Manish Sisodia – Deputy CM of Delhi
“Not sure if I'm a politician, activist, reader, writer, journalist... but I'm an Indian. I like Gandhi because he always moved ahead of his own identity."
Manish Sisodia is an Indian politician. He is currently the Deputy CM of Delhi. He also holds the Finance and Planning, Revenue, Services, Power, Education, Higher Education, Information Technology, Technical Education, Administrative Reforms portfolios in the government of Delhi. Previously, he was briefly a cabinet minister in the Government of Delhi between late December 2013 and February 2014.
Soft spoken and popular among Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers, Manish Sisodia has come a long way from being a journalist to become Delhi's first Deputy Chief Minister. He was born in Faugata village of Hapur district (Uttar Pradesh) on 2 February 1972. He obtained a post-graduate diploma in Journalism from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi and worked for Zee News as news producer and news reader from 1997 to 2005 and later he joined All India Radio on different positions. Manish is also known as award-winning documentary film maker and has also served as radio anchor with FM channels.
Manish Sisodia is one of the most prominent members of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) founded by Arvind Kejriwal. He was also a key member of the anti-corruption movement led by social activist Anna Hazare in 2011, which laid the foundation of the agitation for Jan Lokpal (Citizen's Ombudsman). He quit journalism and got involved in movement for social awareness on full time basis and participated in the agitation for Right to Information (RTI).
He is also an active volunteer of Parivartan, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), which is working for social transformation of the marginalised and deprived sections of the community. He conducts training workshops, produces short films and documentaries on various aspects of right to information and edits monthly magazine on RTI- Apna Panna.
On 26 November 2012, Arvind Kejriwal, along with Manish Sisodia and others formed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The party fought the 2013 elections to the Legislative Assembly of Delhi on 4 December and won. He had to give up his post due to the CM Arvind Kejriwal's resignation and the subsequent imposement of President's Rule in Delhi. Manish Sisodia was again elected to the legislative assembly of Delhi in 2015.
Over the years, he has evolved from a writer, radio anchor, news producer for a television channel, to an activist who stood with Arvind Kejriwal like a rock, while many AAP leaders left the party. He will be tasked with fulfilling some of the most crucial poll promises of the Aam Aadmi Party, including building of 500 new schools and 20 new colleges.
Deepinder Goyal – Founder & CEO, Zomato.com
“We pay our people well. It’s so that they should be able to focus on work without worrying. But funnily enough, good people don’t care much for money."
Deepinder Goyal is the Founder and CEO of Zomato. He is the man behind Zomato, the one stop where technology and food is served together.
Goyal was born and brought up in Punjab. He graduated in 2005 with an Integrated Masters in Computing and Mathematics degree from IIT Delhi and joined the American consulting firm Bain and Company within the same year. Punching in the required amount of daily hours and hefty paycheques every month at his cushy job still didn’t satisfy his appetite.
Bugged with the daily chore of having to wait in long queues to get access to various menu cards of restaurants at the office pantry, Goyal and his colleague Pankaj Chaddha (who is also an IITian as well as co-founder of Zomato.com) teamed up and started scanning menus and putting them up online. It attracted great response from the employees as it provided accurate details about each restaurant just within a click and most of them were bachelors without much access to home-cooked food.
This proved to be a great stepping stone as they incorporated this idea on a bigger scale, worked on the website and gathered the menus of 400 restaurants across Gurgaon within a span of three months thus launching Zomato.com in 2008 (earlier named as Foodiebay). The start-up bug had finally hit Goyal and he took a major leap by quitting his job at Bain and Company the same day his wife, a Mathematics PhD, got a teaching job at the Delhi University. Zomato now provides information for over 260,000 restaurants across 16 countries. The markets it operates in includes the UK, UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Qatar, and 35 cities across India.
As the co-founder of this website, Deependra Goyal juggled various roles from designing the landing page, to collecting, scanning, rating and uploading menus; marketing the portal at almost no-cost; and mainly getting hold of advertisers.
Goyal believes in less of hard work and getting things done smartly. As Zomato started as a start-up, his main emphasis was spending solely on human resources as they are the face of the company. Success according to him is directly proportional to family support. He highly accredits his wife who supported him through the highs and lows of launching Zomato.
His main aim is to make the brand a part and parcel of every “foodie’s” routine and change the entire concept of ordering food from restaurants in India and around the world.
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever”, is his favourite piece of advice quoted by Steve Jobs, which is his motto and advice to all the entrepreneurs who would take risks and turn that risk into success just as he did.
Sources:
The rise of AAP's Manish Sisodia
Manish Sisodia Latest News
Manish Sisodia [Biography]
Know your Delhi minister: Manish Sisodia
Manish Sisodia
Newsmaker: Deepinder Goyal
Cooking up a smart idea
How Deepinder Goyal’s Zomato entered into the Rs 1,000-crore club
Deepinder Goyal – The man who served technology and cuisine on one plate
The Way I Work: Deepinder Goyal
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Deepinder Goyal | The food network