With PM Modi's recent visit to the Silicon Valley, Priyanka Chopra's Quantico success and IIT-Roorkee's Kartik Chandran winning a $625,000 worth genius grant, India's US connect gets stronger while others seem to be gung-ho about future prospects
The phrase Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai might be passe now as the much-touted India-US bonhomie takes over. The individuals to be credited range from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, versatile actress Priyanka Chopra, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering — Kartik Chandran, chef Vikas Khanna and many more.
Modi’s visit to the Silicon Valley (he is the first Indian leader to visit the west coast after more than 30 years) and his meet with the world’s biggest tech giants was surely the highlight of his second visit to the US. Following which key tech-related announcements were made.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google would partner up with the Indian Railways to provide high-speed internet at 500 railway stations across India. Plus, the Google users will soon be able to type in ten Indian languages. Then Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for collaborating with the Indian Government in order to provide low-cost internet services to 5,00,000 villages here.
“We believe that low-cost broadband connectivity coupled with the scale of cloud computing intelligence that can be harnessed from data can help drive creativity, efficiency and productivity across governments and businesses of all sizes,” Nadella, who is the first Indian-America.
Chipmaker company Qualcomm announced its support for ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ initiative by launching a $150 million fund for start-ups here to “fuel innovation and foster promising Indian start-ups who are contributing to the mobile and ‘internet of everything’ ecosystem and provide start-ups with financial, marketing, technology and business support to help propel them forward in the competitive Indian market,” according to its executive chairman Paul Jacobs.
Then, of course, was the PM’s visit to Facebook Headquarters to address a Townhall session with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Before the session began, both Modi and Zuckerberg changed their Facebook profile pictures to support ‘Digital India’. Soon, many followed suit and the entire social media was painted in the shades of the tri-colour to show their support.
Who knew that Zuckerberg turned to India during crisis and spent a month here after heeding to the advice of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He said during the session, “We had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook – I went and I met with Steve Jobs and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be.”
Modi, too, had an emotional moment while talking about his mother.
While Modi was trending, Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra, too, was making waves as she made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel live. Chopra, who plays a FBI trainee Alex Parrish in ABC’s thriller series Quantico, looked gorgeous in a navy blue outfit by Barbara Bui and a pair of nude louboutins. She spoke about her decision to study in America when she was 12-years-old, just to get out of the uniform wearing routine we have here but later had a hard time when it came to picking an outfit for school every single day.
The star also confessed her love for late rapper Tupac Shakur when she was in her early teens and said, “I’m going to say this on national television…I was supposed to be Mrs Tupac Shakur”. After he was shot, she mourned for 20 days straight and also dressed in black. Former basketball player Dennis Rodman then replaced her earlier crush, she added.
After the show premiered on last Sunday in the US, Google trends did an interesting study on social media trend which shows that Chopra zoomed ahead of Modi the day the show aired while Modi visited Facebook Headquarter.
Another one making it big is Kartik Chandran, an Indian-American associate professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia Engineering, has been named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow with a “genius grant” of $625,000 with no strings attached.
Chandran, an IIT Roorkee graduate, has won the fellowship for his work in “transforming wastewater from a pollutant requiring disposal to a resource for useful products, such as commodity chemicals, energy sources, and fertilisers.”
Amritsar lad Chef Vikas Khanna had already given the New Yorkers a taste of India with his restaurant Junoon, but this time he had the opportunity to cook a seven-course meal for PM Modi and CEOs of the top 50 businesses in the US.