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You don't have to know people personally for them to be role models. Some of my most important role models were historical or literary figures that I only read about - never actually met.

I didn't have a role model. My role model was Michael Jordan. Bad role model for an Indian dude... I didn't have anyone who looked like me. And by the time I was old enough to have what could have been a role model, they were my peers. Aziz Ansari is my peer. Kal Penn is my peer.

Ben Kingsley was my ideal choice for Gandhi, and he really lived up to the expectations of an international audience. I did not find any Indian actor worthy to perform the role of Gandhi in the early Eighties, though there were brilliant performers like Naseeruddin Shah in India.

I want to be remembered as someone who put India on the scientific map of the world in terms of large innovation. I want to be remembered for making a difference to global healthcare. And I want to be remembered as someone who did make a difference to social economic development in India.

Mahatma Gandhi was someone who demonstrated the tremendous power of leadership by example.

While my father was a diplomat rather than a business person, I count him as a critically important formative role model. He was comfortable living and working all around the world, wherever he was assigned.

In India, it's hard not to have Gandhi as a hero. To give up everything - including power and money - and to live for his countrymen, that beats everything else. He's a role model of selflessness.

A Bollywood hero, for most people, has been a Raj, a Rahul or a Prem... it's now a part of the psyche.

Rahul Gandhi is very idealistic and a very decent human being. He has real concerns for the downtrodden.

Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.