Amitabh Bachchan - Known to many as "the king of Indian cinema," Big B is the hands-down winner, leading in almost every category we took into consideration. Last December, Bachchan gained the honor of being the first Indian movie star to have his effigy sculpted for Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London. The 58-year-old actor has been in more than 100 films since 1969. His biggest hit, Sholay (Flames), packed theaters throughout its enormously successful five-year run in India. Won last year's BBC "Star of the Millennium" poll. Revived his flagging career when he became host of India's version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.

Hrithik Roshan - The son of Rakesh Roshan, one of India's most famous directors, the 23-year-old newcomer has made a sudden impact in just six films, including Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, which currently reigns at the top of the box office. Roshan is often referred to in the Indian media as Bollywood's next superstar, but he has clearly arrived and already ranks No. 2 in earnings per film behind Bachchan. Roshan is scheduled to be in more than 10 films in the next two years.
		Aamir Khan - The son of renowned director Tahir Husain was a sensation as a child star in the 1970 hit Yaadon Ki Baaraat. Khan won the Filmfare Best Actor award in 1997. Aamir gets the nod with his recent power move into producing films as well acting.
Returned to Bhuj, India, last month after an earthquake devastated the Gujurat village where he shot Lagan, Once Upon a Time in India. Khan was very active in raising relief money for victims of the quake, which claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and left tens of thousands homeless.
		Aishwaria Rai rocketed to international fame after winning the 1994 Miss World contest. Before that, she was a model and architecture student. The 27-year-old actress has appeared in 20 films since taking the crown, nine of them last year.
While some critics have panned her acting abilities, lucrative endorsements for Palmolive, Casio pager, Pepsi and Philips Television, and the highest rating on our Web-search ranking, catapult her into the top five.
One of India's most beloved actresses, Madhuri Dixit has appeared in more than 50 movies since 1986 and has won the Filmfare Best Actress award three times. Like Rai, she was a top model before becoming an actress. Since her 1999 wedding to an American-trained surgeon, rumors have persisted that she will retire.

While India's biggest celebrity actors are treated like royalty by an adoring public, they are also the subject of the kind of media gossip that would make a National Enquirer reporter blush. The most popular Indian actors earn about one-twentieth of what their American counterparts make, with top earner Bachchan reportedly barely cracking $1 million per film. And production costs for a Bollywood film are miniscule when weighed against the Hollywood standard. The budget for an Indian blockbuster tops out around $4 million, whereas comparable American films routinely exceed $100 million.

But India's film industry puts ours to shame in terms of the drama that takes place behind the camera. Feuds between actors are carried out in public and often reach epic proportions; death threats, assaults, extortion attempts and murky financing are all part of the game.

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India's pioneering healthcare project - Quality care is provided for very little money 8 March, 2001, BBC, By Vir Singh

Delhi - The back lanes of the modest Delhi neighbourhood of Daryaganj are not the kind of place most Indians would expect to find a clean, fully-equipped hospital. Yet this is where Dr Shroff's Charitable Eye Hospital has served the poor for the last 85 years, earning a reputation for providing quality care for very little money.

In the mid-1990s, when traditional funding sources dried up, the hospital faced certain bankruptcy. So it decided to make a break with the past - by attracting private patients and using some of their money to treat charity patients. Dr Steven Roy, the hospital's chief executive officer, says finding patients who can pay the full fee is difficult because of what he calls the organisation's "image problem."

To overcome the barrier, the Shroff hospital has a separate waiting room for private patients, who can make an appointment so as to avoid a long wait. Charity patients, in another part of the hospital, must sometimes wait for several hours. Hospital authorities maintain, however, that the quality of treatment is the same for all patients.

Om Prakash Shakad, who looks to be in his late seventies, says he was nearly blind before coming to the Shroff hospital. "Now I can recognise your face," he says. "I couldn't do that before." For each visit, he pays a mere 10 rupees.

Subsidised treatment His treatment is subsidised by people like Rajesh Shukla, whose mother is a private patient. The fact that some of the fee is used to provide free treatment does not bother him. Most paying patients praise the hospital's social mission. Revenues earned from private patients currently support 40% the Shroff hospital's running costs. This figure is expected to rise to 100% by the middle of next year.

