Governor bobby jindal biography

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Moore H. Shepley Hahn. Wells Flanders Baker. Warmoth Pinchback J. McEnery Nicholls M. Long King O. Allen Noe Leche E. Long Jones Davis E. Jindal gained national attention inwhen he ran for governor for the first time. On January 22,Jindal announced his candidacy for a second gubernatorial race.

Governor bobby jindal biography: Early life and education Jindal

He was the frontrunner in pre-primary polls and defeated 11 opponents in the primary. InJindal was elected as the 55th Governor of Louisiana, becoming the first Indian-American to hold that position. At the age of 36, he was also the youngest governor in the country. That's how it worked in Baton Rouge, a town of hidden staircases and secret tunnels built by a politician who once boasted that he bought other pols like sacks of potatoes.

Governor bobby jindal biography: Bobby Jindal was sworn in as

The part-time legislators — who can often be seen dressed in seersucker suits — are housed together for the duration of the session in a historic, pentagon-shaped barracks; as you would expect, the cookouts in the courtyard are legend. There are actually only four sides to the Pentagon Barracks, built in the early s. The fifth had to be torn down due to construction flaws attributed by some to graft.

Though Jindal had courted the legislators with ardor during the special sessions, once the regular session started, in late March, he'd stopped answering calls. Visiting McCain's Sedona ranch with the other vice-presidential hopefuls and their wives. Bobby's wife, Supriya Jolly Jindal, was born in India. They went to the same high school for a period; she once turned him down for a date.

She has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering and an MBA from Tulane; she has also completed all the coursework for a Ph. For fun, she said in an interview in the mansion, she does calculus problems. They have three children — Selia, six, Shaan, four, and Slade, two. Shaan was born with a heart defect and had surgery as an infant.

Slade was born precipitously at home inand Bobby delivered the eight-pound, 2. He launched into the story of his parents' journey to LSU. The young governor winced, like a bookish kid who's just realized he's wandered into the wrong area of the playground. He looked down into his spidery hands, arranged at the moment as if they were holding an invisible bowl.

He searched inside the bowl for the answer to Leno's question. He went all the way to college.

Governor bobby jindal biography: Piyush "Bobby" Jindal is an

That's pretty amazing. His hands knit together protectively and fell into his lap. The first time he ran for governor, in — his very first attempt at public office of any kind — Jindal lost in a runoff to Kathleen Blanco the governor during Hurricane Katrina, which hit in Four days before the runoff, polls showed Jindal with a comfortable point lead.

Then Blanco's campaign started running a television ad featuring a picture of a young, very dark-appearing Jindal with his hair disheveled and sticking up. Before it's too late! By Election Day, Jindal was trailing Blanco by 3 points. He did especially poorly in what they call Bubba Country, the northern part of the state, usually a Republican stronghold.

Over the course of the next four years — during which time he successfully ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, raising so much money in the process that he was able to donate to other GOP candidates around the country, ensuring his election as president of the incoming freshman class of congressmen — Jindal visited northern Louisiana, by his own count, more than seventy-seven times.

Many of those visits took place on Sundays at small evangelical churches, where he gave testimony about his conversion from a Hindu to a Roman Catholic. Some churchgoers noted that they had never before heard a Roman testify in quite the way Jindal did, casting his own experience in terms similar to that of a born-again fundamentalist. Reporters noted that Jindal had taken to wearing cowboy boots.

Inrunning in the primary against twelve other candidates Blanco did not seek reelectionJindal won with 54 percent of the vote — the first candidate to win an open gubernatorial seat outright since Louisiana adopted its nonpartisan primary governor bobby jindal biography in This time Jindal carried Bubba Country by a considerable margin. There was even a group called Bubbas for Bobby.

Now Jindal put on a huge, embarrassed smile. Speaking into the reformed bowl of his hands, he bravely told the story Leno wanted — how he'd taken his name from the youngest of television's three Brady brothers, who lived in a blended family with three blond stepsisters in the idealized suburbs of the American seventies. And then you go and do the sleaziest profession of all.

If Jindal inherited his looks from his mother, he may well have inherited his drive from his father, who reminded his sons every day how lucky they were to live in America. Amar Jindal grew up in northern India during the chaotic years that followed the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The family lived in a remote farming community that was backward even by Indian standards — the main source of fuel for cooking and heat was dried cow dung.

Amar's mother was illiterate. His father was educated to the fifth grade. In time, Amar graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Punjab University. He married a classmate's sister, Raj; she had a master's degree. The Jindals settled into graduate-student housing near LSU. In the eyes of an immigrant, Louisiana in was paradise on earth.

There were abundant oil and gas reserves, thriving industry, major ports, multiple railroads, jobs aplenty, the guarantee of schooling for all. Amar got a good job with one of the railroads; Raj switched from nuclear physics to the budding field of computer science and was hired by the state of Louisiana as one of its first IT people. Thirty years later, she is still working in the same department.

Technically, Bobby is her boss. Jindal remembers his parents always working hard. For a time the family had no car; they rode the bus everywhere.

Governor bobby jindal biography: Jindal was born in

Amar took great pains to be home at night to read to his son before bed, something Bobby now tries to do with his own children. Supriya complains that Bobby's version of monster hide-and-seek gets the kids riled up at bedtime. All three children sleep together in one room, right next door to the master. You get the picture of a little family camped out in only a few rooms upstairs in a huge old mansion.

After his own bus rides home from work, Amar didn't have quite so much energy. Frequently, it would be he who fell asleep during story time. Bobby would pad out and dutifully report to his mother: Dad's asleep. Jindal remembers his father being disappointed with A's — it had to be A-pluses. As a youngster, Bobby competed in tennis tournaments, but later he would turn entrepreneurial, starting a computer newsletter, a retail candy business, and a mail-order software company.

He also worked the concessions at LSU football games, and rooting for the Tigers remains a passion to this day. Jindal has said that when he was growing up, there were "several" other Asian Indian families in the Baton Rouge area and that he was raised in a "strong Hindu culture. Jindal has spoken of attending weekly pujas, reading the Vedic scriptures, and making trips back to India to visit relatives.

At the same time, he said recently during a conversation in the back of his SUV as he was driven through Baton Rouge, "my parents, and my mom especially, were adamant that, 'Look, we made the decision to come to America, our kids are Americans, they should grow up fully American. The Jindals lived in a series of apartments for nearly seven years, until the birth of Bobby's younger brother, Nikesh.

Today, Nikesh Jindal is a thirty-year-old lawyer in Washington. He went to Dartmouth and Yale — "Quite a shock for a southern boy," he said on the phone recently with a chuckle. Unlike Bobby, he has no southern accent. Nikesh remembers fondly the family's one-story, three-bedroom house in a "small little neighborhood where you knew all the people on the street.

All requests for an interview with Amar and Raj Jindal were declined. At the time, the school system in the city was under a controversial desegregation order; while the LSU community lent some diversity, Baton Rouge was still very much a part of the Old South.