Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice!

Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice! – Part 1

So recently, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said in a recent interview to Economic Times that Indians ‘measure success with academic excellence and a good job, but lack creativity’. Here’s an excerpt:

‘The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practicing and having a good job and a great life. That’s a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behavior is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar.’

Well, India has its own problems. Yes, our education system is archaic and needs a major overhaul, but over the years there have been many Indians who have broken the mold with their talents and have gone ahead to make our country proud in various walks of life. This is a tribute to such legends who are looked upon with great respect by each Indian, you and me too! This is a reminder to Steve to show him that we are no less than any other country!

Here is a list of Indians (in no particular order) from various walks of life such as arts, science, and business, who have wowed us with their achievements in India and the international arena:

S. Chandrasekhar

S. Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore before India got partitioned. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his mathematical theory on black holes also known as ‘The Chandrasekhar Limit’.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Born in Tollygunge, Calcutta, as a Gaudiya Vaishnavism spiritual teacher (guru) and the founder preceptor (Acharya) of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the "Hare Krishna Movement" he helped tell the word of Hindu gods and goddesses to the world. Within the final twelve years of his life, Bhaktivedanta Swami translated over sixty volumes of classic Vedic scriptures (such as the Bhagavad Gita, Chaitanya Charitamritaand the Srimad Bhagavatam) into the English language. His translation and commentaries of the Bhagavad-Gītā are considered by adherents to the ISKCON movement and many Vedic scholars as one of the finest literary works of Vaishnavism translated into the English Language.

Aryabhata

Born in Pataliputra, he was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who gave the explanation of lunar eclipse and solar eclipse, rotation of Earth on its axis, reflection of light by moon, sinusoidal functions, solution of single variable quadratic equation, value of π correct to 4 decimal places, circumference of Earth to 99.8% accuracy, calculation of the length of sidereal year. His Āryabhaṭīya and the Arya-Siddhanta are still referenced by astronomers and scientists from around the world!

Sundar Pichai

Born in Madurai, Pichai is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Google Inc. He is also part of the board that made Alphabet Inc. into Google's parent company. He has been the central figure at Google in its development of products like Google Chrome, Chrome OS, and Google Drive. He has also been actively responsible for promoting the Chrome OS and the Chromebook, Google’s flagship devices that are low-cost netbooks for the general masses.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie originally hails from Kashmir and was born in Mumbai. He is famous for his fictional books like Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize winner in 1981 and Booker of Bookers in 1993). He has been ranked thirteenth by The Times on its list of the ‘50 greatest British authors since 1945’.

Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar

Popularly known as Baba Saheb, he was born in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. He was a political activist and social reformer who campaigned for greater equality through his work as an Indian jurist, economist, politician and social reformer.

He inspired the Dalit Buddhist Movement and campaigned against social discrimination against Untouchables (Dalits), while also supporting the rights of women and labor. He was Independent India's first law minister, the principal architect of the Constitution of India and a founding father of the Republic of India.

Amartya Sen

Born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, Sen is a 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate. He is a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (HSF) and the Chancellor of Nalanda University.

Har Gobind Khorana

Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist, was born in Punjab and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1968 for being able to crack the genetic code along with his associates Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley.

Virat Kohli

Born in Delhi, Kohli captained the Indian Cricket Team Under-19s to victory at the 2008 Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia. He is currently the captain of the national team in all three formats. He is ranked as one of the world's most famous athletes by ESPN and one of the most valuable athlete brands by Forbes.

In 2014, he became the top-ranked T20I batsman in the ICC rankings, holding the position for three successive years till 2017 and is currently ranked 3rd in the world, as of February 2018. Since October 2017, he has also been the top-ranked ODI batsman in the world and the 2nd ranked Test batsman in the world.

In ODIs, Kohli has the second highest number of centuries and the highest number of centuries in run-chases in the world. Kohli holds numerous Indian batting records including the fastest ODI century, the fastest batsman to 5,000 ODI runs and the fastest to 10 ODI centuries. He is only the second batsman in the world to have scored 1,000 or more ODI runs for four consecutive calendar years.

