Dinesh Trivedi

Former Minister of Railways, Dinesh Trivedi, was a master in switching gears in his career before he embarked on a political journey. Here too he played hop, skip and jump with his allegiance to political parties, pledging his loyalty to Congress in the '80s, Janata Dal in the '90s and then finally hanging his political hat in Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress party in the late '90s. Prior to threading the political fields, He graduated with an MBA in 1974, he worked in Chicago for two years for the Detex Company, before returning to India, where he worked for a logistics provider Lee and Muirhead. In 1984, he quit his job to start his own air freight company based in Kolkata. He also started a consumer protection center. His most notable feat is his contribution in making the Vohra report on the criminalization of politics in India, which paved a way to the Right To Information Act (RTI) movement. He was appointed as the Minister of Railways in 2011. However, his tenure was a brief one as he was forced to resign after he incurred the wrath of party leader Mamata by proposing a railway fare hike in over a decade without her consent. A vehement critic of the Modi Government, he's been known to quip witty jibes at the party, often doling out disparaging statements like Since achhe din are nowhere in sight, please give us back our bure din, which might be perceived as poor taste but it is nonetheless clever/witty.