Anandita Dutta Tamuly : chilly girl

Anandita Dutta Tamuly , is an Assamese woman from Titabor Town inJorhat district of Assam. She is married to Pankaj Tamuly and is mother of a son. She is known for eating and rubbing Bhut Jolokia peppers on her bare eyes. The chilli, native to Assam, is the world's hottest chilli pepper as recognized by the Guinness World Records.

On Thursday night, April 9, 2009, Anandita performed her feat at the district library auditorium, Jorhat before hundreds of people for a Channel 4  programme on global food being anchored by celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay. She ate 51red-hot-chillies in two minutes and smeared seeds of 25 chillies in her eyes without shedding a tear. According to Diganta Saikia, one of the event coordinators, the Guinness authorities had earlier asked them to authenticate this with a supervised recording of the feat. The coordinators accordingly asked Ramsay to be the adjudicator for Guinness and he agreed to pursue Anandita’s claim as the world’s ‘hottest woman’ by submitting video clippings.

Sudarsan Pattnaik

Sudarsan Pattnaik  was  born in Puri , nearly 70 km from Bhubaneswar the capital city of Orissa. He is the inventor of sand art in India and has learned this form of sand art by himself without any guidance by practice and creative ideas. He started sculpting images on sand since the age of seven. Till now he has designed hundreds of sand sculpture. In the recent years people have started focusing on this art form. Now Sudarshan has many students working under his arm. Among them is Manas Kumar Sahoo who was the semifinalist of India's Got Talent Season 2. He has won many national and international awards for his creative designs and has recorded his name in the World records for sculpting the tallest Santa Claus and most Santa Claus image built on sand. Sudarshan Pattnaik won the People's Choice Prize at the 1st Moscow International Sand Sculpture Championship held in Russia.

Pattnaik created a 15 feet high Hindu God Ganesh to create awareness among the people on the potential dangers of global warming at the International Sand Championship.

The top of the sculpture depicted the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and in the flowing water Lord Ganesh is traveling on a boat with a sign 'Divine Concern on Global Warming'.

This was to educate people through his art about the effects Global Warming.

Sudarsan Patnaik’s ultimate objective is to create awareness and enthusiasm among the people and make it popular professional art form among the people for which he is traveling various places in the country and demonstrating this art form by holding work shops and training. He established "The Golden Sand Art Institute” which is first of it’s nature in India.

Pattnaik has so far participated in more than 35 international sand sculpture championships across the world and won many awards for the country.

His sand sculpture on Black Taj Mahal earned him accolades all over the world.www.sandindia.com

Ganesh Hegde

Choreographer of the movie RA-ONE. Best-known for his work in the Oscar-nominated film Lagaan and for his musical numbers in Company. Ganesh has choreographed many stage shows, namely Temptations 2004, the Bollywood rock concert which toured America with huge stars such as Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta, Saif Ali Khan and Arjun Rampal.

Hegde is also known for choreographing of Michael Jackson's concert in India.

He has been associated with the Zee Cine Awards since conception and has been choreographing the Filmfare Awards for the past decade.

Hegde's famous choreographed sequences include It's Magic from Koi Mil Gaya, Dum from Dum and Main Hoon Don from Don - The Chase Begins Again.

Hegde started a trend for the music video type execution in movies with Kambakht Ishq (Pyar Tune Kya Kiya) and Khallas (Company)
Singing

In October 2005 Ganesh released his debut album "G" with the backing and promotion of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. He is reported as the first Indian pop act to produce, write, direct and star in his debut music video (for his single Main Deewana). He is also credited with launching the career of Indian model and actress Yana Gupta, for whom he crafted the song Babuji in the film Dum.

Hegde started out performing with Asha Bhonsle on stage shows and she is reported to have convinced him to release his own album. She has sung a duet with him in G.

