Meet Jindal, first South Asian American governor

ASPIRING HIGH: Piyush Darbash ‘Bobby’ Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge.

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New Delhi: Republican Bobby Jindal made history today by becoming the first South Asian American governor of a US state, winning the Louisiana election. So who exactly is Bobby Jindal?

Piyush Darbash ‘Bobby’ Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Indian immigrants.

His parents Amar and Raj Jindal had immigrated to Baton Rouge almost 40 years ago.

They were attending graduate school at that time of his birth. Bobby was a Hindu but converted to Catholicism as a teenager. He adopted his name Bobby after watching the Brady Bunch television program.

He ran for the Governor's post for the first time at the age of 32 when he was already Louisiana's health care secretary and assistant secretary in the US Department of Health and Human Services under President George W Bush.

Jindal lost to Democrat Kathleen Blanco in 2003 in that race. He is only the second Indian in congressional history after Dalip Singh Saund, a Democrat who represented California's 29th District from 1957 to 1963.

Jindal was a Hindu who converted to Catholicism as a teenager.

He attended high school at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. In 1991, he graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with honors in biology and public policy.

Afterwards, he received a master's degree in politics from New College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

After Oxford he joined McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm. In 1997, he married Supriya Jolly. The couple have three children, Selia, Shaan, and Slade.

Jindal will become the first non-white Louisiana governor since Reconstruction in the 1870s. He is a conservative who ran on promises to stop political corruption, cut taxes and improve schools.