Among the T20I world records held by Kohli are: the fastest batsman to 1,000 runs, most runs in a calendar year and most fifties in the format. He also holds the records of most runs in a single tournament of both the World Twenty20 and the IPL.

He also has the highest historic rating points for an Indian batsman in ODIs (909 points) and T20Is (897 points) in ICC rankings and 2nd highest rating points in Tests (912 points) behind only Sunil Gavaskar. He is the only batsman in history to average over 50 in Test matches, ODIs and T20Is simultaneously.

Kohli has been the recipient of many awards such as the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World in 2016, ICC World Cricketer of the Year in 2017, ICC ODI Player of the Year in 2012 and 2017, and the BCCI's International Cricketer of the Year for the 2011–12, 2014–15 and 2015-16 seasons, the Arjuna Award (2013) and Padma Shri (2017).

His brand value in 2016 was estimated to be US$92 million, placing him second on the list of India's most valued celebrity brands.

Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice! – Part 2

Mira Nair

Mira Nair was born in Rourkela, Odisha. She is one of the most famous filmmakers around the world. Her documentary film India Cabaret (investigative documentary on the strippers working in Mumbai) won the Best Documentary prize at the American Film Festival. She is best known for films like Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, the Golden Lion-winning Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Born in in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, and a structural biologist by profession, he won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Ada E. Yonath and Thomas A. Steitz for studying the function and structure of the ribosome. In 2007, he had won the Louis-Jeantet Prize for his contributions in the field of medicine.

Sania Mirza

Born in Mumbai, Sania Mirza is an Indian professional tennis player who was formerly ranked No. 1 in the women's doubles rankings. From 2003 until her retirement from singles in 2013, she was ranked by the WTA as India's No. 1 doubles player. Throughout her career, Mirza has established herself as the most successful female Indian tennis players of India.

Mirza was named one of the "50 Heroes of Asia" by Time in October 2005. In March 2010, The Economic Times named Mirza in the list of the "33 women who made India proud". She was also an UN Women's Goodwill Ambassador for South Asia. She was named in Time magazine's 2016 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is also the recipient of The Arjuna Award (2004), WTA New Comer of the Year (2005), Padma Shri (2006), Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna (2015) and the Padma Bhushan (2016)

Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa)

She was born in Albania but became a naturalized Indian citizen after her years of work and selfless service to the underprivileged of Calcutta’s slums. She was conferred with the 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Peace Prize and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

Amar Bose

Born in Philadelphia, Bose was an Indian-American entrepreneur and academic behind the revolutionary sound systems of Bose Corporation. Bose’s expertise and research on speaker technology research are world-renowned. He invented one of the world’s first stereo loudspeakers which were more suited for domestic settings and reflected sound fields in various listening atmospheres which we now know as an Audio Equalizer. His focus on psychoacoustics later became a hallmark of his company's audio products. He also developed an electromagnetic replacement for automotive shock absorbers, intended to radically improve the performance of automotive suspension systems, absorbing bumps and road shock while controlling car body motions. In 2007, he was listed in Forbes 400 as the 271st richest man in the world, with a net worth of $1.8 billion.

Sachin Tendulkar

Born in Dadar, Bombay, he is regarded as one of the world’s greatest ever cricket batsmen! He won the cricket World Cup with India in 2011 and has also scored over 30,000 runs in international cricket with many records to his name.

Mahatma Gandhi

Born in Porbandar, he is considered as the foremost political leader of the Indian independence movement. It is due to his tenacity and non-violent resilience that the British were forced to retreat and the Indians were able to overthrow the British rule. He has inspired millions with his philosophy to this day and also helped alleviate the plight of women and the ‘untouchable’ castes of India.

