fulfilling part of a journey that began in early 1990s when he first encountered the internet as a student at the Delhi College of Engineering. Since then, Sharma tweaked his business model every few years. “People used to say that the data tsunami, the smart phone tsunami is coming, and will wipe away all feature-phone-led models,” Sharma told HT, “My theory was in this tsunami, we don’t want to be the one that gets killed, we want to be the one that rides that.” MUKESH AMBANI Chairman and MD, Reliance Industries Ltd Mukesh Ambani, 60, the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd is India’s richest man with a net worth of ~2.5 trillion ($38 billion). He controls 40% of Reliance, which operates the largest refinery in the world, and is India’s most valuable company.
Apart from Reliance Industries, he also owns the Mumbai Indians cricket team and property worth $400 million in Mumbai, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Earlier this year, he overtook Hong Kong’s Li Ka Shing to become Asia’s second richest man. Ambani is also the chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, his most audacious gamble yet. Reliance is proposing to invest nearly Rs 3 trillion in this telecom venture (including planned capital expenditure) to set up a 4G wireless network and broadband SALMAN KHAN Actor, philanthropist During any film conversation, his name crops up as one of the biggest stars of Indian cinema. Salman Khan debuted in Bollywood in 1988 and his success story is no less dramatic than that of a typical masala flick.
In spite of controversies and criticisms, the eldest son of veteran screenwriter Salim Khan remains one of the most commercially successful, respected and sought after stars in the industry. In the past 28 years, Salman has grown not just as an actor.
He has established himself as a successful producer and television personality. His films have kept the box-office register ringing, with him being the only actor to star in the highest-grossing Hindi films in nine separate years. In August 2017, Khan was on the Forbes list of World’s Highest-Paid Entertainers. That is just his reel side. There is also the do-gooder Salman. Known to go out of his way to help friends, colleagues and sometimes even strangers, the industry unanimously vouches for his “heart of gold”.
Beyond the 70mm and the ‘film family’, there’s the good samaritan Salman. Like in 2012, when Khan offered to pay Rs 40 lakh to release 400 prisoners from 63 jails in Uttar Pradesh through his NGO.
The prisoners had completed their terms, but were unable to pay fines for their charges owing to financial troubles. ASHWINI ASOKAN Founder and CEO, Mad Street Den Ashwini Asokan is founder and chief executive officer at Mad Street Den, an AI and computer vision startup based in Chennai.
Asokan returned to India from the United States after more than a decade to bootstrap Mad Street Den, which she founded with her neuroscientist husband, Anand Chandrasekaran, in 2013.
An alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, Asokan graduated with a master’s degree in interaction design. She went on to work with Intel in California, where she led a team working on improving the user experience for mobile products.
At Mad Street Den, Asokan brings together her capabilities as a product designer and a cultural researcher to create technologies that feel intuitive and natural to humans. Her company’s first product is a visual search engine called Vue.ai.
Sold to e-retailers, Vue.ai allows users to search for an article by uploading its picture and also learns from their past searches to suggest things that may fit their taste. Her work, she says, sits at the intersection of technology, people and complex organisational systems.
Asokan wants to establish Mad Street Den as a computer vision company with a global
NAOMI CAMPBELL Model, actor, activist For as far back as an entire generation can remember,
Naomi Campbell has been one of the most famous faces on the planet – certainly one of the most famous women, second only to perhaps the Queen, Princess Diana, or Angelina Jolie.
She began walking the ramp in the late ’80s. In 1987, she became the first black woman in over two decades to feature on the cover of British Vogue. The prejudice she faced for being a non-white model would always haunt her. This encouraged her to raise her voice against the pay disparity non-white models endured.
Campbell gradually walked away from the ramp and switched focus to causes such as raising awareness on breast cancer, eradicating poverty, and even organising a fund-raiser for the 2008 Mumbai terror attack victims. She launched the Diversity Coalition, aimed at pointing out racism in the fashion world. She now appears in a host of television roles. ROSE McGOWAN Actor, writer, director, activist Before Rose McGowan became the unlikely face of the worldwide protest against powerful men who abused their positions — like the disgraced Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein — McGowan made a career out of playing uncompromising women in films.
