Rajat Gupta: From lofty board room to lowly jail cell
From being born into a middle-class family in Kolkata to reaching the stellar heights of the highly competitive world of Corporate America, the story of Indian American Rajat Gupta is nothing short of legendary.
With a career graph that could make the best burn with envy, Gupta, who boasts of posts like head of consultancy giant McKinsey, board seats at Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble and special adviser to the United Nations, among other things, has done what not many could have done in his 63 years of life.
A US court held Gupta guilty of providing insider information to Galleon hedge fund founder and friend Raj Rajaratnam, in one of America's biggest insider trading cases.
Born in Maniktala in Kolkata, son of a freedom fighter- turned-journalist father and a school teacher mother, Gupta was orphaned at the age of 18.
Ranking 15 in the IIT entrance exam of 1966, Gupta was admitted to IIT Delhi on a scholarship from where he did his B-Tech in Mechanical Engineering.
He then came to the United States for a graduate degree and finished top of his class at the prestigious Harvard Business School where he studied on a scholarship.
He landed a job at consulting giant McKinsey and quickly rose through the ranks.
In 1994, he was made the global head of the firm, the first non-American to hold that position.
Gupta's enviable resume boasted of job profiles as board members of some of the biggest US companies. After 10 years at McKinsey, Gupta joined the boards of many
