Indians may be a poor country in the world, but when it comes to money, power and influence, Indians stay ahead with others. With two of them governors, four billionaires and over a score sitting in high places in government, Indian Americans not only keep making news but have also emerged as major players in American media.
Take Indian-born Aparism Bobby Ghosh, for instance, who was last week named by Time magazine as ‘Editor-at-Large’. In naming Ghosh, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel, called him “one of Time’s greatest assets and this past year was one of his best yet.”
Then there is Fareed Zakaria, who too was introduced as Editor-at-Large of Time Magazine in October 2010 after spending 10 years overseeing all of Newsweek’s editions abroad.
Called “the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation” by Esquire Magazine, Zakaria hosts what has been dibbed one of the most intelligent shows on American TV, ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’ on CNN every Sunday.
Equally ubiquitous is Sanjay Gupta, the multiple Emmy-award winning chief medical correspondent for CNN. A practicing neurosurgeon, Gupta has reported from earthquake- and tsunami-ravaged Japan, earthquake devastated Haiti and covered live the unprecedented flooding in Pakistan.
Vinnie Malhotra, a former programme development executive at ESPN and long-time ABC News producer, has just joined CNN as senior vice president for development and acquisitions.
Last month, Raju Narisetti, credited with creating Mint, the successful business daily out of Delhi, returned to the Wall Street Journal, where he had spent 23 years earlier, as Managing Editor of its Digital Network.
Nisid Hajari, Managing Editor of Newsweek is busy writing “Midnight’s Furies,” a dramatic history of the Partition of India and Pakistan, told through the characters of Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Churchill, and Mountbatten.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is the National Editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. His first book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City:Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” published in 2006 won the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction.
ESPN’s sports anchor Kevin Negandhi is the first anchor of Indian-American descent to be on a national sports network in American Television history and Ali Velshi, son of Murad Velshi, the first Canadian of Indian origin elected to the legislative assembly of Ontario, serves as CNN’s chief business correspondent.
Other names include Davan Maharaj, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times;
Stephanie Mehta, Fortune magazine Executive Editor overseeing technology, and Nikhil Deogun, Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief Business News, CNBC, the most-watched business TV network in the world.
Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, one of America’s top regional newspapers, is the first South Asian to run a major US daily.
Hundreds of lesser known Indian Americans are among the producers, reporters, copy editors and production assistants, bringing Americans their daily news -showing how far Indian-American have come in the media world where only a few of them commanded bylines in the 1990s