Sonia, Tata & Nooyi in Time's 'most influential'

NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi has once again made it to Time’s list of 100 most-influential people in the world. She is the only Indian politician on the list but has Tata group chairman Ratan Tata and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi for company.
Along with figuring on the Time list in 2007, Ms Gandhi was also on the Forbes list of 100 most powerful women last year. The write up on Ms Gandhi in the magazine by former UN diplomat, Sashi Tharoor, says: “The story of Sonia Gandhi, 61, is remarkable at every level, and the fairy-tale metaphor barely begins to scratch the surface of its extraordinariness.”
He goes on to describe her story saying, “A novelist seeking to tell the story of Sonia Gandhi may be forgiven for seeing a fairy-tale element in the narrative: Beautiful foreigner comes to strange new land and marries handsome prince... But there is a twist to the tale....” Mr Tharoor then says that the “queen” when offered “the crown on a brocade cushion, turns it down”.

She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers,” he writes. Incidentally, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too was on the list in 2005.
The Congress president has been named in category of ‘leaders and revolutionaries’, along with Dalai Lama, Russian president Vladimir Putin and US presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and president George Bush.
Under the most influential business people, named under the ‘Builders and Titans’ category, Mr Tata and Ms Nooyi find mention. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, China’s Hu Jintao, Malaysian leader Anwar Ibrahim, Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr, Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Kayani, and Baitullah Mehsud — which the magazine said has been alleged to be the mastermind of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination — are also on the list.