Over the years, there have been plenty of non-resident Indians who have gone ahead and made the country proud with their achievements in different walks of life such as arts, science, and business. Narinder Singh Kapany is one of the leading names in the list. Born in Punjab, Kapany is revered for the contribution that he has made in the field of fibre optics. He was a part of a list named ‘Unsung Heroes’ that appeared in a Fortune Magazine issue titled ‘Businessmen of the Century’.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai and hails originally from Kashmir. He is a name to be reckoned with in the world of English fiction with Satanic Verses being his most controversial work to date. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 with Midnight’s Children, which happened to be his second novel. It was for the same novel that he was conferred with the Booker of Bookers in 1993. In 2008, he was ranked thirteenth by The Times on its list of the 50 greatest British authors since 1945.
S. Chandrasekhar
S. Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore before partition. He won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for his mathematical theory on black holes. The Chandrasekhar Limit has been named in his honour. His most famous work is on energy radiated by stars. The focus in this case is on the white dwarf stars that are basically dying parts of a star. RJ Tyler has praised him in the Biographical Memoirs, Fellows of the Royal Society of London saying that Chandrasekhar will always be one of a kind.
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Apart from being a Nobel Laureate economist, Sen is a philosopher as well. He has made some exceptionally-noteworthy contributions to the world of welfare economics, economic theories regarding famines, social choice theory, indices that measure how well citizens are doing overall, and economic and social justice. It was in 1998 that he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Chancellor of Nalanda University.
Vinod Khosla
Forbes has listed Khosla, one of the people who co-founded Sun Microsystems, as a billionaire. It is Sun that has created Network File System and the programming language known as Java. Khosla has also established his own company named Khosla Ventures. Hailing from Delhi, Khosla was a student of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. He also played a major role in founding TiE and Daisy Systems.
Har Gobind Khorana
Khorana, an Indian-American biochemist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968 in the domain of physiology and medicine. He achieved the honour for being able to crack the genetic code along with his associates Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley. He was born at Raipur in Punjab. He also has the distinction of being the first-ever scientist to have chemically fused oligonucleotides. The contribution he made to science remains immense and is one reason he was so highly revered around the world.
Rohinton Mistry
Born in Mumbai, Rohinton Mistry is a writer well known around the world. He completed his Bachelor of Arts from St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. In 1975, this celebrated author moved with his wife to Canada. His first book Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from the Firozsha Bag, a collection of 11 interconnected short stories, was published 1987. Long Journey, his second book, came out in 1991. It was highly appreciated in India and abroad.
Pan Nalin
Born in Gujarat, Pan Nalin has won many awards in his role as a documentary maker, screenwriter, and film director. His most famous works are Samsara, Ayurveda: Art of Being, and Valley of Flowers. After making his first film Samsara, Nalin received significant international acclaim along with more than 30 awards around the world. Valley of Flowers is regarded as a major underground success and has been pre-sold across 35 countries. Nalin was also sent an invitation to be a part of the panel on France-India Co-production, Salon du Cinema in Paris.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
A Nobel Laureate structural biologist, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. In 2009, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Ada E. Yonath and Thomas A. Steitz. In this instance, he and his co-researchers had studied the function and structure of the ribosome. He also happens to be an upper-tier member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2007, he won the Louis-Jeantet Prize for the contribution he made in the field of medicine.
Mira Nair
Mira Nair is one of the most instantly-recognizable filmmakers around the world. She was born at Rourkela, Odisha, and began her journey as an independent maker of short films. For her film India Cabaret, Nair won the Best Documentary prize at the American Film Festival. India Cabaret was basically an investigative documentary on the strippers working in Mumbai at that time. Her first film was Salaam Bombay made in 1988.
Following are some other NRIs who have made India proud over the years:
- Anita Desai and Kiran Desai
- Bobby Jindal
- Deepak Chopra
- Indra Nooyi
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Kalpana Chawla
- Lakshmi Mittal
- Lakshmi Pratury
- Lord Swaraj Paul
- Sabeer Bhatia
- Satya Nadella
- Sundar Pichai
- Sunita Williams
- Zubin Mehta
Read More…
Daughters of Indian Diaspora Caught in a Cross Cultural Conflict
