This business leader, with his own vision ventured into new business; became one of the wealthiest & donated 25% of his wealth!!

Azim Hashim Premji (born 24 July 1945) is an Indian business tycoon and philanthropist who is the chairman of Wipro Limited, guiding the company through four decades of diversification and growth to emerge as one of the Indian leaders in the software industry. According to Forbes, he is currently the fourth wealthiest Indian, and the 61st richest in the world, with a personal wealth of $15.3 billion in 2014. In 2000, he was voted among the 20 most powerful men in the world by Asiaweek. He has twice been listed among the 100 most influential people by TIME Magazine, once in 2004 and more recently in 2011. Premji owns 75% percent of Wipro and also owns a private equity fund, PremjiInvest, which manages his $1 billion personal portfolio.

He was born in Mumbai then part of British India in a Muslim family originally hailing from Kutch in Gujarat. His grandfather was a noted businessman and was known as Rice King of Burma. After partition, when Jinnah invited his grandfather to come to Pakistan, he turned down the request and chose to remain in India. He has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering degree (equivalent to a Bachelor of Engineering degree) from Stanford University, USA. He is married to Yasmeen. The couple have two children, Rishad and Tariq. Rishad is currently the Chief Strategy Officer of IT Business, Wipro.

In 1966, on the news of his father's death, the then 21 year old Azim Premji returned home from Stanford University, where he was studying engineering, to take charge of Wipro. The company, which was called Western Indian Vegetable Products at the time, dealt in hydrogenated oil manufacturing but Azim Premji later diversified the company to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders. 

In the 1980s, the young entrepreneur, recognizing the importance of the emerging IT field, took advantage of the vacuum left behind by the expulsion of IBM from India, changed the company name to Wipro and entered the high-technology sector by manufacturing minicomputers under technological collaboration with an American company Sentinel Computer Corporation. Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.

Premji has been recognised by Business Week as one of the Greatest Entrepreneurs for being responsible for Wipro emerging as one of the world’s fastest growing companies. In 2000, he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the Manipal Academy of Higher Education. In 2006, Azim Premji was awarded Lakshya Business Visionary by National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut for his outstanding philanthropic work.

In 2001, he founded Azim Premji Foundation, a non-profit organisation, with a vision to significantly contribute to achieving quality universal education that facilitates a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society. The Foundation works in the area of elementary education to pilot and develop 'proofs of concept' that have a potential for systemic change in India's 1.3 million government-run schools. 

A specific focus is on working in rural areas where the majority of these schools exist. This choice to work with elementary education (Class I to VIII) in rural government-run is a response to evidence of educational attainment in India.

In 2005, the Government of India honoured him with the title of Padma Bhushan for his outstanding work in trade and commerce. In 2011, he has been awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award by the Government of India. In 2013, he received the ET Lifetime Achievement Award.

Azim Premji has become the first Indian to sign up for the The Giving Pledge, a campaign led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, to encourage the wealthiest people to make a commitment to give most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. He is the third non-American after Richard Branson and David Sainsbury to join this philanthropy club.

"I strongly believe that those of us, who are privileged to have wealth, should contribute significantly to try and create a better world for the millions who are far less privileged"--- Azim Premji

In April 2013 he said that he has already given more than 25 per cent of his personal wealth to charity.

This MAVERICK patriot devoted life for the country since age of fifteen, remained AZAD till his last breath!!!

Chandra Shekhar Azad (23 July 1906 – 27 February 1931), popularly known as Azad ("The Liberated"), was an Indian revolutionary who reorganised the Hindustan Republican Association under the new name of Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) after the death of its founder, Ram Prasad Bismil, and three other prominent party leaders, Roshan Singh, Rajendra Nath Lahiri and Ashfaqulla Khan. He is considered to be the mentor of Bhagat Singh and chief strategist of the HSRA.