Lakshmi N. Mittal

The chairman and CEO of the largest steelmaking company in the world – ArcelorMittal. He was listed as the 47th “most powerful person” in the Forbes list of 2012 and was included as one of the “100 most influential persons in the world” by TIME in 2007. He also owns 34% share in Queens Park Rangers Football Club.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

Popularly known as ‘Netaji’, he raised a united Indian army (INA) of all religious faiths in an attempt to win independence for India. Bose advocated complete unconditional independence for India, whereas the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) wanted it in phases, through Dominion status. Eventually, India attained freedom due to brave hearts like him. His most famous quote/slogans like "Give me blood and I will give you freedom", Dilli Chalo ("On to Delhi)!, and "Ittihad, Etemad, Qurbani" (Urdu for "Unity, Agreement, Sacrifice") were really popular with the Indian youth of that time.

India at CERN

Indian scientists have contributed substantially to the building and operation of the Large Hadron Collider Grid (LCG) at CERN which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. More than 200 Indian scientists from India’s Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC) and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) have been involved at CERN in its various physical experiments.

The prominent Indians who are part of the project include Atul Gurtu of TIFR, an expert on particle colliders, Vikas Sinha of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, who created a chip to process signals, and Vinod Chauhan employed by CERN to lead the group which tested the magnets. Indian scientists have played a major role in the CMS experiment, which is one of the two experiments that discovered the Higgs Boson.

Indian scientists at CERN have also played a significant role in the ALICE experiment, which is a dedicated experiment for search and study of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Hardware contributions by India to the ALICE detector include the Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), the Muon Spectrometer, the MANAS chip, and Silicon pad detectors.

Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice! – Part 3

Swami Vivekananda

Born in Calcutta, the indomitable spirit of Swami Vivekananda was an Indian Hindu monk, a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna. He was a key figure in the introduction of the Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world and also awoke in his fellow Indians a renewed sense of pride and self-belief. Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is perhaps best known for his speech which began, "Sisters and brothers of America ...," in which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893.

Zubin Mehta

Born in Mumbai, he is the biggest Indian name in the orchestra world. He is currently the music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the main Conductor for Valencia’s Opera House. He has received countless awards like the Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Wolf Prize in Arts and the Lifetime Achievement Peace and Tolerance Award of the United Nations to name a few.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Born in Gorakhpur, he was a popular spiritual teacher, Indian yogi, and guru who introduced millions of Indians and westerners to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his organization Yogoda Satsanga Society of India and Self-Realization Fellowship. His book, Autobiography of a Yogi remains a spiritual masterpiece and was included in the 100 best spiritual books of the 21st century. Yogananda was a disciple of Sri Yukteswar and was responsible for the early spread of Hindu yoga in the US.

Sri Chinmoy (Chinmoy Kumar Ghose)

Born in Chittagong District of East Bengal (now Bangladesh), he was was an Indian spiritual leader who taught meditation in the West after moving to the New York City in 1964. He established meditation centers around the world which had 7,000 students in 60 countries and also created the Sri Chinmoy Oneness-Home Peace Run.

Satyajit Ray

Born in Calcutta, he was an Author, film director, producer, illustrator and film critic famous for his Apu Trilogy, Apur Sansar, Pather Panchali and Aparajito amongst many of his works. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, 2 Silver Bears, a number of additional awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. The Government of India honored him with the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award, in 1992.

Male beauty pageant winners

Aryan Vaid (Winner in 2000) and Raghu Mukherjee (Winner in 2002) have both been winners of the coveted Mr. International title.

Rohit Khandelwal won the Mr India title in 2015 after which he became the first ever Asian to be crowned Mister World in 2016.

The Great Gama

Ghulam Mohammad Baksh born in Amritsar was awarded the Indian version of the World Heavyweight Championship on 15 October 1910. He remained undefeated in a career spanning more than 50 years and is considered one of the greatest wrestlers of all time.

Amitabh Bachchan

Born in Allahabad as Inquilaab Srivastava, Amitabh was dubbed India's "angry young man" for his on-screen roles in Bollywood. Referred to as the Shahenshah of Bollywood, Star of the Millennium, or Big B, he is considered as the most influential Indian actor of all time, becoming the dominant personality of Indian film during the 1970s and 80s. He has received numerous awards and a record 39 nominations for Filmfare awards. The Government of India honored him with the Padma Shri in 1984, the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2015 for his contributions to the arts. The Government of France honored him with its highest civilian honor, Knight of the Legion of Honour, in 2007 for his exceptional career in the world of cinema and beyond.