She began her career with an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her performance as a troubled teen who falls for a violent drifter in provocateur Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995). For The Doom Generation, McGowan drew from her personal experiences living as a wayward teen in the 1980s. After years of playing outspoken women on screen, she found her voice off it.
A few years after starring in what is arguably her biggest role – the lead in directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double feature – McGowan was a part of an explosive NYT expose against the industry’s larger-than-life character, and pro- ALEX HARDIMAN Director, news products, FB Alexandra Hardiman has a tough job at hand: foil fake news on Facebook. The social network, which has 2 billion active monthly users worldwide, was, along with other social media platforms, accused of not doing enough to stop misinformation during the 2016 US presidential election.
Hardiman, 35, is the head of Facebook’s news products division, which is responsible for fighting fake news and helping publishers discover new ways of storytelling and monetising. She joined Facebook in 2016 to lead the pages product team focused on messaging and mobile products for small business.
“My colleagues and I will work collaboratively with news organisations across the spectrum to build new storytelling formats, local news communities, monetisation options, and more. We will also partner with teams in Facebook to continue curbing the spread of false news,” Hardiman wrote in a Facebook post on May 1, 2017. NEERAJ KAKKAR Cofounder, CEO, Paperboat Making a mark in the Indian packaged food sector isn’t something that consumer startups usually attempt to do. The sector is largely dominated by big brands such as Dabur, PepsiCo and ITC. But Neeraj Kakkar, chief executive officer of Hector Beverages Pvt. Ltd, saw an opportunity in the traditional drinks and foods segment.
The company first launched two ethnic drinks — aamras and jaljeera under the PaperBoat brand in Bangalore in 2013 -and later expanded the product to cities in northern India. Within a year of its launch, Paper Boat started selling close to 1.2 million packs every month.
By 2015, Hector was valued at $100 million and raised more than $30 million from investors such as Advent Management and Hillhouse Capital Group.
In April that year, the company tied up with Japanese Ramen noodles maker Indo Nissin for distributing PaperBoat drinks in Tier-II cities and rural markets.
PaperBoat also produces seasonal and festival-specific drinks -- Thandai during Holi, Panakam during Ram Navami and Serbet-e-khaas during Ramadan. They sell on online grocery ordering platforms. DR ASH TIWARI Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai As a part of the Mount Sinai Health System that includes seven hospitals in New York, robotic surgeon, urologist, oncologist, teacher and principal investigator Dr Ash Tiwari’s days are packed. He has introduced key innovations in robotic surgery for prostate cancer and prostatectomies by using a minimally invasive approach that minimises side-effects associated with traditional ‘open’ surgery.
While the 3D robotic procedure magnifies and makes the operating field more visible to the surgeon, it reduces pain, blood loss, scarring and post-surgery complications.
Apart from surgery, the Kanpur-born Tewari’s focuses on an active surveillance programme for prostate cancer patients. He has performed more than 5,500 robotic prostate cancer surgeries and made seminal contributions on various aspects of prostate cancer research.
He has been consecutively listed in New York Magazine’s Top Doctors issue ROLA HALLAM Chief executive officer, Cando Rola Hallam is an anaesthetist and intensive care doctor by profession. By passion, however, she is a global health activist who was working across subSaharan Africa until civil war broke out in her home country, taking her to the heart of conflict-torn middle-east.
A British-Syrian, she is medical director of Hand in Hand for Syria, which plays an integral part in building hospitals and health centres across the country. Hallam lectures at the London School of Economics and King’s College London. An international human-rights advocate, she works for an end to the targeting of civilians in war zones, to protect medical neutrality, and care for people trapped in war zones.
Her quest to provide access to healthcare for all has led her to launch CanDo, a not-for-profit social enterprise enabling local humanitarians to provide healthcare services in communities devastated by war. FARAH MOHAMED Chief executive officer, Malala Fund It’s been 44 years since she fled Uganda and sought asylum in Canada, but Farah Mohamed says she never forgets she was once a refugee. This is what drives her work for girls’ education around the world as chief executive officer of the Malala Fund.
