PUNJABI DIASPORA

MALAYSIA
DALJIT SINGH Dalliwal, the Malaysian Punjabi Business Chamber president, was sworn in as a senator before Dewan Negara President Abdul Hamid Pawanteh.
Dalliwal, 48, has a masters in business administration from the University of New England, US, and became active in politics when he joined the Malaysian Indian Congress in 1989.
Dalliwal says his appointment shows that Sikhs are not neglected in Malaysia and his appointment is an honour for Indians in general and the Sikh community in particular.
Dalliwal also participates in charity work involving the Sikh community and gurdwaras.

INDIAN ARTIST Manjit Singh Gill, who has a law degree with honours from the Universiti Islam Antarabangsa of Malaysia and received his degree at the 24th convocation in Gombak, along with his brother Sukhjit made history when they recorded their first local bhangra album called ‘Loaded’ which was recognised by the Malaysia Book of Records, recently.
The boys’ father Tan Sri Darshan Singh Gill is a lawyer in Ipoh and is president of the Malaysia National Sikhs Movement.
Malaysia has a 100,000 strong Sikh community that is recognised in various fields.

US
JAGMOHAN SINGH Ahuja, a prisoner had his hair chopped off by authorities in a Florida prison because the county jail sheriff said the rules require all sentenced inmates to have short hair and not wear head covering in order to prevent concealing contraband and or weapons.
According to the jail authorities, they are well within their rights to cut the prisoner’s hair and will continue to do so.
The United Sikhs have launched a campaign against the cutting of hair that is a gross violation of the religious rights of the prisoner and plan to continue their efforts to allow Sikhs to keep their hair and have appointed lawyers to represent them in the case.

UK
AN INDIAN woman who left home to avoid being forced to marry a man chosen by her family in India, has founded a charity organisation to help women in similar situations. Birmingham-based Kelly Kaur was 16 when she left her home in Walsall. Kelly had to return home after her parents told the police their daughter was under 16. Both parents are now dead, and Kelly now a 39 year old businesswoman is a happily-married mother of two. She has set up a new housing initiative called Thoroughcare Housing and Support to provide help for victims of domestic violence and forced marriages. It will also provide education and support to vulnerable adults and children seeking asylum and young people leaving care.

KANNADIGA DIASPORA

US
MICHAEL THEVAR is to recruit 125 people from poor backgrounds over the next 3 years for his firm, help them shift to US with families 
Fifteen years back a youth hailing from an impoverished, backward caste family in Karnataka defied social convention when he went to the US on an International Exchange Programme and eventually started his very own healthcare staffing company. It would have been the perfect ending to Michael Thevar’s real life rags to riches story if he had chosen to move on, except that he has already started work on the "next agenda in his life": to establish a ‘Bhimnagar’ or a ‘Buddhavihar’ in Pennsylvania. 
Thevar who acquired his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Social Work from Nirmala Niketan and Tata Institute of Social Sciences is back in Mumbai, busy making preparations to take a batch of 20 candidates hailing from ‘backward classes’ with him to the USA. These candidates are trained social workers who will be working in Thevar’s Temp Solutions as counsellors and therapists and will eventually be a part of the future ‘Bhimnagar.’

KERALA DIASPORA

UAE
HARI RAMAN, 28, of Kozhikode, Kerala, recorded a song on the spirit of the Olympics, written by his history professor two years ago.
The song, in English, was aired by a Hindi FM radio station in Beijing and became a huge hit with listeners, so much so that other radio stations picked it up as well.
Raman, who lives in Dubai, says prof. M.C. Vasisht of Malabar Christian College, Kozhikode, wrote the lyrics, a student Sai Giridhar composed the music, and he himself sang the song which was recorded in a studio in Kerala.

Kuwait
KADAR PILLAI, chairman and managing director of Kuwait’s Kanoo Group of Companies, is in Delhi to ask the government of India to relax rules to recruit Indian workers for a steel plant to be set up in Kurdistan. 
Pillai, of Ernakulam, Kerala, says if India does not permit Indian workers, he will have to recruit workers from the Philippines and Pakistan.
The Kurdistan facility will have the capacity to manufacture 200 metric tonnes a day of steel, with plans to double the capacity. The Kanoo Group is implementing the project in partnership with the UK and the West Asia based Al Zahawi group. Kadar claims the security situation is encouraging for safe investment.

