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Over the next hour, I'll be introducing portraits by Professor Sunil Killani of outstanding individuals from over 2,000 years of Indian history,

from the fields of science, history, literature and politics, some remembered and some forgotten. I was born in the incredibly poor state of Bihar which has

an international image that is almost entirely negative except that is for its

association with the Buddha and that's where we start with the global Indian and

the Buddha waking India up. The sun slipped down behind the tarp roofs and day laborers are streaming home from 10 hour days

ferrying materials to office buildings under construction or trimming thorny

Bougainvilla on the manicute campus of a nearby private school. On this particular web of slum lanes, the cast lineage of most of the workers is Dalit, the untouchables of old.

Most months, their financial situation boils down to what people around here call

earn and eat, but for two years the workers here set aside what little they could

for bricks and mortar and now they have a deep blue room about 5 meters square

that stands distinct from all the other hand-built rooms in the slum. A temple devoted to Buddha in a Mumbai slum.

This particular sacred spot is tucked behind a scrap dealers.

In the West, the Buddha is often seen as the original impersonal man, the extinguisher of his own personality. Indeed, after attaining his

Enlightenment, it's said he referred to himself as Tataga, gone. But in modern India, paradoxically, the Buddha has helped hundreds of millions of low-cast citizens

to be the opposite of gone or invisible. His ideas have allowed them to be newly present,

to step outside the Hindu class system's iron cage.

Here in this temple put up more than 10 years ago, everyone is equal.

It was all built together.

So people from many different backgrounds came together to get.

...