Kalpana Chawla

Born in Karnal, Haryana she was a highly prolific NASA astronaut was a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997. She received many accolades such as the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and NASA Space Flight Medal. She tragically lost her life in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Sabeer Bhatia

Born in Chandigarh, he is famous for founding the Hotmail, which was the world’s first-ever free web-based email service. MIT chose him as one of 100 young innovators who is expected to have the greatest impact on technology and awarded him the ‘TR100′. He sold Hotmail for a whopping US$400 million to Microsoft.

Rabindranath Tagore

Born in Calcutta, he was a Bengali polymath who significantly helped to reshape Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with a hint of Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the famous Gitanjali he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. He also founded the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan.

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan

Born in Madras, he was an Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President of India (1952–1962) and the second President of India from 1962 to 1967. He was the foremost philosopher of modern Indian thought wherein he grounded India’s beliefs in Advaita Vedanta, reinterpreting this tradition for a contemporary understanding. He defended Hinduism against "uninformed Western criticism" and earned a reputation as a bridge-builder between India and the West. Radhakrishnan was awarded a knighthood in 1931, the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India, in 1954, and honorary membership of the British Royal Order of Merit in 1963. Radhakrishnan believed that "teachers should be the best minds in the country" and since 1962, his birthday is being celebrated in India as Teachers' Day on 5 September.

Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice! – Part 4

Abhinav Bindra

Born in Dehradun, he is an Indian businessman and retired professional shooter who is a World and Olympic champion in the 10 m Air Rifle event. By winning the gold in the 10 m Air Rifle event at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, he became the first Indian to win an individual gold medal at the Olympic Games.

He is also the first and only Indian to have held both the World and Olympic titles at the same time, a feat he accomplished by capturing the Gold Medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, after having won the gold at the 2006 ISSF World Shooting Championships.

Rakesh Sharma

Born in Patiala, he is the only Indian citizen to travel in space! He is a former Indian Air Force pilot who flew aboard Soyuz T-11 as part of the Intercosmos programme launched on April 2, 1984. Sharma spent a total of 7 days 21 hours and 40 minutes aboard the Salyut 7 on which the Soyuz T-11 had docked. His work was mainly in the fields of bio-medicine and remote sensing. When Indira Gandhi asked Sharma how India looked from outer space, he replied “Saare Jahan Se Ac*hcha!” (the best in the world!). He was conferred with the honor of the ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ upon his return from space. The Republic of India conferred its highest peacetime gallantry award, the Ashoka Chakra, on him.

Shah Rukh Khan

Born in New Delhi, he is popularly known as SRK or King Khan for appearing in more than 80 Bollywood films and earning numerous accolades, including 14 Filmfare Awards. Khan's philanthropic endeavors have provided health care and disaster relief, and he was honored with UNESCO's Pyramide con Marni award in 2011 for his support of children's education and World Economic Forum's Crystal Award in 2018 for his leadership in championing women's and children's rights in India. 2008’s Newsweek branded him as one of the most 50 influential people of the world.

Pranav Mistry

Born in Palanpur, he is a computer scientist and inventor who is famous inventing SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. He researchs on wearable computing, augmented reality (AI), ubiquitous computing, gestural interaction (GI), machine vision, machine learning and collective intelligence within robotics. He is currently director of research at Samsung Research America where he launched Samsung’s first smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, in 2013.

He also heads the Think Tank Team which is an interdisciplinary group of researchers that hunts for new ways to mix digital informational with real-world interactions. The World Economic Forum had honored Mistry as a ‘Young Global Leader’ in 2013.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni

Born in Ranchi, he is an Indian cricketer and former captain of the Indian team in all three cricketing formats. He led India to unprecedented international success by winning the World Cup, Champions Trophy, World Twenty20 and also achieving the status of no. 1 Test team for India.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Born in Erode, he was a mathematician known for developing highly original and insightful theorems in number theory, infinite series and continued fractions, which were proved by mathematicians many years after his death. His notable contributions are the Landau–Ramanujan constant, Mock theta functions, Ramanujan conjecture, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan–Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan's sum, Rogers–Ramanujan identities, Ramanujan's master theorem, etc.

