PERSONS SEPTEMBER 2013

PERSONS SEPTEMBER 2013

• Ruchira Kamboj----Ruchira Kamboj was appointed as the Permanent Representative of India to UNESCO, Paris with the rank of Ambassador. The government made this announcement on 25th September 2013. She will succeed VS Oberoi. At present, Ruchira is joint secretary in Ministry of External Affairs. She is expected to take up her assignment shortly. Kamboj joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1987. She last served as the Deputy Head, in the office of the Commonwealth Secretary-General, London. Prior to that, she served as the Minister and Head, High Commission of India, Cape Town, South Africa.
  
• Ravindra Kumar,----Editor of The Statesman was elected as President of The Indian Newspaper Society for the year 2013-14 at its 74th Annual General Meeting held in Bangalore on 27 September 2013.Ravindra Kumar succeeded K N Tilak Kumar of Deccan Herald and Prajavani. At the meeting, Kiran B Vadodaria was elected as Deputy President and P V Chandran as Vice President. Shankaran is the Secretary General of the Society. The executive committee of INS represents the current 990 members from newspapers, journals, periodicals and magazines. Indian Newspaper Society (INS) (formerly Indian and Eastern Newspaper Society) acts as the central organization of the Press of India, an independent body authenticating circulation figures of newspapers and periodicals in India. INS is an organization which plays a major role in protecting and promoting the freedom of press in India. INS was founded in 1939. Its headquarters are at New Delhi.
  
• Sanjay Govind Dhande----Former director of IIT Kanpur, on 25 September 2013 appointed as a member of UGC for a term of three years. Sanjay Govind Dhande's tenure as UGC member would be till 24th September 2016.The Union Government on 18 September 2013 removed social scientist Yogendra Yadav from the membership of the University Grants Commission (UGC) for joining the Aam Admi Party.
  
• Mr Justice Vangala Eswaraiah----Former acting Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh High Court, has taken over as the Chairperson of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC).The NCBC has been set up under the National Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1993, pursuant to the direction of the Supreme Court in the Mandal case judgement for setting up a national body for Backward Classes at the Centre as a permanent body. The Commission’s last Chairperson was Mr Justice M. N. Rao, a retired Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court. He performed the duties of the Chief Justice, High Court of Andhra Pradesh in 2012 and retired as such on attaining the age of superannuation on March 9 this year.
• Manish S. Shah ----President Barack Obama on 20th September, has nominated yet another Indian American, Manish S. Shah, to the key post of US District Court judge for the Northern District of his home state of Illinois. An Assistant US Attorney in the Northern District of Illinois since 2001, New York-born Shah, 40, currently serves as Chief of the Criminal Division, having previously served as Chief of Criminal Appeals from 2011 to 2012.Shah was also Deputy Chief of the Financial Crimes and Special Prosecutions Section from 2008 to 2011 and Deputy Chief of the General Crimes Section from 2007 to 2008.
  
• Ratan Tata----India's leading industrialist Ratan Tata has been nominated as a member of the board of trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an American think tank, a media release has said on 18th September. Welcoming him, Carnegie President Jessica T. Mathews said: "We are honoured to welcome Ratan to Carnegie's board." Finberg expressed hope that having Tata on their Board of Trustees would be an asset for Carnegie in developing it as "the truly global think tank" and would also be helpful in establishing Carnrgie's new South Asia Centre in New Delhi. Ratan Tata was the chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, from 1991 until his retirement at the end of 2012.Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest think tank in the United States was established in 1910. It is globally renowned with research centers in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, and Brussels as well as a program in Almaty, Kazakhstan in addition to its headquarters in Washington, DC.
  
• Nina Davuluri--- Indian-origin American, Nina Davuluri on 15th September 2013 became the first Indian-origin contestant to win the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She was initially named the Miss New York 2013 and subsequently won Miss America 2014 title. She is the first Indian-origin woman to be chosen as Miss America. Nina Davuluri was born in Syracuse, New York on 20 April 1989. She later moved to Oklahoma and then to St. Joseph, Michigan. She was born to the Telugu parents and hails from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. She is a trained Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam dancer and also learnt to play piano.
  
• Rakesh Sood---Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has appointed Rakesh Sood, India’s former Ambassador to Nepal, Afghanistan and France and the country’s first Ambassador in charge of Disarmament in Geneva, as his new Special envoy for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation on 1st September.Mr. Sood who retired from the Indian Foreign Service in March this year is a recognized expert in his field and will be able to make a valuable contribution to the country’s foreign policy on security, non-proliferation and disarmament issues. He served in New Delhi for nine years as Joint Secretary DISA (Disarmament and International Security Affairs), a division that he set up and headed from 1992 to 2000. In that post he oversaw the negotiations concerning the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the deliberations on the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). He also participated in bilateral dialogues on nuclear and other non-proliferation questions with the world’s major powers.
  
