LODESTARS OF THEIR OWN SKY

YOU HAVE TWO FORMS OF greatness. There are those who acquire more lustre and I power than their peers.

- 

Many of these happen to be in places that necessarily affect the lives of others-politicians come most obviously to mind. But the bulk of them merit comparisons only within their class. In the scales of greatness, they swim with the shoal. Then there are those who rise above their vocations, whose aggregate value has far surpassed the circumscribed limits of their day job. What they inflect is the course of society itself, in material and symbolic ways. In the following pages, we present precisely such an exalted set. Ten icons, who differ only in the life-practices they chose when they started. When they crossed over to greatness, they attained to the same universality.

If any confusion lingers, the names would erase it. You would find the word 'actor' somehow wholly inadequate as a descriptor for, say, Amitabh Bachchan. He's a cultural phenomenon that spills over the embankments to define an epoch itself. It's not difficult to see how this 'flooding' effect works for artists, or sportspersons. To see why, for instance, Sachin Tendulkar is more than the sum of all his runs put together. Our list also has corporate titans, but only those who have been architects of things greater than their company valuations, those who qualify as visionaries and change-makers. Nor is this, by any stretch of the imagination, a toothless club of grey eminences. They are all supremely active, having nowhere exhausted their generative potential-even the nonagenarian automaker R.C. Bhargava. Greatness, at some level, is an inexhaustible fuel.

1 AMITABH BACHCHAN, 82

Actor, Bollywood legend

Eternal Superstar