Appointed to her latest assignment this February, Mohamed is a leading advocate for the rights of girls and women around the world. As founder and CEO of G(irls)20, she worked for girls’ education and the participation of women in the labour force. The Malala Fund, named after Pakistan’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning education activist Malala Yusufzai, has invested nearly $9 million since 2014 in girls’ education programmes in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and countries hosting Syrian refugees.
Mohamed says the Malala Fund will place special emphasis on refugee girls as part of the mission to secure 12 years of free, safe and quality education. Education, she says, is an investment in economic growth, a healthier workforce, and lasting peace. “In some countries, doubling the percentage of students finishing secondary school would halve the risk of conflict,” she said recently.
In addition to advocating for greater development education aid, the Malala Fund supports education leaders in countries with the most out-of-school girls through its new initiative, the Gulmakai Network. Mohamed sees refugee girls not as statistics but as “faces of our future”. “The international community needs to recognise that the world’s most pressing problems can be solved not by bullets and bombs, but by investing in education,” she said. VIKAS KHANNA Chef, author, filmmaker Vikas Khanna is one of the best-known Indian chefs on the international circuit. Having cooked satvik food for former US President Barack Obama, and a fan list that includes Tom Cruise and Andre Agassi, Khanna has got many people interested in authentic Indian food. But success came hard to the 46-year-old Michelin star chef, restaurateur, and former judge of the popular show, Masterchef India.
Khanna was born with a club foot. Doctors told his mother that he would never be able to walk properly. An introvert, Khanna ended up spending time in the kitchen with his grandmother, and fell in love with cooking.
At 13, Khanna started to walk normally. By 17, he was running a catering business in Amritsar, when his uncle took him to ITC Maurya, New Delhi. After studying at the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, Manipal, he did a three-year stint at the Leela Kempinski, Mumbai.
In 2000, Khanna landed in America, where he stayed in a shelter for homeless in New York. After that there has been no looking back for this master chef. DR MADHAV DHODAPKAR Coleader, cancer immunology, Yale Dr Madhav Dhodapkar is a researcher in cancer immunology and the role of the immune system in controlling cancer at the Yale Cancer Center. He heads a research team that is combining new approaches for early detection and prevention of cancer, and exploring how the immune system regulates the transition to cancer.
Dr Dhodapkar was awarded the US National Cancer Institute’s Outstanding Investigator award with $7 million in research funding in 2016. He studied medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi before moving to the United States for a fellowship in haematology and oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He has worked as faculty at the Myeloma Institute in Little Rock, Arakansas, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, at New York’s Rockefeller University.
In 2002, Dhodapkar was named a New York Community Trust Scholar in Blood Diseases Research. His research interests include immunobiology of myeloma (a cancer arising from plasma cells), dendritic cell biology, and developing novel biological approaches to treat cancer. His research strategies have led to clinical tumour remissions in myeloma patients. Dr Dhadopar says his goal is to learn to harness the properties of the immune system to detect, prevent and treat cancer, with focus on multiple myeloma. GAGGAN ANAND Chef and restaurateur Gaggan Anand is the chef who has made the world fly to Bangkok for Indian food. He’s made Indians realise that dhokla can look like snow, that kulfi can be creamy without cream, and that dal cooked in a test tube can taste better than anything your mother made. He’s shown that an Indian-born chef can get the world to eat out of the palm of his hand.
If nothing is what it seems in Anand’s world, it’s because he doesn’t play by the rules. Raised in Kolkata, he moved to Thailand in 2007, but eventually hopped on a plane to Spain to train at the Michelin star restaurant, El Bulli, under Ferran Adrià. The internship didn’t come easy; Anand called 18 times asking for an opportunity before he finally got one. In 2010, he opened ‘Gaggan’ in Bangkok, using science and modern technology to create modernist and progressive re-interpretations of traditional recipes. The restaurant has topped the list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants for three years. At pop-ups in India, his 12-course menus, priced at close to ₹20,000, sell out quickly. In Bangkok, his