Sabeer Bhatia at the age of 27 sold his company to Bill Gates for $ 400 million! He used his ‘negotiating’ attitudes acquired when he was growing up and observed his ‘servants’ buying fruits and vegetables! Fortunately today we have hundreds of ‘Sabeer Bhatias’ and many many thousands are in the making.
Bhatia was born and raised in the southern city of Banglore. His father, who held a high post in the Ministry of Defence, and his mother, a senior

official in a state bank, placed great value on education. Their only son did not disappoint them. “On parent-teacher days the teachers would just say ‘Sir why did you come?You don’t have to come! We tell Sabeer to solve questions on the blackboard for us,” says Bhatia senior. Like many Indian parents,Balev and Daman hoped their son would secure a lifetime position with a big multinational firm. Sabeer had different ideas. “I was pretty entrepreneurial even as a school boy,” he says. When a college opened nearby he decided to open a sandwich shop and drew up his first business plan. “Then my mom said ‘Stop thinking about these things and go and study’. Bhatia is persistent, focused, disciplined and a superior human being. Doing his Master’s in Science at Stanford, he attended lectures by such legends as Steve Jobs of Apple and Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems. Sabeer Bhatia, the pioneer in the field of first web-based e- mail- The Hotmail, was born in Chandigarh in the year 1969. He had his early education at Bishop’s Cotton School in Pune, then St. Joshop’s college in Banglore. He earned a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the 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 5 July 1996.
‘…From Son Of A Professional Couple To $400 Million Success Before He Hit 30…’

Sunil Mittal, 45, started off by selling bicycle spares, not so long ago, to a NASDAQ listening and the title of Ring Master! For this lad from Ludhiana, with a plain BA degree, speed is the key to success. Four years ago, he became a small player in the Indian telecommunications market, the owner of cellular franchises in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Total customer bade, 116,000. Today, his Bharti Tele Ventures is the largest mobile phone company on the subcontinent.

Customer base 2.5 million. He recently wrapped up a $ 1 billion expansion that multiplied the size of his network four times in less than a year. The former bicycles parts maker has acquired the largest market share nationally with his cash register ringing loud all the way. THE QUESTION of Bharti’s DNA is something Sunil Mittal loves to talk about, using management jargon he’s extremely comfortable with, despite being an average student in college. “With our speed- to market, we bring about programmed chaos in the opposition’s camp. The second part of our DNA is that we’ve promised ourselves to be at least one per cent better than the competition in every way, whether it’s technology or customer satisfaction. So ours really is a cross-DNA between that of Reliance and the Tatas.”
He won’t elaborate on that, refusing to name the Ambanis or the Tatas any further, but you’ve got to read between the lines: he’s impressed by the speed and ambition of Reliance and with the working style of the Tatas (read compassion). “I cannot agree with Jack Welch and his concept of forced ranking-eliminating 10 per cent of employees every year. We’re very weak on consequence management, we don’t punish under Performers.”
There’s another side, however, to the chairman and managing director of Bharti group: in order to achieve his goals, he’ll do just about anything. When Bharti TeleVentures, the holding company, was rolling out nine new circles recently on the back of six existing ones, the quality were quick to point out that the tiger had bitten off more than he could chew.
Confront him with the question, and he says it was all part of a carefully laid-out strategy. “Yes, it certainly affected the quality, but when you’re cleaning the markets, you’ve to take your eyes off the existing services,” he says.

He started out life as a humble fruit juice seller’s son in Darya Ganj market in Old Delhi. He wanted to make it big in Bombay and he did, by cooking up innovative ways to pirate popular music. Super Cassette Industries, his flagship company and its low price high volume strategy ushered in a musical revolution. Pretty soon he had the leader of the pack,
HMV India itself, chomping at the bits in order to compete with him. Using all of his fortunes from

his music production company in Noida, near Delhi to finance his film production business, Gulshan Kumar soon became the owner of a vast 400 crore-rupee empire. He was the highest taxpayer for the financial year 1992-93. Gulshan started his business in audiocassettes as his financial position allowed him, very humbly, very small. Fortunately for him, at that point, the audiocassette had only recently entered India. That was about the onlyadvantage Gulshan had, of entering the fray not too late.
Gulshan’s approach, and understanding was natural. The audiocassette was a new product, and the music business was a modern and new business. The music business was attractive, profitable, creative artistic, and glamorous.