Ali Akbar Khan

Born in Comilla (East Bengal) he is a Sarod virtuoso who popularized Indian classical music in the West. He was accorded India's second-highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1989 and was also nominated five times for the Grammy Award. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts's National Heritage Fellowship.

Kailash Satyarthi

Born in Vidisha, MP, he is an Indian children's rights activist. He is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan. Satyarthi was among Fortune magazine’s ‘World’s Greatest Leaders’ in 2015 and was also featured in LinkedIn’s Power Profiles List in 2017. He has won various awards like The Aachener International Peace Prize, Germany (1994), The Trumpeter Award (1995), Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award (1995), Harvard Humanitarian Award (2015), etc.

Pandit Ravi Shankar

Born in Benaras, he was a sitar virtuoso and composer par excellence. He played all around the world and helped to popularize Indian classical music in the West. He was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, Bharat Ratna, Ramon Magsaysay Award, Five Grammy Awards, and was also nominated for an Academy Award. He has also won numerous other accolades in India and the world.

Satyendra Nath Bose

Born in Kolkata, he was a physicist who worked on quantum mechanics and famous for his collaborations with Albert Einstein. His notable works include the Bose-Einstein condensate, Bose-Einstein statistics, Bose-Einstein distribution, Bose-Einstein correlations, Bose gas, Boson, Ideal Bose Equation of State, Photon gas, etc. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.

The Higgs-Boson particle (also known as God particle) successfully created in the CERN lab is named after him. A similar particle was discovered at CERN on 4 July 2012, with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 which closely resembles the God particle, was later confirmed to be the Higgs-Boson in 2013. This makes the particle the first ever elementary scalar particle to be discovered in nature.

Dhyan Chand

Born in Allahabad, he is considered as the greatest field hockey player of all time. He won three Olympic gold medals with India ’28, ’32 and ’36 when India was a dominant force in field hockey.

Notable Indians who rocked the world! Steve Wozniak, please take notice! – Part 5

PV Sindhu

Born in Hyderabad, she became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic silver medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics. She is one of the two Indian badminton players to ever win an Olympic medal after Saina Nehwal.

She also became the first Indian ever to win Korea Open Super Series and was the silver medalist at the 2017 BWF World Championships. She had reached the 2nd spot in the women’s singles rankings for 10 straight weeks.

Satya Nadella

Born in Hyderabad, Nadella is the current Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, the largest software company in the world. He currently draws US$84 million per annum as base salary, which is one of the highest salaries in the world. Under his leadership as CEO, Microsoft stocks having risen more than 130% and achieved an all-time high. He is also one of the first CEOs from Microsoft to be credited for working in collaboration with other companies such as Apple Inc., Dropbox, IBM, and Salesforce.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Born in Tiruchirapalli, he was the 1930 Nobel Prize Physics winner for his work on light scattering and wavelength also called the Raman Effect. He was also awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1957), Bharat Ratna (1954), Hughes Medal (1930), and was also a Fellow of the Royal Society.

International beauty pageant winners

The following is a list of India's placements at the ‘Big Four’ international beauty pageants, considered the most important in the world. The country has won twelve victories in among three of the Big Four pageants.