MARWARI DIASPORA

US
AT THE Democratic National Convention event hosted by the Indian American Leadership Initiative in Denver last month, Barack Obama’s campaign insider Preeta Bansal made an impassioned plea to Indians to support the Senator in the US presidential election.”Barack’s story is our story,” Bansal, former New York solicitor general told a packed audience. 
Obama’s No. 2 immigration adviser sees her role as framing the issues to "recognise the diversity of the immigrant community" both legal and illegal. Bansal. The 42-year-old partner at law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York, is a veteran of the Clinton White House and Justice Department. Her path first crossed Obama’s at Harvard Law School, although mutual friends brought her to the campaign. 
Barack Obama “is able to advance progressive principles, but he’s not one of these starry-eyed liberals", she says. 
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has just named Bansal to the city’s Campaign Finance Board.

RAJAT MITTAL, IIT alum and George Washington University researcher, has spent five years studying Olympic champion Michael Phelps and his uncanny dolphin kick. Mittal, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and his colleagues studied 50 US swimmers and found that of them all, Phelps was able to use his body in a different way and much closer to dolphins than other swimmers. Phelps, who won eight gold medals in Beijing, is able to straighten his massive size 14 feet to a greater angle to reduce resistance, making almost 90 percent of thrust come from his foot. Foot size isn’t the only reason Phelps is a phenomenon. His powerful lungs can hold out longer underwater than most swimmers.

UK
RAJESH AGRAWAL, 31, has been nominated in the Business and Commerce Excellence category in the Lloyds TSB Southern Jewel Awards to be held in October. 
Agrawal is founder and chief executive of RationalFX, a company that allows individuals and businesses to buy or sell currencies online. 
Agarwal moved to London in 2001 after being headhunted by a foreign exchange broking firm.
Agrawal’s company is reported to be one of the UKs fastest growing companies and recorded a turnover of 180 million last year.
Agarwal moved to London in 2001 after being headhunted by a foreign exchange broking firm..

US
Music Conductor Zubin Mehta has been awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, one of art’s richest awards, for his lifetime work with orchestras around the world. 
Mehta, 72, one of the leading Asians in western classical music, has led philharmonic orchestras in Berlin, New York, Tel Aviv and Vienna. 
As executive director and president of the New York Philharmonic, Mehta led a landmark performance of the 106-member orchestra in Pyongyang in February.

GUJARAT DIASPORA

US
THE TWIN Towers of New York’s World Trade Centre are the ones remembered by the public but the complex actually had seven towers, some of them much smaller than the iconic towers 1 and 2. Towers 4 and 5 are now being rebuilt and the job of protecting their vulnerable underground parking space has been entrusted to Jaydev Desai of New Jersey. Desai, employed at Liberty Security Partnership, works with 30 other engineering firms. He teams up with the concerned engineers to review drawings and ensure there is no conflict in the designs. A priority is to figure out how every vehicle going into the underground garages can be chemically and otherwise tested for explosives.

Thailand 
NISHITA SHAH, 28, an Indian origin businesswoman from Thailand figures in Forbes magazine’s list of next-generation billionaires. 
Shah is one of the richest people in Thailand because of her stake in her family’s sprawling business empire with an estimated net worth of 375 million. When the stunning heiress is not poring over financial reports or gracing the pages of Thai magazines, she’s planning her upcoming fashion line. 
"My dad said I could study anything I wanted as long as it was business," says Shah, who holds a business degree from Boston University. 
Shah is the largest individual shareholder and director of Precious Shipping, Thailand’s biggest dry-bulk shipper.
Later this year, she is launching her own fashion label, Nsha, on three continents.
After the tsunami of 2004 she helped the fishing village Baan Talay Nok "promising to help it recover and to cover the educational costs through university for children who lost one or both parents, roughly 20 in all," according to Forbes.
With her mother Anju Shah, she’s a patron and fund raiser for the Queen Sirikit Centre for Breast Cancer.