Vandana Luthra is the mastermind behind the country’s largest and most successful chain of health and fitness centres VLCC (Vandana Luthra’s Curls and Cures).
She is a graduate from Delhi University and also pursued Cosmetology from Germany subsequently she did a series of courses in beauty care, fitness, food, nutrition and skin care from London, Munich and Paris. She had to convince her parents-in-law and husband who were not in favour of her working when she decided to enter the beauty business.

Mrs Luthra opened the 1st fitness centre in 1989 at a time when Indian market was very nascent and the idea of combining health and beauty was quite radical to the Indian society. Today she has a chain of 32 outlets all over the country and plans to take VLCC abroad. VLCC is the world’s first beauty corporate to get the ISO 9001:2000 certification from DNV (Det Norske Veritas).

Shehnaz Hussain was married by the age of 15 and by the time she turned 16, she had become a mother. It was then that the mental upheaval began and she began getting bored with the drudgery of endless routine. She decided to fulfil her dreams. The first turning point in her life came when her husband was posted in Teheran. Once there, she decided to study cosmetology, but it was very expensive proposition. So she began working for the Iran Tribune-writing articles in

English on various issues and under different names. That’s how she could finance his training at some of the best institutions in the West. During her training period she realized the extent of harm caused to women as a result of chemical ingredients in cosmetics. She then turned to Ayurveda, which she believed was the ideal alternative to chemical cosmetics. An important moment was when she entered the international market for the first time and participated in the festival of India in 1980. Even though she was given a counter in the perfumery section of Selfridges, the famous departmental store in London, she managed to hold her own and let her products speak for themselves. Her entire consignment sold in three days and broke the store’s cosmetic sales records for the year.

Shreedharan, who was born in Chattanur, a small village near Palakkad in Kerala, does not have much of a social life. “Once in a while I go to classical music concerts,” he says. He also makes it a point to visit Kerala at regular intervals to meet relatives. How many people in Delhi know a man called E. Shreedharan? He is 70. Should have retired a long time ago with enough achievements to boast about to his grandchildren. Most of his working life he was yet another unknown engineer

with the railways, until he took up the challenge of building the Konkan Railway that reduced the Mumbai-Kochi distance by one-third. Everybody said it was not possible. He defied them all and built India’s first genuine railway project of any notable size after the British.When the government was short of money, he raised public bonds and that was a decade ago when such things were unprecedented. Shreedharan did not stop there.Everybody laughed when plansto build a metro rail in Delhi were announced. He is a modest man. It is not the self-effacing version of modesty which politicians wear, but the genuine kind. E.Shreedharan, architect of the Konkan Railway and the Delhi Metro Rail, believes that all his achievements were the result of team efforts.

The 71- year-old civil engineer (“Still looking forward to retirement”) has been selected as one of the most outstanding Asians by Time magazine.

For the past decade or so, he has been at the forefront of a major trend in holistic healing. Since the early 1980s Chopra has successfully combined his impeccable credentials as a practicing endocrinologist with his exploration of mind/body medicine. By doing so, he has dramatically influenced many in traditional medical circles and helped bring the enormous benefits of holistic medicine to the general public’s attention.Chopra created a paradigm for exploring the healing

process- a model he calls ‘Quantum Healing’. He recalls: “As doctors we are taught to prescribe tranquillisers for people who are feeling anxious to promote tranquillity. We give sleeping pills to people with insomnia. Quantum Healing looks past all the wonder drugs and modern technology to a natural way of healing which speaks to an integration of mind and body.” Rather than turn his back on his conventional training, he extended his practice to bring together the best of ancient wisdom and modern science. In 1984 he helped to introduce ayurvedic medicine to United States and within a year he established anAyurvedic Health Centre for Stress Management and Behavioural Medicine in Lancaster, Massachusetts. He was also the founding President of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine.
Since that time, he has emerged as one of the world’s leading proponents of this innovative combination of Eastern and Western healing. Chopra combines ancient mind/body wisdom with current anti-aging research to show that the effects of aging are largely preventable. By changing your perception of aging and by being aware of your body and how it processes intelligence and experience you will change how you age.
Today, Chopra lectures around the world making presentations to major corporations and organizations such as the World Health Organization in Geneva, the United Nations, and London’s Royal Society of Medicine, as well as a number of US medicinal institutions.

