Arun Sarin is CNN-IBN Indian of the Year-Global Indian

INDIAN AT HEART: Sarin has taken his company Vodafone to glorious heights.

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New Delhi: The year 2007 has been phenomenal for Indians on the world stage, but one of them stood out, so no wonder CNN-IBN has chosen Arun Sarin as Indian of the Year for the global Indian category.

The dapper CEO of Vodafone may be an Indian citizen who today lives in London, but he was born and educated in Panchmarhi and is an IIT-ian from Kharagpur.

And being away from India has only made his heart grow fonder, Sarin has just committed $2 billion from Vodafone to connect rural India with the rest of the world.

So it could be rightly said that he is a man who put his money where his heart is.

Sarin and Vodafone first connected with India through a $1 ½ billion-deal with Bharti in 2005. Sarin himself came visiting the next year only to get more involved in his ‘love affair’ with India.

Vodafone was interested in a controlling stake in one of India's largest telecom companies, Hutchison Essar.

And among Sarin's competitors were Reliance Communications, Essar, already a partner of Hutch, the Hinduja group and the Malyasian Telecom Giant Maxis.

However, Sarin was fighting for more than just a stake in a telecom company. He was fighting for a greater international commitment to India. He bid a whopping $11 billion.

The competition melted away, but the battle had only just begun. The government put up so many roadblocks that Sarin was pushed to the wall.

There were days of determined negotiation, helplessness, endless trips to government offices and finally, tortuously, the deal came through. Hutch gave way to Vodafone.

Living the Indian dream

Once he was a little boy in Panchmarhi, dreaming of one-day flying fighter jets. His father was in the army and encouraging, but mother said a flat no.

She was scared of what might happen to him in air. She didn't know that he was destined to become one of the rulers of India's airwaves.

Sarin has worked in the telecommunications industry almost all his life so he is an adept engineer and manager, technocrat and administrator rolled into one.

Arriving in the United States at the age of 22 and struggling up the corporate ladder against prejudices and stereotypes to become the CEO of the largest telecom company in the world, Sarin has always been a fighter.

Yet his personal mission was in India and not America. It was in this country that Arun Sarin, global CEO, fought one of his life's biggest battles to change bureaucratic mindsets, old attitudes and restrictive regimes to target a 100 million-subscriber base.

And this global Indian reached out to a local Indian from across the seven seas, as if to say, “This is where I really belong”.

He's 56 years old, works 18 hours a day and has always focused on emerging markets like Turkey, Romania and India.

As they say, you can take the man out of India, but you can never take India out of the man.

Jury member Nandan Nilekani explains why Sarin made it to the top:

“We all felt that in the global Indian category, Arun Sarin was the right choice. He is the CEO of the world’s largest and most respected companies in the world, Vodafone. Secondly he has made the biggest investment into India when he brought Hutch and Vodafone to India. The investment and the faith in India as well as the success has seen him become a global CEO, and that is why he was chosen as the Global Indian of the Year.”