Chandra Shekhar Azad was born in Bhavra village, in the present-day Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh. He was then called Chandra Shekar Tiwari. His forefathers were from the Badarka village near Kanpur (in present-day Unnao District. His mother wanted her son to be a great Sanskrit scholar and persuaded his father to send him to Kashi Vidyapeeth, Banaras to study. In December 1921, when Mohandas K. Gandhilaunched the Non-Cooperation Movement, Chandra Shekhar, then a 15-year old student, joined. 

As a result, he was arrested. On being produced before a magistrate, he gave his name as 'Azad', father's name as 'Swatantra' (independent) and residence as 'Jail'. From that day onward, having announced his name to be Azad (The Liberated) in court, he was known as Chandra Shekhar Azad among the people.

After suspension of the non-cooperation movement in 1922 by Gandhi, Azad became more aggressive. He committed himself to achieve complete independence by any means. Azad also believed that India's future lay in socialism. He met a young revolutionary, Pranvesh Chatterji, who introduced him to Ram Prasad Bismil who had formed the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), a revolutionary organisation. Azad was impressed with the aim of HRA, i.e., an independent India with equal rights and opportunity to everyone without discrimination of caste, creed, religion or social status. 

On introduction, Bismil was impressed by Azad, when Azad reportedly put his hand over a lamp and did not remove it till his skin burnt. He then became an active member of the HRA and started to collect funds for HRA. Most of the fund collection was through robberies of government property. He also wanted to build a new India based on socialist principles. Azad and his compatriots also planned and executed several acts of violence against the British. 

Most of his revolutionary activities were planned and executed from Shahjahanpur which was also the hometown of Ram Prasad. He was involved in the Kakori Train Robbery of 1925, in the attempt to blow up the Viceroy's train in 1926, and at last the shooting of J.P. Saunders at Lahore in 1928 to avenge the killing of Lala Lajpat Rai.

Azad made Jhansi his organisation's hub for some time. He used the forest of Orchha, situated 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Jhansi, as a site for shooting practice and, being an expert marksman, he trained other members of his group. Near the forest he built a hut near to a Hanuman Temple on the banks of the Satar River. He lived there under the alias of Pandit Harishankar Brahmachari for a long period, and started teaching children from the nearby village of Dhimarpura. In this way he managed to establish good rapport with the local residents. The village Dhimarpura was renamed as Azadpura by the Madhya Pradesh government.

While living in Jhansi, he also learned to drive a car at Bundelkhand Motor Garage in Sadar Bazar. Sadashivrao Malkapurkar, Vishwanath Vaishampayan and Bhagwan Das Mahaur came in close contact with him and became an integral part of his revolutionary group. The then congress leaders from Raghunath Vinayak Dhulekar and Sitaram Bhaskar Bhagwat were also close to Azad. He also stayed for sometime in the house of Rudra Narayan Singh at Nai Basti, as well as Bhagwat's house in Nagra.

Azad died at Alfred Park in Allahabad on 27 February 1931 when he went to the city to meet with a revolutionary colleague, Sukhdev Raj. The police were notified of his location by an informer. Faced with armed police, Azad fired upon them. He was wounded in the process of killing three policemen and wounding some others. His actions made it possible for Sukhdev Raj to escape. After a long shootout, holding true to his pledge to never be captured alive, he shot himself dead with his last bullet.

The file related to Azad is preserved inC.I.D. Headquarters, 1, Gokhale Marg, Lucknow. The Colt pistol of Chandra Shekhar Azad is displayed at the Allahabad Museum. The body was sent to Rasulabad Ghat for cremation without informing general public. As it came to light, people surrounded the park where the incident had taken place. They chanted slogans against the British rule and praised Azad.

He aligned the global time zones, bringing up concept of standard time zone(Cosmic time)!!!

Sir Sandford Fleming, KCMG (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish-born Canadian engineer and inventor. He proposed worldwide standard time zones, designed Canada's first postage stamp, left a huge body of surveying and map making, engineered much of the Intercolonial Railway and the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada and founder of the Royal Canadian Institute, a science organization in Toronto.

