born Oct. 27, 1920, Uzhavoor, India President of India (1997-2002). He was the first member of the country's lowest social caste the group traditionally considered to be untouchable to occupy the office. Raised in poverty, he attended the University of Travancore on a scholarship and graduated from the London School of Economics with top academic honours. In 1949 he became a diplomat, despite opposition from upper-caste officials, and was ambassador to several countries, including China and the U.S. After serving as a cabinet minister in parliament, he was named vice president in 1992 and president in 1997
v. born Nov. 7, 1888, Trichinopoly, India died Nov. 21, 1970, Bangalore Indian physicist influential in the growth of science in India. He received a Nobel Prize in 1930 for discovering that when light passes through a transparent material, some of the light that emerges at a right angle to the original beam is of other frequencies (Raman frequencies) characteristic of the material. He contributed to the building up of nearly every Indian research institution in his time, founded a scholarly physics journal and an academy of sciences, and trained hundreds of students