Hegde has also sung the rap Kaun Banega Crorepati promo song ' Ek Sawaal Ka Sawaal Hai ', for the third season of the show hosted by Shah Rukh Khan .The song is available on a T Series album titled ' Shah Rukh Khan Kar Le Kar Le Koi Dhamaal'.The video was conceptualized and directed by Hegde.
Education

Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra - Artist-Communicators

Former art directors from the advertising world, versatile artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra express themselves in painting, sculptures and installations. Among their creations is the "Apocalyptron", a 15ft-high Godzilla-like monster created out of 2,000 pink plastic bottles, symbolic of rampant consumerism, aptly placed in a shopping mall in Delhi. Their work has eight-figure price tags, is frequently auctioned at Sothebys and has been snapped up by art czar Frank Cohen as well as pop star Elton John, strangely making them the very icons of what they parody. Despite criticism for churning out computer-generated art work, they remain unfazed. "Had we been working as individuals, the curve would have been much slower," says Thukral. Among their early projects was the Punjabi-pejorative titled BoseDK designs and the mind-numbingly everyday products of the fictitious BoseDK mega mall. They spend six months a year jetting to exhibitions from Tokyo to Turin but their time in India is spent closeted in their studio in Gurgaon. "No time for parties," says Tagra. Forthcoming projects include four large museum shows in Paris, Beijing, Washington and Lyon, a move into a purpose-built studio and a feature film.
  The Journey: Two small-town boys, Thukral from Jalandhar and Tagra from Ludhiana, went to the big city to learn fine art at the Delhi College of Art. They worked together at Ogilvy & Mather, before debuting with a solo show at Nature Morte in 2005. Since then, the duo has held over a dozen shows in New York, London, Sydney and Berlin where they often field post-Slumdog Millionairequeries like, "do you have plug points in India?"
The Inspiration: They revel in seemingly everyday ordinariness and kitsch which finds expression in all their projects-from paintings lampooning the rootlessness of Punjabi baroque architecture to rubber slippers and underwear with a "put it on" condom message.
The Mentor: The mundane world with dashes of Stephan Sagmeister's shock, Damien Hirst's formaldehyde art, the scale of Anish Kapoor and Subodh Gupta's exuberance. "We can spend hours marvelling at a plastic toy," says Thukral.

Athira Krishna

Athira Krishna is an internationally acclaimed prodigy violinist from India. Athira was born in Trivandrum,Kerala. She has an enviable musical lineage as the grand daughter of the illustrious Vidwan Shri. GopalaPillai, fabulous musician of yesteryears who belonged to the renowned Tanjore tradition of Carnatic Music whose master-disciple lineage traced back to the Sri. Muthuswamy Dikshithar Carnatic trinity of the 18th century, and to Baluswamy Dikshithar, who first introduced the violin to Indian classical music.

D Udaya Kumar: The man who design the rupee symbol

Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar was booked to fly to Guwahati on Thursday morning. On Friday he was to start his new job as assistant professor in the department of design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati. He was leaving the IIT Mumbai campus where he spent five years earning a PhD in industrial design—the first doctorate to be awarded in the discipline in India.


The calls started pouring in early Thursday morning. He had won a nationwide contest run by the government to design a symbol for the Indian rupee. A symbol he designed, incorporating elements of Devanagari and Roman scripts, had been chosen to represent India's growing economy and its currency. It would be incorporated in Unicode, computer keyboards will have a dedicated key for the symbol and it will come to be seen and recognised around the world. A designer gets to create a currency symbol just once in a nation'




For a man used to painstaking and solitary pursuit of meaning in symbols, typefaces and ancient Tamil manuscripts, the attention must have been unsettling. He didn't take his flight. In the evening, cars came to haul him off to television studios. He would go to Guwahati the next day.


Born in Chennai on 10 October, 1978, Kumar's family hails from Thanjavur. The magnificent temples there must have had something to do with his decision to study architecture, which he pursued at Anna University in Chennai. Subsequently, he did his masters in architecture from IIT, Mumbai. When the industrial design centre in the campus started offering a PhD, Udaya Kumar enrolled, and started work on the evolution of the Tamil script,which dates back to 2nd century AD.