In 1827, Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland to Andrew and Elizabeth Fleming. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed as a surveyor and in 1845, at the age of 18, he emigrated with his older brother David to Ontario (then the western half of the Province of Canada, at that time called Canada West). He qualified as a surveyor in Canada in 1849.

In 1849 he established the Royal Canadian Institute with several friends, which was formally incorporated on November 4, 1851. Although initially intended as a professional institute for surveyors and engineers it became a more general scientific society. In 1851 he designed the Threepenny Beaver, the first Canadian postage stamp. Throughout this time he was fully employed as a surveyor, mostly for the Grand Trunk Railway. His work for them eventually gained him the position as Chief Engineer of the Northern Railway of Canada in 1855, where he advocated the construction of iron bridges instead of wood for safety reasons.

In 1862 he placed before the government a plan for a transcontinental railway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The first part, between Halifax and Quebec became an important part of the preconditions for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to join the Canadian Federation because of the uncertainties of travel through Maine because of the American Civil War. In 1867 he was appointed engineer-in-chief of the Intercolonial Railway which became a federal project and he continued in this post till 1876. Fleming served in the 10th Battalion Volunteer Rifles of Canada (later known as the Royal Regiment of Canada) and was appointed to the rank of Captain on January 1, 1862. He retired from the militia in 1865. 

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian. At a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8, 1879 he linked it to the anti-meridian of Greenwich (now 180°). He suggested that standard time zones could be used locally, but they were subordinate to his single world time, which he called Cosmic Time. He continued to promote his system at major international conferences including the International Meridian Conference of 1884. That conference accepted a different version of Universal Time, but refused to accept his zones, stating that they were a local issue outside its purview. Nevertheless, by 1929 all of the major countries of the world had accepted time zones.

By conditioning the air, this man changed the way we live!!!

Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876 – October 7, 1950) was an American engineer, best known for inventing modern air conditioning. Carrier was born on November 26, 1876, in Angola, New York, the son of Duane Williams Carrier and Elizabeth R. Haviland. The Carriers lived in New England until 1799 when Carrier's great-grandparents joined an ox-team train of settlers pushing west through the Mohawk Valley. They settled in Madison County, New York and then in 1836 moved west again to Erie County. 

There they purchased the farm that became the birthplace and childhood home of Willis Carrier. His father, Duane, taught music to the Indians, tried running a general store, and was for a short time a postmaster, then settled down to farming and married Elizabeth Haviland. She died in 1887, when Willis was 11 years old. He studied at Cornell University graduating in 1901 with a BS in engineering.

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to a quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world's first modern air conditioning system. The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that air conditioning must perform four basic functions:

1.) control temperature; 2.) control humidity; 3.) control air circulation and ventilation; 4.) cleanse the air.

After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. patent No. 808897 on his invention, which he called an "Apparatus for Treating Air," the world's first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first and cooling it for the second.

In 1906, Carrier discovered that "constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity," which later became known among air conditioning engineers as the "law of constant dew-point depression." On this discovery he based the design of an automatic control system, for which he filed a patent claim on May 17, 1907. The patent, No. 1,085,971, was issued on February 3, 1914.

On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented the most significant and epochal document ever prepared on air conditioning – his "Rational Psychrometric Formulae" – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the "Magna Carta of Psychrometrics." This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.

With the onset of World War I in late-1914, the Buffalo Forge Company, for which Carrier had been employed 12 years, decided to confine its activities entirely to manufacturing. The result was that seven young engineers pooled together their life savings of $32,600 to form the Carrier Engineering Corporation in New York on June 26, 1915. The seven were Carrier, J. Irvine Lyle, Edward T. Murphy, L. Logan Lewis, Ernest T. Lyle, Frank Sanna, Alfred E. Stacey, Jr., and Edmund P. Heckel. The company eventually settled on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.

Despite the development of the centrifugal refrigeration machine and the commercial growth of air conditioning to cool buildings in the 1920s, the company ran into financial difficulties, as did many others, as a result of the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. In 1930, Carrier Engineering Corp. merged with Brunswick-Kroeschell Company and York Heating & Ventilating Corporation to form the Carrier Corporation, with Willis Carrier named Chairman of the Board. Spread out over four cities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Carrier consolidated and moved his company to Syracuse, New York, in 1937, and the company became one of the largest employers in central New York.