• Two— Miss Universe crowns (1994 • 2000)
• Six — Miss World crowns (1966 • 1994 • 1997 • 1999 • 2000 • 2017)
• Four — Miss Asia Pacific International (1970 • 1973 • 2000) and Miss Earth crown (2010)

The credit mainly goes to iconic beauties like Reita Faria (Miss World 1966), Zeenat Aman (Miss Asia Pacific International 1970), Sushmita Sen (Miss Universe 1996), Aishwarya Rai (Miss World 1994), Diana Hayden ( Miss World 1997), Yukta Mookhey (Miss World 1999), later in 2000 three Indians made a total sweep in 2000: Lara Dutta, Priyanka Chopra and Dia Mirza went on to win Miss Universe, Miss World and Miss Asia Pacific International (predecessor of Miss Earth pageant) titles respectively, Nicole Faria (Miss Earth 2010) and finally Manushi Chhillar (Miss World 2017).

Mithali Raj

Born in Jodhpur, she is an Indian cricketer and the current captain of the Indian Women's cricket team in Tests and ODI. She is the highest run-scorer in women's international cricket and the only female cricketer to surpass the 6,000 run mark in ODIs.

She is also the first player to score 7 consecutive 50s in ODIs and the first captain (men or women) to lead India to an ICC ODI World Cup final twice in 2005 and 2017. This is a reason why she is often regarded as one of the greatest cricketing batters to have ever played the game.

AR Rahman

Born in Madras, he is an Indian composer, singer-songwriter, music producer, musician and philanthropist. He has won four National Film Awards, two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, fifteen Filmfare Awards and sixteen Filmfare Awards South.

In 2009, Rahman was included on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, in 2010. The UK-based world-music magazine ‘Songlines’ named him one of "Tomorrow's World Music Icons" in August 2011. South Indian fans of Rahman refer him with the moniker of "The Mozart of Madras", and "Isai Puyal" (English: the Musical Storm).

Mukesh Ambani

Born in Aden, he is an Indian business magnate who is the chairman, managing director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a Fortune Global 500 company and India's most valuable company by market value. He resides at the Antilia Building valued close to $1 billion, which is one of the world's most expensive private residences. As of 2015, Ambani ranked fifth among India's philanthropists, according to China’s Hurun Research Institute.

He is the recipient of many awards such as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year2000, NDTV Business Leader of the Year2010, Financial Chronicle Businessman of the Year 2010, Harvard Business Reviews’ 5th-best performing global CEO in 2010, etc.

Kidambi Srikanth

Born is Ravulapalem, he is the first Indian to win a Super Series Premier Men's title in badminton.

In 2017 Kidambi won the Indonesia Super Series becoming the first ever Indian male player to do so. After winning the Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, France and Denmark Super Series, he became the fourth ever badminton player ever to win four Super Series titles in a year. In 2018, he was awarded the Padma Shri.

Saina Nehwal

Born in Hisar, she is one of India’s most successful badminton players who formerly achieved the world no. 1 ranking in 2015 after Prakash Padukone. She is the first Indian to win a Super Series title and holds the distinction of being the only Indian to have won at least a medal in every BWF major individual event, namely the Olympics, the BWF World Championships, and the BWF World Junior Championships.

She is also the first ever Indian badminton player to have won an Olympic medal. She has won over twenty three international titles, which include ten Superseries titles. She was conferred with the Padma Bhushan in 2016 and is also the winner of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna and the Arjuna Award previously.

Vinod Khosla

Hailing from Delhi, Khosla is credited with co-founding Sun Microsystems (which created Network File System and the programming language Java) and playing a major role in the founding of TiE and Daisy Systems. He is a self-made billionaire and is also the owner of Khosla Ventures.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Born in Mymensingh (now Bangladesh), he was a polymath known for his studies on Millimetre waves, microwave optics, inventing the Crescograph and contributions to plant biology in which he proved that plants also react to stimuli and that also have feelings. Bose is also considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He was also a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, Companion of the Order of the Star of India, Knight Bachelor and Fellow of the Royal Society.

Narinder Singh Kapany

Kapany was born in Punjab and is credited for his contributions in the field of fiber-optics. He was also part of the ‘Unsung Heroes’ list published by the Fortune Magazine.

Now that is the king of all lists ever made! This list is still missing many Indians who rocked the world with their achievements and we will definitely cover them in further parts of this series! Till then, please feel proud of these achievers and aspire to do something for your country as well! Jai Hind!