Virender Sehwag, the man of the Indo-Pak cricket series, was lucky that his parents could afford Rs.150 a month for his cricket training. When his coach first spotted him, he was a 13- year-old local boy, son of a grain hawker, who lived in a house stuffed with siblings, uncles, aunts and 16 cousins.
He had no dazzling skills but was desperate to learn. Today he is India’s fearless and dramatic opener, one of the most sought after cricketers in the country. To India’s impoverished youth, he is the man of clay astride the mountain of the gods.

It would be an understatement of the millennium if one would call Kapil Dev one of the greatest all-rounders of not just Indian cricket but in the history of the game. Such have been the deeds of this natural cricketer from Haryana that words would not be enough to describe them. Ever since he took to the game in the late 70s to the time he called it quits in the mid 90s, he was one of the leading all rounders in the game. Kapil was a truly inspirational cricketer who has charted the course

of many famous Indian victory almost single handedly. Captaining India to win the Prudential World Cup in 1983 obviously was the highlight of his illustrious career. He came on the scene just when India’s famed and widely feared spin quarter of Bedi, Prasanna, Chandrashekhar and Venkatraghavan were nearing the autumn of their careers. He remained India’s ace strike bowler for a decade and a half. He chose to remain away from the game after he retired in 1994 and it was only after critics suggested that he give something back to the game did he accept the job of Indian Coach in 1999. But pool results coupled with betting and match fixing scandals saw a premature end to what could well have been an interesting challenge to the great all-rounder.
Kapil Dev was born in a timber merchant’s family on January 6th, 1959 in Chandigarh, Surprisingly for such a talented cricketer; there was never a lineage of cricket in his family. However he had instilled in him the virtues of hard work by his father Ramlal Nikhanj who himself was a thorough perfectionist and a strict disciplinarian.
Kapil played his first really competitive game of cricket only at the age of 13. And it was a complete accident that he got a chance to parade his skills in that match.
No sooner did he realize that he had some talent he wanted to excel in the sport. The fighter that he always was the young lad was dying to test his skills against quality opposition. His family too started noticing his passion for the game and they encouraged him to take up the game seriously. His elder brother Bhushan Dev who was 3 years older to Kapil gave him the biggest encouragement and at age 14 Kapil started playing for DAV school and college.
Such was his love for the game that after he finished school at 1.30 p.m. he would race home on his bicycles and be home at 1.50 p.m. After gulping a quick lunch he would set out for the cricket ground again at 2/15 a.m. only to be at the cricket ground at 2.40.

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the present occupant of the Rastrapati Bhawan, is the son of a fisherman. He was born at Dhanushkodi in Rameshwaram district of Tamil Nadu on 15 October 1931, the fifth among seven siblings. His father did not have much formal education but knew the value of honesty and self-discipline and passed on these to his son. As a small boy, Kalam used to sell newspapers in a village to earn his living. He was not exceptionally smart at school

but was fascinated by religion and rockets. Initially the missiles he built crashed and he was made a butt of ridicule. However, he eventually went on to script the Space Odyssey of India. Dr. Kalam made significant contributions as Project director to develop India’s first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III), which successfully injected the Rohini satellite in the near earth orbit in July 1980, which made India an exclusive member of the Space Club. He took up academic pursuit as Professor, Technology and Societal Transformation at Anna University, from November 2001 and was also involved in teaching and research tasks. Above all he took up a mission to ignite the young minds for national development by meeting high school students across the country. He became the 11th President of India on 25 July 2002 at the age of 72. His focus is on transforming India into a developed nation by 2020. A vegetarian, his interests include playing the veena and writing poetry. He has also written two books, “Igniting Minds: Unleashing the Power Within” and “India 2020: Vision or the New Millenium”. If a nation is known by its first citizen, then India is a hotbed of scientific talent, and a developed nation in spirit. His first inspiration was his science teacher, Sivasubramania Iyer, who taught him in fifth class how birds fly. He gives four steps to make India better-
1. Improve yourself
2. Help others
3. Each to plant two saplings
4. Set yourself a clear goal.

