Things about Bobby Jindal you didn't know

Washington, Mar.3 (ANI): Everybody knows that Piyush "Bobby" Jindal is the son of Indian immigrants, that he is 37 and one of the youngest political leaders in the United States, that he is a Republican who has the potential to be the country's future president. But there are aspects to his personality.

Jindal doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't swear and relentlessly hammers his message that the days of corruption and incompetence are over.

Jindal is keen to change the "business as usual" attitude in Louisiana.

Jindal was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His mother earned a doctorate in nuclear physics, while his father was a civil engineer.

Jindal is a man so determined to be true blue American, that he changed his name.

When he was born, Jindal was named Piyush. Asked where the name Bobby came from, Jindal said: "Every day after school, I'd come home and I'd watch 'The Brady Bunch.' And I identified with Bobby, you know? He was about my age, and Bobby stuck."

In high school, he converted from his parents' Hindu faith to Catholicism, and he rejected their political party as well.

Jindal went to Brown University where he studied biology, trying to fulfill his parents' dream to become a doctor. He was admitted to Harvard Medical School and Yale Law, but declined both. Instead he accepted a Rhodes Scholarship, and by the ripe old age of 24 he was running the Louisiana healthcare system.

The editor of the New Orleans Times Picayune, Jim Amoss says "Clearly, an ambitious and very clever young man. But he's also a young man who, by nature, is cautious. There is not a touch of recklessness about him."

Jindal first ran for governor at the age of 31, but lost a close race. Then he was elected twice to Congress.

In 2007, he ran for governor again, and won big.

"He shares, in many ways, the conservative values of people in north Louisiana and then, the other big factor that I think played in north Louisiana, as well as south Louisiana, is Katrina," Amoss explained.

Hurricane Katrina and the bungled state and federal response more than anything else set the stage for change in Louisiana.

But where he seems to be making the biggest waves is in ethics reform. Just weeks after taking office he forced through several bills that among other things called for far more transparency in the financial dealings of politicians.

It was a radical break with a tradition established in the 1930s by that powerful and massively corrupt governor, Huey Long.

Jindal's wife Supriya rivals her husband in the brains department. She has an MBA and is one paper shy of a doctorate. But unlike her husband, she isn't so sure about that relentless political pursuit.

Despite her reluctance, they are quite the team, in both matters political and familial.

They have three children, aged 7, 4 and 2, who have made the governor's mansion their own, and inevitably being compared with the Obamas and their picture-perfect family life.

Asked if their family maintains any of the Indian traditions, Supriya Jindal said "Not too many." (ANI)