The Great Depression slowed residential and commercial use of air conditioning. Willis Carrier's igloo in the 1939 New York World's Fair gave visitors a glimpse into the future of air conditioning, but before it became popular, World War II began. During the post-war economic boom of the 1950s, air conditioning began its tremendous growth in popularity.

In 1930, Carrier started Toyo Carrier and Samsung Applications in Japan and Korea. South Korea is now the largest producer for air conditioning in the world. The Carrier Corporation pioneered the design and manufacture of refrigeration machines to cool large spaces. By increasing industrial production in the summer months, air conditioning revolutionized American life.

This astrophysicist is known for championing models alternative to big bang model!!!

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (born July 19, 1938) is an Indian astrophysicist. Narlikar is a proponent of steady state cosmology. He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesizes Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch. In cosmologies based on this theory, the gravitational constant G decreases strongly with time.

Narlikar was born in Kolhapur. His father, Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar, was a mathematician who served as a professor and later as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Jayant's mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar of Sanskrit language. Jayant studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya Banaras (till class 12) and Banaras Hindu University (12th Onwards) campus, Varanasi.

Narlikar received his Bachelor of Science degree from Banaras Hindu University in 1957. He then began his studies at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge University in England, where he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1959 and was Senior Wrangler. This appears to have been the first time, and perhaps the only time, that a student was Senior Wrangler who was a non-collegiate member of the University at the time. In 1960, he won the Tyson Medal for astronomy. 

During his doctoral studies at Cambridge, he won the Smith’s Prize in 1962. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 under the guidance of Fred Hoyle, he served as a Berry Ramsey Fellow at King's College in Cambridge and earned an M.A. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1964. He continued to work as a Fellow at King's College until 1972. In 1966, Fred Hoyle established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, and Narlikar served as the founder staff member of the institute during 1966-72.

In 1972, Narlikar took up Professorship at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India. At the TIFR, he was in charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group. In 1988, the Indian University Grants Commission set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, and Narlikar became the Founder-Director of IUCAA.

Narlikar is internationally known for his work in cosmology, especially in championing models alternative to the popular Big Bang model. During 1994-1997, he was the President of the Cosmology Commission of the International Astronomical Union. His research work has involved Mach’s Principle, quantum cosmology, and action-at-a-distance physics.

During 1999-2003, Narlikar headed an international team in a pioneering experiment designed to sample air for microorganisms in the atmosphere at heights of up to 41 km. Biological studies of the collected samples led to the findings of live cells and bacteria, which introduced the possibility that the earth is being bombarded by microorganisms, some of which might have seeded life itself on earth. 

Narlikar was appointed as the Chairperson of The Advisory Group for Textbooks in Science and Mathematics, the textbook development committee responsible for developing textbooks in Science and Mathematics, published by NCERT, which are used widely as standard textbooks in many Indian schools.

The Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity is a Machian theory of gravity proposed by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar that fits into the quasi steady state model of the universe. The gravitational constant G is arbitrary and is determined by the mean density of matter in the universe. The theory was inspired by the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory for electrodynamics. Currently the theory does not fit into WMAP data. Narlikar and his followers are working on adding mini bangs with various creation fields to explain the anisotropy of the universe.

The determined inventor started developing revolver beginning from pepperbox off scrap wood since the age of 15 !!

Samuel Colt (July 19, 1814 – January 10, 1862) was an American inventor and industrialist from Hartford, Connecticut. He founded Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (today, Colt's Manufacturing Company), and made the mass production of the revolver commercially viable. Colt's first two business ventures — producing firearms in Paterson, New Jersey, and making underwater mines — ended in disappointment. 

Colt's manufacturing methods were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. His use of interchangeable parts helped him become one of the first to exploit the assembly line. Moreover, his innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer in the fields of advertising, product placement and mass marketing, although he was criticized during and after his life for promoting his arms through bribes, threats and monopoly.

