tech2 News Staff

American business magnate, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, has been penning down his thoughts in his much subscribed blog for a long time. In a recent addition, among the other year enders, the technology entrepreneur oddly penned down a list of his favourite fanatics of 2016, a list that also included one Indian, Nandan Nilekani.

Gates on his blog called GatesNotes, aptly titled the paragraph as "Rebooting India" after Nilekani's recently published book. He recalled how he had met Nilekani more than 20 years ago which was when the entrepreneur was busy setting up Infosys. Soon after, he recalled how Nilekani went from hard-core entrepreneur to philanthropist and soon enough left Infosys to become chairman of India's new identity card system, Aadhar, providing biometric ID to billions in India.

As of today, Nilekani is busy finding ways to improve the lives of the poor by setting up EkStep, which is a non-profit using smartphone-based apps to help underprivileged children learn. Gates was quick to comment how both share a common optimism about how a digital revolution can bring about a change in India which was brought to light in a recent interview by the Financial Times.

Apart from Nandan Nilekani, who was number 3 on his list of fanatics for the year. Former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter made it to number 1 followed by Nate Bowling, Washington State Teacher of the Year. Nilekani was followed by Dr. Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington who has helped collaborated and brought together a number of institutions to make health research and data more meaningful. Last but not the least, was Ken Caldiera who Gates called one of his best teachers. Caldiera is a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and investigates issues to do with and related to climate change, and energy systems.

Gates is all about giving and recently played Secret Santa on Reddit giving a lucky user a ton of gifts. Bill Gates recently presented a lecture at Niti Aayog, on “Transforming India.” The lecture was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and senior government officials. Gates spoke about how Technology could be one of the biggest drivers for social transformation.