Can this business model work for much larger public health services that serve the bulk of India's poor? Dr Lalit Nath, a former director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, says this could eventually happen as many things have changed. Dr Nath says some state governments have started allowing public hospitals to keep some of the revenues earned from private patients. The authorities hope that this will substantially improve access to health services, especially for the poor.

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Volunteers in the Virtual World - Silicon Valley dot-commers do charity work on the Web 2 March 2001, San Francisco Chronicle, By Bill Workman

At 25, software developer Nipun Mehta would seem too young to be thought of as a sage. But that's what this bright, intense, Silicon Valley visionary has become to many of his peers with his message of service to others in a high-tech world notorious for the self-absorbed pursuit of money and the perks of wealth.

Two years ago, Mehta, already embarked on a quest for more balance in his highly competitive life, invited a dozen or so friends - mostly Indian Americans like himself whose dot-com careers were flourishing - to his parents' Santa Clara home for pizza and talk. What he had in mind was enlisting them in what has become one of Silicon Valley's most innovative approaches to charity, organizing volunteers to donate their highly valued technological skills in helping low-budget, nonprofit organizations build Web sites.

"It seemed like a good fit," recalls Mehta. "Nonprofits often don't have the financial resources to afford a good Web site, and we have these special skills that could really help."

What emerged from that initial meeting was CharityFocus Inc.(charityfocus.org), an online organization that now has more than 900 volunteers in several nations. Breaking up into teams of three or four and working largely through the Internet, they have provided free services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to 450 nonprofits in the Bay Area and beyond. But just as important as helping others, says Mehta, is the role he sees his charity playing in "inspiring a spirit of service in ourselves, working on the fundamental principle of compassion."

Even as dot-com stocks have plunged in recent months, the number of volunteers continues to grow, says Mehta, including some who have been laid off by corporate cutbacks. Beneficiaries of his talented volunteers have ranged from soup kitchens and senior centers to dental programs for the poor, grassroots housing projects and, more recently, newly emerging groups in Mehta's native India devoted, among other things, to rural economic development, literacy and population control.

One of those who came to Mehta for help was Airline Ambassadors International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that arranges for airline personnel and other frequent travelers to deliver clothing, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid to children around the world.

''We didn't have the skills or the money for a professionally designed Web site. But what Nipun and his team created was not only beautiful, but became an essential ingredient to our success as an organization," said Nancy Rivard, a Burlingame flight attendant and the nonprofit's founder. She was also greatly impressed by Mehta's dedication to doing good works, which has spread to other projects, including a program to help exiled Tibetan teenagers living in India that has attracted the attention of the Dalai Lama and the Richard Gere Foundation.

Mehta's online charity operates on a shoestring annual budget of little more than $5,000, with most of its software and Web hosting needs donated by a half-dozen Silicon Valley companies he lobbied for help. "This is all volunteer," says Mehta.

He is now devoting himself full-time to his charity work, having resigned in June from his job at Sun Microsystems, where he says he was earning upward of $100,000 a year. When he left, he had stockpiled enough savings to take care of his needs for several months. "When I need more money, I'll go back to work for a while and get it," he says.

Mehta's savings also helped pay the cost of a trip late in December to India that was prompted by a flood of e-mail inquiries from there following a CNN report on his charitable work. Behind his inspirational rhetoric is a shrewd, skeptical mind. Mehta admits that while his purpose in traveling to India was ostensibly to test interest in setting up CharityFocus chapters, he also wanted to make sure those he was dealing with weren't hoping to financially exploit a connection to the fabled riches of Silicon Valley.

Mehta, who first programmed a computer at age 7 and graduated from Santa Clara's Wilcox High School at 16, has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a member of the tennis team. The living room of his parents' house is lined with more than two dozen of his tennis trophies, but he says he has little time now for the sport, even though the Wilcox High courts are just a few blocks away.

A Hindu and an admirer of India's famed Mohandas Gandhi, whom he often quotes and whose ascetic life he seeks to emulate, the lean 6-footer beds down at night in a sleeping bag in a sparsely furnished room down the hall from his computers.

''In a sense, it symbolizes simplicity for me and living in the moment," he said. "I don't want to be defined by all my stuff." One of Mehta's biggest fans is author Tom Mahon, a longtime critic of Silicon Valley's historically low ranking in charitable giving. "A lot of people worried that Generation X was soulless and focused only on the technology, but Nipun Mehta is living testimony to the fact it ain't necessarily so," said Mahon.

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