Samuel Colt was born in Hartford, to Christopher Colt (1777-1850), a farmer who had moved his family to the city after he became a businessman, and Sarah Colt, née Caldwell. His mother's father, Major John Caldwell, had been an officer in the Continental Army and one of Samuel's earliest possessions was his maternal grandfather's flintlock pistol. At age 11, Colt was indentured to a farmer in Glastonbury, where he did chores and attended school. Here he was introduced to the Compendium of Knowledge, a scientific encyclopedia that he preferred to read rather than his Bible studies. 

Its articles on Robert Fulton and gunpowder motivated Colt throughout his life. He discovered that other inventors in the Compendium had accomplished things that were once deemed impossible, and he wanted to do the same. Later, after hearing soldiers talk about the success of the Double rifle double-barreled rifle and the impossibility of a gun that could shoot five or six times without reloading, Colt decided that he would create the "impossible gun".

In 1829, at the age of 15, Colt began working in his father's textile plant in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had access to tools, materials, and the factory workers' expertise. Following the encyclopedia, Samuel built a homemade galvanic cell and advertised as a Fourth of July event in that year that he would blow up a raft on Ware Pond using underwater explosives; although the raft was missed, the explosion was still impressive. Sent to boarding school, he amused his classmates with pyrotechnics. 

In 1830, a July 4 accident caused a fire that ended his schooling, and his father then sent him off to learn the seaman's trade. On a voyage to Calcutta on board the brig Corvo, he noticed that regardless of which way the ship's wheel was spun, each spoke always came in direct line with a clutch that could be set to hold it. He later said that this gave him the idea for the revolver. 

On the Corvo, Colt made a wooden model of a pepperbox revolver out of scrap wood. It differed from other pepperbox revolvers at the time in that it would allow the shooter to rotate the cylinder by the action of cocking the hammer and a pawl locking the cylinder in place, rather than rotating the barrels by hand and hoping for proper indexing and alignment.He had learned about nitrous oxide(laughing gas) from the factory chemist in his father's textile plant, so he took a portable lab on the road and earned a living performing laughing gas demonstrations across the United States and Canada, billing himself as "the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New-York, London and Calcutta". 

Colt conceived of himself as a man of science and thought if he could enlighten people about a new idea like nitrous oxide, he could in turn make people more receptive to his new idea concerning a revolver. He started his lectures on street corners and soon worked his way up to lecture halls and museums. As ticket sales declined, Colt realized that "serious" museum lectures were not what the people wanted to pay money to see and that it was dramatic stories of salvation and redemption the public craved.

Having some money saved and keeping his idea alive of being an inventor as opposed to a "medicine man", Colt made arrangements to begin building guns using proper gunsmiths from Baltimore, Maryland. He abandoned the idea of a multiple barreled revolver and opted for a new design, a rotating cylinder which would come into alignment with a single barrel due to his idea of a pawl engaging the cylinder and holding it in place.He sought the counsel of a friend of his father, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who loaned him $300 and advised him to perfect his prototype before applying for a patent. 

Colt hired a gunsmith by the name of John Pearson to build his revolver. Over the next few years Colt and Pearson fought over money, but the design improved and in 1835 Colt was ready to apply for his US patent. Ellsworth was now the superintendent of the US Patent Office and advised Colt to file for foreign patents first as a prior US patent would keep Colt from filing a patent in Great Britain. In August 1835, Colt left for England and France to secure his foreign patent.

Colt was the first American manufacturer to use art as a marketing tool when he hired Catlin to prominently display Colt firearms in his paintings. He employed an effective marketing program which comprised sales promotion, publicity, product sampling, and public relations. He used the press to his own advantage by giving revolvers to editors, prompting them to report "all the accidents that occur to the Sharps & other humbug arms", and listing incidents where Colt weapons had been "well used against bears, Indians, Mexicans, etc". In 2006, Samuel Colt was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.