Sunday 6 March 2016

ABOUT SACHIN TENDULKAR (FORMER INDIAN CRICKET PLAYER)

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar :

He wa born on 24 April 1973 is a former Indian cricketer and captain, widely regarded as one of the greatest batsman of all time. He took up cricket at the age of eleven, made his Test debut on 15 November 1989 against Pakistan in Karachi at the age of sixteen, and went on to represent Mumbai domestically and India internationally for close to twenty-four years. He is the only player to have scored one hundred international centuries, the first batsman to score a double century in a One Day International, holds the record for most number of runs in both ODI and Test cricket, the only player to complete more than 30,000 runs in international cricket.

In 2002 just half way through his career,Wisden Cricketers' Almanack ranked him the second greatest Test batsman of all time, behind Don Bradman, and the second greatest ODI batsman of all time, behind Viv Richards. Later in his career, Tendulkar was a part of the Indian team that won the 2011 World Cup, his first win in six World Cup appearances for India. He had previously been named "Player of the Tournament" at the 2003 edition of the tournament, held in South Africa. In 2013, he was the only Indian cricketer included in an all-time Test World XI named to mark the 150th anniversary of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.

Tendulkar received the Arjuna Award in 1994 for his outstanding sporting achievement, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award in 1997, India's highest sporting honour, and the Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan awards in 1999 and 2008, respectively, India's fourth and second highest civilian awards. After a few hours of his final match on 16 November 2013, the Prime Minister's Office announced the decision to award him the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award.He is the youngest recipient to date and the first ever sportsperson to receive the award.He also won the 2010 Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy for cricketer of the year at the ICC awards. In 2012, Tendulkar was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India. He was also the first sportsperson and the first person without an aviation background to be awarded the honorary rank of group captain by the Indian Air Force. In 2012, he was named an Honorary Member of the Order of Australia. 

Tendulkar was selected to represent Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy, India's premier domestic First-class cricket tournament, for the 1987 to 88 season. However, he was not selected for the final eleven in any of the matches, though he was often used as a substitute fielder. He narrowly missed out on playing alongside his idol Gavaskar, who had retired from all forms of cricket after the 1987 Cricket World Cup. A year later, on 11 December 1988, aged just 15 years and 232 days, Tendulkar made his debut for Mumbai against Gujarat at home and scored 100 not out in that match, making him the youngest Indian to score a century on debut in first-class cricket. He was handpicked to play for the team by the then Mumbai captain Dilip Vengsarkar after watching him easily negotiating India's best fast bowler at the time, Kapil Dev, in the Wankhede Stadium nets, where the Indian team had come to play against the touring New Zealand team. He followed this by scoring a century in his first Deodhar and Duleep Trophies, which are also Indian domestic tournaments .

In December 2012, Tendulkar announced his retirement from ODIs.  He retired from Twenty20 cricket in October 2013 and subsequently announced his retirement from all forms of cricket, retiring on 16 November 2013 after playing his 200th and final Test match, against the West Indies in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium. Tendulkar played 664 international cricket matches in total, scoring 34,357 runs.

ABOUT MARK ZUCKERBERG (FACEBOOK CEO)

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg :

He was born  on May 14, 1984 is an American computer programmer, Internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is the chairman, chief executive, and co-founder of the social networking website Facebook. His personal wealth, as of December 2015, is estimated to be $46 billion.Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook. In the spirit of The Giving Pledge, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced they would give the majority of their wealth over the course of their lives to "advancing human potential and promoting equality.

Together with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, he launched Facebook from Harvard's dormitory rooms.The group then introduced Facebook onto other campuses nationwide and moved to Palo Alto, California shortly afterwards. In 2007, at the age of 23, Zuckerberg became a billionaire as a result of Facebook's success. The number of Facebook users worldwide reached a total of one billion in 2012. Zuckerberg was involved in various legal disputes that were initiated by others in the group, who claimed a share of the company based upon their involvement during the development phase of Facebook.

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy", adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of him". Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such program, since his father's dental practice was operated from their home, he built a software program he called "ZuckNet" that allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. It is considered a "primitive" version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.

According to writer Jose Antonio Vargas, "some kids played computer games. Mark created them." Zuckerberg himself recalls this period: "I had a bunch of friends who were artists. They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it." However, notes Vargas, Zuckerberg was not a typical "geek-klutz", as he later became captain of his prep school fencing team and earned a classics diploma. Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a close friend, notes that Zuckerberg was "really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff", recalling how he once quoted lines from the Roman epic poem Aeneid, by Virgil, during a Facebook product conference.

During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used machine learning to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot  and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.

Since 2010, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year distinction. Zuckerberg was played by actor Jesse Eisenberg in the 2010 film The Social Network, in which the rise of Facebook is portrayed. He has been married to Priscilla Chan since 2012 and they have a daughter.

ABOUT BILL GATES (MICROSOFT FOUNDER)

William Henry "Bill" Gates III :

Born On  October 28, 1955, He  is an Americanbusiness magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, andinventor. Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.
He is consistently ranked in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2009 excluding 2008, when he was ranked third; in 2011 he was the wealthiest American and the world's second wealthiest person. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires List, Gates became the world's richest person again in May 2013, a position that he last held on the list in 2007. He held the position until Carlos Slim reclaimed it in July 2014. As of September 2014, he is the second richest person in the world. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, he was also the largest individual shareholder up until May 2014. He has also authored and co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by judicial courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work, and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie(which has since left Microsoft), chief software architect, and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014, taking on a new post as technology advisor to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, in an upper-middle-class family, the son of William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His ancestral origin includes English, German, and Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing"

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in Cobol, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of interesting girls." He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success. At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard Collegein the autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who would later succeed Gates as CEO of Microsoft.