"I want to continue work on Tamil typography. I find our symbols have a very heavy western influence. I will do more work on Indian scripts," he told ET. For the design, he took inspiration from the symbols of such currencies as Korea's won, UK's pound sterling, euro, lira, peso and others. "Thus it has a harmonious identity as far as international currency symbols are concerned and at the same time it has the Indian uniqueness," he said about his winning design. Among the international currencies, he likes the Yen symbol as it best reflects the country. The 31-year-old bachelor worked as a senior designer for two years with speciality magazine publisher Infomedia.

Suresh Ranjan Goduka

With forefathers who migrated to Assam from the erstwhile Rajputana a century ago, this Marwari youth could teach Raj Thackeray a thing or two about cultural assimilation. Among the leading Assamese poets of his generation, he gave up a documentary filmmaking career in Delhi and went back home in 2004 to startJeevan, a monthly Assamese magazine, which seeks to explore the diversity, beauty and infinite possibility of life. "The media here carries only news of oppression, corruption and lack of development," says Goduka, who used own bank balance, his father's savings as well as a loan to fund Jeevan, which now sells 5,000 copies a month. Its perception, awareness and aspiration surveys conducted among the youth, a first in the region, have shattered many myths. This year, he founded the Jeevan Initiative, an NGO, dedicated to youngsters.

Uttam Teron

Seven years before the Right to Education Bill was introduced in Parliament, Uttam Teron, a young man from Pamohi, 20 km from Guwahati, dreamt of 100 per cent literacy for the children of his village. Education was the lowest priority in this Karbi-dominated hamlet and most children, especially girls, helped their parents in the fields. This changed when Teron began the Parijat Academy in 2003 with four students. Today, the school, with a small hostel, provides free education to 502 students of which 256 are girls. "Teron has shown how the efforts of an individual can inspire a big movement," says Shantikam Hazarika, Director, Assam Institute of Management.

The Journey: Born to a train driver father and a homemaker mother who never went to school, Teron invested the Rs. 800 he had earned as a private tutor in constructing a room with a tin roof and bamboo walls. It became his school.

The Mission: Plans to build a hostel which can accommodate 100 students, a full-fledged computer centre, a health clinic, a day-care centre for handicapped children and a weaving centre for girls.

Bhabananda Barbayan (Majuli dancers Monk)

Sri Babananda Barbayan is dancer,choreographer, drummer, teacher and artistic-director. He is also director and research scholar, department of dance, Rabindra Bharati University. The Sattriya, an indian Classical style of drama-drama-music has its origin traced back to the Neo-Vaisnavite movement flourishing in Assam in the 15th-16th century. The great Wise Sri Sankaradeva created it with an evident artistic and futuristic vision, treated the art to supplement the pursuit of Bhakti (love devotion). Bhabananda practice his art since his age of 4, when he is becoming monk. He is actualy recognozed in India as the better artist of Sattriya. His first tour with his group (les moines danseurs de Majuli) in France and Portugal in 2008 has been a succes.

Indrani Medhi

Indrani Medhi is an Associate Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. Her research interest is in the area of Ethnographic UI Design and Technology for Socio-Economic Development. Her current work has been in User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users. She has a Masters degree in Design from Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA and Bachelors degree in Architecture from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. Currently, she is also a 3rd year Ph.D. student at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, (IIT Bombay), Mumbai, India. Indrani is a native of Guwahati, Assam, in Northeast India, and has been living in Bangalore since 2005.

Recently Indrani was listed in the MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of "outstanding innovators" under the age of 35; featured in the list of "50 Smartest People in Technology" in 2010 by Fortune magazine; was named a "Global Forum Visionary" by Fortune; won the "Young Indian Leader" award for 2010 from CNN IBN; and featured in the list of 35 "Youth Icon" under 35, by India Today magazine.