World Bank President Ajay Banga, Bollywood actor Alia Bhatt, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Olympian wrestler Sakshi Malik and actor-director Dev Patel are among the Indians who have made it to the prestigious Times’s list of 100 most influential people in the world released on Wednesday.
Time’s '100 Most Influential People of 2024’ also includes US Department of Energy’s Loan Programmes Office director Jigar Shah, Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Physics at Yale University Priyamvada Natarajan; Indian-origin restaurateur Asma Khan; as well as Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya.
Time’s profile of the former Mastercard CEO, written by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, said, “It’s not easy to find a leader with the skill and drive to take on the monumental task of transforming an essential institution, but since becoming World Bank president last June, Ajay Banga has done just that.”
Yellen praised him for his sharp wit and consistency.
Describing Bhatt as a “formidable talent”, director, producer and writer Tom Harper said in the Time profile that she is “not only one of the world’s leading actors, admired for her work in the Indian film industry for over a decade — she is also a businesswoman and a philanthropist who leads with integrity”.
On Malik, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Nisha Pahuja writes that she was among India’s “most celebrated wrestlers” who had gathered at Jantar Mantar in Delhi in early 2023 to demand the immediate arrest and resignation of chief of the Wrestling Federation of India Brij Bhushan Singh, accused of sexually harassing female athletes.
“What began as a small, targeted protest to demand decisive government action in favour of the wrestlers ballooned instead into a yearlong battle unprecedented in Indian sport, drawing support from across the country and attention from across the world,” Pahuja writes in her profile of Malik for Time.
Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist and the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope, wrote in the profile for Natarajan that a novel approach developed years ago by her “brought us closer to understanding a basic mystery in astronomy: How do the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centres of most galaxies form?”
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