ABOUT BARACK OBAMA (44Th AMERICAN PRESIDENT)

Barack Hussein Obama :

Obama was  born on  August 4, 1961, He is an American politician currently serving as the 44th President of the United States, the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School between 1992 and 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000 against Bobby Rush.
In 2004, Obama received national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his inauguration, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

During his first two years in office, Obama signed into law economic stimulus legislation in response to the Great Recession in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other major domestic initiatives in his first term included the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often referred to as "Obamacare"; the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. In foreign policy, Obama ended U.S. military involvement in the Iraq War, increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In January 2011, the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives as the Democratic Party lost a total of 63 seats; and, after a lengthy debate over federal spending and whether or not to raise the nation's debt limit, Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.

The President of the United States is considered one of the world's most powerful people. The role includes being the commander-in-chief of the world's most expensive military with the largest nuclear arsenal and leading the nation having the largest economy by real and nominal GDP, described as the world's only contemporary superpower. The office of the president holds significant hard and soft power both in the United States and abroad.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the executive power of the United States in the president. The power includes execution of federal law, alongside the responsibility of appointing federal executive, diplomatic, regulatory and judicial officers, and concluding treaties with foreign powers with the advice and consent of the Senate. The president is further empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves, and to convene and adjourn either or both houses of Congress under extraordinary circumstances. The president is largely responsible for dictating the legislative agenda of the party to which the president is enrolled. The president also directs the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. Since the founding of the United States, the power of the president and the federal government has grown substantially.

Obama was reelected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2013.

ABOUT NARENDRA MODI (INDIAN PRIME MINISTER)

Narendra Damodardas Modi :

Narendra Damodardas Modi was  born on  17 September 1950 is the 15th and current Prime Minister of India, in office since 26 May 2014. Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament (MP) from Varanasi. He led the BJP in the 2014 general election, which gave the party a majority in the Lok Sabha the lower house of the Indian parliament  a first for any party since 1984 and was credited for 2014 BJP electoral victories in the states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir.
Since taking office as Prime Minister, Modi's administration has focused on reforming and modernising India's infrastructure and government, reducing bureaucracy, encouraging increased foreign direct investment, improving national standards of health and sanitation and improving foreign relations. Modi has been appreciated for starting initiatives like Swachh Bharat Mission, Make in India and Digital India. Earlier, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi's economic policies credited with encouraging economic growth in Gujarat have been praised, although his administration has also been criticised for failing to significantly improve the human development in the state and failing to prevent the 2002 Gujarat riots. A Hindu nationalist and a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Modi remains a controversial figure domestically and internationally, despite his progressivism. Known for his tech savvy image, he is the second most followed politician on social media after U.S. President Barack Obama.

On 26 June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India which lasted until 1977. During this period, many of her political opponents were jailed and opposition groups (including the RSS) were banned.As pracharak in-charge of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS, Modi was forced to go underground in Gujarat and frequently traveled in disguise to avoid arrest. He became involved in printing pamphlets opposing the government, sending them to Delhi and organising demonstrations.[ During this period, Modi wrote a Gujarati book, Sangharsh ma Gujarat The Struggles of Gujarat, describing events during the Emergency
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He was assigned by the RSS to the BJP in 1985. In 1988, Modi was elected organising secretary of the party's Gujarat unit, marking his entrance into electoral politics. He rose within the party, helping organise L. K. Advani's 1990 Ayodhya Rath Yatra in 1990 and Murli Manohar Joshi's 1991 to 92 Ekta Yatra (Journey for Unity). As party secretary, Modi's electoral strategy was considered central to BJP victory in the 1995 state assembly elections. In November of that year Modi was elected BJP national secretary and transferred to New Delhi, where he assumed responsibility for party activities in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. The following year, Shankersinh Vaghela (one of the most prominent BJP leaders in Gujarat) defected to the INC after losing his parliamentary seat in the Lok Sabha elections.Modi, on the selection committee for the 1998 Assembly elections in Gujarat, favoured supporters of BJP leader Keshubhai Patel over those supporting Vaghela to end factional division in the party. His strategy was credited as key to the BJP winning an overall majority in the 1998 elections,and Modi was promoted to BJP general secretary (organisation) in May of that year.

Modi played a significant role in the BJP's 2009 general-election campaign. On 31 March 2013 Modi was appointed to the BJP parliamentary board, the highest decision-making body in the party, and at the party's 9 June national executive meeting he was appointed chair of the BJP's central election campaign committee for the 2014 general election. Senior leader and founding member Lal Krishna Advani resigned his party posts after the appointment in protest of leaders who were "concerned with their personal agendas". His resignation, which was described by The Times of India as "a protest against Narendra Modi's elevation as the chairman of the party's election committee", was withdrawn the following day at the urging of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. In September 2013, the BJP announced that the chief minister would be their candidate for prime minister in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

Modi was a candidate in two constituencies: Varanasi and Vadodara. During the campaign, he pledged to speed up government decision-making and remove bureaucratic hurdles which slowed development. He won in both constituencies, defeating Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal in Varanasi and Madhusudan Mistry of the INC in Vadodara by 570,128 votes. The BJP-led NDA won the general election overall and the INC experienced its worst-ever defeat. Modi, who was unanimously elected leader of the BJP after his party's victory, was appointed prime minister by India's president. To comply with the law that an MP cannot represent more than one constituency, he vacated the Vadodara seat. In what CNN described as "India's first social media election", Modi used Twitter, Facebook, Google Hangouts and holographic projections for campaign appearances. His victory tweet was the most re-tweeted tweet in India.

Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister of India on 26 May 2014 at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. He was the first to invite all South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation leaders to attend his swearing-in ceremony. His first cabinet consisted of 45 ministers, 25 fewer than the previous UPA government.