Louisiana congressman Jim McCrery still remembers the telephone call. It was early in 1995, and one of his former summer interns was on the phone to ask a favour. In his spare time, Bobby Jindal told his old boss, he'd written a plan to salvage Louisiana's scandal-ridden Medicaid system. He'd like to return home as the state's next secretary of health.

So would McCrery recommend him to Buddy Roemer, who was leading in the gubernatorial race that year?

McCrery had always been impressed by Jindal, but even he was startled by the audacity of the request.

Just in case Roemer had someone else in mind, the congressman asked, would he consider a job as an assistant secretary?

No, Jindal replied. He would not. In the end, Roemer lost that election. But Jindal became the state's health secretary anyway. He was 24years old. Now at the age of 27, Jindal has a new role nearly as improbable as his last. He is the executive director of a federal commission charged with saving the nation's Medicare system.

A slender figure with a quiet bearing, smooth manners and an intense gaze, Jindal occupies a chair at the head of the table when the commission meets. Surrounding him are senators, members of Congress and some of the nation's most esteemed thinkers on the subject of health care policy. On an average, they are three decades his senior, and their job -- assigned by Congress and the White House -- is to find a way to preserve Medicare, the huge insurance programme for America's elderly that is poised near the edge of insolvency.Created in the 1960s, Medicare has swelled into one of the nation's largest and most popular social programmes, but it is showing its own signs of age.

Its finances are fraying, with the fund that pays hospital bills expected to run out of money in a decade, just before the 77 million-strongbaby boom generation begins to retire.

Helping to shepherd the commission through delicate matters is one of the toughest tasks in Washington. It is also Jindal's first paying federal job.Jindal is the latest embodiment of a recurrent Washington phenomenon: a driven, talented guy who manages to penetrate the city's ego and hierarchy to land in a spectacularly influential spot. Journalist Bill Moyers was not yet 30 when he served as the top assistant to then-Vice President Johnson, deputy director of the Peace Corps, and President Johnson's press secretary. David A Stockman was 26 when he was executive director of the House Republican Conference, before going on to Congress and a berth as director of President Reagan's Office of Management and Budget.

It is a phenomenon that inspires in seasoned, cynical Washington a mixture of wariness and awe. ``If people like what you're doing, you're seen as a Wunderkind. If not, age becomes a way people can question your authority and judgment,'' says Atul Gawande,who was 26 when he left Harvard Medical School to become chief of social policy for President Clinton's 1992 campaign. He became deputy director for health policy on Clinton's transition team, then a senior adviser on health care reform -- one of the cadre of young adults who gave rise to news stories about the ``kids in the Clinton White House.''

Despite his rapid attainments, Bobby Jindal is something of a surprise in person. To be sure, he is supremely self-assured intellectually, with sterling academic credentials. Yet he is so unassuming that, when he was Louisiana's secretary of health and hospitals, he routinely told blind dates merely that he worked for state government. When one young woman pressed him for details, he told her he was a secretary, leaving his dismayed date with the impression he did clerical work.

Those who know Jindal well say he is propelled partly by a deep religious faith. He converted from Hinduism to Catholicism while in college and has published a series of journal articlesabout his religious journey. Since his conversion, he has given 10 per cent of his income to charity.It is his eagerness to be socially useful, combined with a confidence in his own ideas, that have led Jindal to leap into the most gnarled realms of health care policy. ``He has become a very, very smooth politician without having lost any of his ardour to do good,'' says Thomas J Anton, one of Jindal's college thesis advisers.

In Louisiana, his straightforward style and budgetary acumen made him a darling of the state's leading politicians, lobbyists and editorial writers. Yet in Washington, he's had to learn how to work behind the scenes.According to McCrery, Jindal was considered on Capitol Hill first for the job of commission chairman, at a time when the White House and Republican congressional leaders were feuding over who should lead it. Jindal agreed to accept the less visible job of executive director, say several people familiar with his hiring, only after he was assured the role would carryinfluence.

Still, the young director has stirred a flurry of interest that has made the commission a bit uneasy. Co-chairman Rep. Bill Thomas declined interview requests for this article, saying through aides that the attention should be on the commission's work, not its staff. Jindal himself, accustomed in Louisiana to showering the state with his speeches and appearances, deferred to the chairmen's wishes, declining to make any public comment.

Since he arrived in March, he has played a central though seldom visible role, according to Senator John Breaux, the commission's other chairman. With the panel evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, Jindal has helped determine which outside experts are invited to inform the group's thinking, taking care that they reflect an ideological balance. He maintains a kind of shuttle diplomacy between Thomas and Breaux to ensure that the two leaders remain in sync.

Robert Reischauer, a Brookings Institution economist who has testified before the commissionand met privately with Jindal, says that, given the hard-moulded opinions of many commission members, ``he's been dealt a very tough hand.'' Yet Breaux says that Jindal ``brings to the table a great deal of expertise'' and that his newness to Washington is useful. ``You don't want a person who is perceived as a political appointee with a preconceived agenda.''

Jindal has been an independent thinker from an early age. Six months before he was born, his parents emigrated from India to Louisiana to attend graduate school. They named their son Piyush. But when he was 4 the preschooler returned home one day and declared that, from now on, he would be known as `Bobby'. The name, borrowed from the youngest character on `The Brady Bunch', has remained ever since.

He had an entrepreneurial streak early on, operating a successful mail-order computer software business with a friend before either was old enough to open a bank account. Yet he also tutored less able students before and after school and was on the boardof the local Salvation Army.

He pursued degrees at Brown University in both biology and public policy. ``He was brighter than hallelujah,'' says Edward N. Beiser, Brown's associate dean of medicine for humanities and social sciences. A Republican on a liberal campus, Jindal was attending Mass daily and struck Beiser as ``a very straight arrow''.

Jindal maintained a 4.0 grade point average and wrote two honours theses. He earned a perfect score on the law school entrance exam, but then turned down offers from the law schools at Harvard and Yale -- and from their medical schools, as well -- in favour of a Rhodes scholarship.

After Oxford, he had been living in Washington for two years -- earning more than $150,000 a year at the high-powered consulting firm McKinsey and Co. -- when he placed the telephone call that persuaded McCrery to put in a good word to Roemer. After Roemer lost the race, Jindal called McCrery again, asking whether the congressman knew the obscure, conservative state senator, MikeFoster, who had just been elected Louisiana's next governor. McCrery didn't know him but called anyway.

``I thought it was probably going to be a short interview,'' recalls Merv Trail, chancellor of the Louisiana State University Medical Center, who led the incoming governor's health transition team. But when Jindal walked in, with his polished manner and meticulous reform plan, ``he just blew my mind away. You absolutely forgot that he was only 24.''