M.F. Hussain, 94, a self-taught artist, is today synonymous with contemporary Indian art. Born in Maharashtra, he learnt the art of calligraphy quite early in life. He also learnt to write poetry while staying with one of his uncles in a madarsa in Baroda, an art that has stayed with him through his life.
His early education was very elementary but Hussain’s love for drawing was evident even at this stage. Whenever he got a chance, he would strap his painting gear to his bicycle and ride out to the surrounding countryside of Indore to paint the landscape. In 1973 he reached Mumbai determined to become an artist, with hardly any money and lived in a cheap room in a by lane inhabited by the city’s dark underbelly.
He became an apprentice to a painter of cinema hoardings, which he would paint with great dexterity, perched on a scaffolding, sometimes in the middle of traffic. He was noticed for the first time in 1947 when he won an award at the annual exhibition of the Bombay.

Dhirubhai Ambani, Indian businessman, was born in Chorwad, Gujarat, on December 28, 1932. He died in Bombay on July 6, 2002, aged 69. Dhirubhai Ambani is survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters. His two American-educated sons have been in day-to-day control of the company.
Dhirubhai Ambani built up the only Indian business to feature in the Forbes 5oo. Combining a keen sense of business with a

razor-sharp ability to negotiate his way through the labyrinth of the Indian Political establishment, Ambani single-handedly built a business empire that in just three decades outgrew corporate houses such as the Tatas and Birlas, which had dominated the country’s industrial landscape for nearly a century. The son of a pretty trader from a remote village in rural Gujarat, Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani- known as Dhirubhai – moved to Aden as a teenager in order to seek his fortune. He started work as a petrol station attendant before taking up a clerical position for an oil company that was the sole distributor of Shell products there. While in Aden, home to many Gujarati expatriates, he realized that a discrepancy between the real sterling exchange rate and the intrinsic value of the silver content in Aden’s coinage afforded an excellent opportunity to make money. This arbitrage generated some $ 3,000 in seed money for the modest trading enterprise that Ambani set up when he returned to Bombay in 1958. Ambani quickly calculated that further expansion would depend on access to a cheap source of capital.
To Indian middle-class salary-earners, Ambani held out the promise of instant enrichment through the stock market. But he was no fly-by-night operator. Reliance shares offered genuine value, and those fortunate enough to have had faith in the company in the early years eventually became millionaires.
In one of his more candid moments, he summed up the secret of his remarkable success story.
Think big, think fast and think ahead. Born to a school teacher father, Ambani followed this advice all his life. He dreamt big even as a small boy when he used to sell hot snacks to pilgrims outside a temple in his native village.
To any sort of sniping in the press, Dhirubhai has responded with stoic silence. Rarely has he reacted to even the most stringent media criticism.
To the Gujarati business community, he has assumed the status of demi-god. To all aspiring small-time entrepreneurs, he has become a sort of benchmark they aim at.

Karsanbhai K Patel of Nirma is the stuff that legends are made of Business journals around the world have all featured him at different times. He forms the basis for case studies at Business Schools. He is a marketing wizard, giant killer, humanitarian and entrepreneur par excellence.
He is Mr K K Patel – the man, the myth, the personae behind Nirma. His story begins at the grassroots and shoots up to the dizzying heights of the corporate world. Son of a humble farmer from mehsana, he went to rewrite the rules of Marketing. At the end of the sixties, Mr K K Patel, a 25 –year old Lab Assistant from Geology & Mining Department of the Gujarat Government, started a small scale

of the corporate world. Son of a humble farmer from mehsana, he went to rewrite the rules of Marketing. At the end of the sixties, Mr K K Patel, a 25 –year old Lab Assistant from Geology & Mining Department of the Gujarat Government, started a small scale business that offered a quality, detergent power, using indigenous technology, at a third of the prevailing price, without compromising on the product. The rest is history, and the product, named Nirma after his daughter, Nirupama, went on to occupy its place in the sun. The Nirma Institute of Technology (NIT) is a self financed technical institute offering both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in engineering.
It was established in 1995 by industrialist Dr. Karsanbhai K Patel under the aegis of Nirma Education and Research Foundation (NERF). The institute is recognized by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and is affiliated to Gujarat University, Ahmedabad.
NIT is located about 15 kms from Ahmedabad. It shares a 100-acre campus with Nirma Institute of Diploma Studies.