Ajit Kumar Jha
NEW DELHI: It is a rich girl meets nerdy boy romance story. The romance started in the salubrious surroundings of the sunny Stanford university campus, at Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, in northern California. The rich girl from India, the nerdy boy from Britain, child of Indian parents. Both Akshata Narayan Murty (the rich girl) and Rishi Sunak (the nerdy boy) were MBA students at Stanford. Both are born in 1980.
Akshata, the first-born child of Infosys’s former Chairman and cofounder NR Narayana Murthy, met the lanky and nerdy Rishi Sunak, a Fulbright scholar, who had earlier studied at Winchester school and Oxford University, in the United Kingdom, during an interview at Stanford.
The British-born Rishi, a child of Indian origin parents (Dr Yashvir and Usha Sunak born in Kenya and Tanzania respectively)) began wooing Akshata from day one. Soon that interview meeting blossomed into a romance. And in August 2009, typically in a happily ever after story, the two tied the knot with seven phere around the fire in Bengaluru. The wedding lasted three days and was attended by the global glitterati. Kiran MazumdarShaw, the Biocon Billionaire hosted the mehndi ceremony. The Kannada meal was catered by the Adiga Adiga family. Nandan Nilekani and Azim Premji attended the wedding ceremony. The celebrity couple has two daughters: Krishna and Anoushka Sunak is worth Canadian $ 1.1 billion (730 million British pounds) claims Sunday Times Rich List, making his fortune as a hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs in the US.
Rishi-Akshata is together worth twice as much as Queen Elizabeth II (estimated at Can $ 657 million by Forbes). Her Infosys stake is estimated at $600 million (Rs 5,000 crore) alone. For a while, the British press went to town claiming that Akshata did not pay UK tax on her overseas income, although the practice is legal.
The fact that father-in-law Narayana Murthy was an icon for Rishi as a boy helped firm up the Rishi-Akshata romance story. Sunak often repeats Murthy’s maxim: `In God we trust. Everybody else brings data to the table.’