• David Frost(74)---- Veteran British journalist and broadcaster David Frost, who won fame around the world for his TV interviews with the former U.S. President, Richard Nixon, has died on 1st September. Frost was known both for an amiable personality and incisive interviews with leading public figures, and his career in television news and entertainment spanned almost half a century. He was the only person to have interviewed all six British Prime Ministers serving between 1964 and 2007 and the seven U.S. Presidents between 1969 and 2008. While popular in Britain and beginning to launch a career on U.S. television, Frost did not become internationally known until 1977, when he secured a series of television interviews with Nixon. The dramatic face-to-face was make-or-break both for him and for the former President, who was trying to salvage his reputation after resigning from the White House in disgrace following the Watergate scandal three years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely watched news interview in the history of TV.
  
• Justice Nuthalapati Venkata Ramana----Judge of the Andhra Pradesh High Court was on 30 August 2013 appointed as the new Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. He was appointed by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee. Justice N.V. Ramana took over from Justice Badar Durrez Ahmad, who is the Acting Chief Justice of the Delhi High court since June 2013. He practiced in Andhra Pradesh High Court, Central and AP Administrative Tribunals and the Supreme Court in civil, criminal, constitutional, labour, service and election matters. He has credited to his name, the encouragement of use of Telugu as language of proceedings in Andhra Pradesh High Court. He also remained the president of the Andhra Pradesh Judicial Academy.
  
• Deepak Sandhu(64)---- Deepak Sandhu became the first woman Chief Information Commissioner on 5th September 2013. She was administered the oath of the office by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee. Deepak Sandhu took over the office from Satyananda Mishra. Mishra served the 5 year term in the office. Deepak Sandhu, 64, is the former Indian Information Service officer of 1971 batch.She took over as the Information Commissioner in the year 2009. The Central Information Commission was established under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
  
• Tommy Morrison--- The former heavy weight champion, who was diagnosed positive for HIV died at the age of 44, on 1 September 2013 at a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. As a boxer, he was nicknamed as The Duke and in his entire boxing career; he played 52 professional fights and lost only 3 of them. Morrison came in limelight in the year 1993 after he defeated George Foreman to win the World Boxing Organization (WBO) Heavyweight Title. He also gained popularity. He also became famous after being casted as a co-star against Sylvester Stallone in the 1990 boxing movie Rocky V. About Tommy Morrison
  
• Diana Nyad (64)--- Endurance swimmer Diana Nyad has become the first person to swim from Cuba to the US (Florida strait) without a shark cage. After about 53 hours' non-stop swimming, the American reached Key West, Florida, escorted by boats and her team of 35 people. Ms Nyad, who left a Havana yacht club early on 7 September, had vowed this would be her last attempt to cross the 110-mile (177km) wide Florida Straits. Her four other tries - one in 1978, two in 2011 and one in 2012 - failed.
  
• Sushmita Banerjee ----An Indian woman writer Sushmita Banerjee was killed by unidentified gunmen outside her home in eastern Paktika province of Afghanistanon 4 September 2013. The attackers shot her dead outside the house. The militants dumped her dead body outside a madarasa. 49-year old Sushmita was married to an Afghan businessman Jaanbaz Khan and recently moved back to Afghanistan to live with him. Her book entitled- Kabuliwaler Bangali Bou, became a bestseller in 1995. The memoir was based on her experiences in Afghanistan and her escape from the Taliban captivity in the 1980s. The book was also a theme for a Bollywood film Escape from Taliban in 2003.
  
• Ronald H. Coase(102)--- The winner of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1991, diedon 2 September 2013 in Chicago. He was the British-American economist and author.He served as the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School.In the year 1991, he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Ronald H. Coase is known for two of his most popular articles- The Nature of the Firm (1937) and The Problem of Social Cost (1960). The Nature of the Firm introduced the methodologies of transaction costs for explaining the limits as well as nature of the firms. On the other hand, The Problem of Social Cost explained how the property rights can overcome the issues of externalities. This was popularly known as the Coase Theorem. Ronald Coase is also referred to as the Father of Reform in policy for allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum. This was based on the article titled The Federal Communications Commission (1959).