7 Popular leaders of the World

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th and current president of United States. He is the only African american to hold the seat. Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Dunham’s mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G. I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii.

Meantime, Barack’s father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama’s parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue Ph. D. studies and then returned to Kenya.

His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro–Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).

He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African–American.

In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. And he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years.

After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science.

Sonia Gandhi

While studying English at the university of Cambridge met Rajiv Gandhi a mechanical engineering student and son of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The couple married in 1968 and moved into the prime ministers official residence, although Rajiv eschewed politics for a career as a commercial airline pilot. However, in 1980 his brother, Sanjay, died, and Rajiv subsequently entered the political arena. When Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, Rajiv was named Prime minister. Though Sonia campaigned for Rajiv, she chose to remain in the background, studying art restroation and working to preserve India’s artistic treasures.

When Rajiv was assassinated in 1991, Sonia was seen by many as the natural heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and she was offered the leadership of the congress party. She rejected the offer and refused to discuss politics publicly. In 1993, however, she visited Rajiv’s former constituency in Amethi, Uttar pradesh and was greeted by cheering crowds. She subsequently traveled throughout the country on behalf of trusts and committees devoted to Indian public life.

In 1998 Gandhi agreed to become president of the then-struggling Congress Party. Her initial efforts were overshadowed by the party’s loss to the Bharatiya janata party in the following election. Following a nationwide campaign that targeted struggling farmers and the unemployed, the Congress party the 2004 election but failed to secure an absolute majority. The party subsequently formed a new coalition called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Gandhi, however, chose not to head the government as prime minister, because her foreign birth had become a politically controversial issue. Instead, she invited the economist Manmohan Singh as prime minister.

In 2006 Gandhi resigned from the Lok Shaba(the lower house of the Indian parliament) and as chairperson of the National Advisory Council—which oversaw the implementation of UPA policies and provided a salary to Gandhi for her work—after accusations that she was breaking a law that banned members of parliament from holding an additional office for profit. She was reelected several months later, however. Her only son, Rahul Gandhi, was also a prominent politician.