Dinesh Trivedi, Lok Sabha MP and former Railway Minister, was born in New Delhi on June 4, 1950, to Hiralal and Urmila Trivedi, a Gujarati couple. They had migrated to India from Karachi during India's partition. Partition took a terrible toll on the stability of the Trivedis who moved from Patiala to Ropar to Bhatinda and then to New Delhi.
Stability came when his father landed a job at the Hindustan Construction Company in Kolkata. The family settled down there and Trivedi attended boarding schools in Himachal Pradesh, before graduating in commerce from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta.
He then reportedly took a loan of Rs 20,000 to travel to the United States of America to secure an MBA degree from The University of Texas at Austin. He was the president of the International Students' Association at the university.
During his stay in the US, he trained to be a pilot, fulfilling his childhood fantasy of flying for the Indian Air Force. Subsequently, he would learn to play the sitar and, according to an unconfirmed news report, would apply to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, to train as an actor.
The same news report also mentions that he was drawn towards a picture of Swami Vivekanand in an advertisement placed by the Ramkrishna Mission and decided to be a monk, again to be dissuaded by his family and some Chicago-based Godman.
What is relatively more well-known is that after his MBA in 1974, he worked in Chicago for two years for Detex Corporation. He came back to India and joined logistics provider Lee and Muirhead. In 1984, he quit the job to start his own air freight company based in Kolkata. He also started a consumer protection centre at his office.
Trivedi shot into prominence when he asked the Supreme Court to make the Vohra report on the criminalisation of politics in India public. This petition gave a push to the Right to Information movement.
Trivedi joined the Congress to leave the party for former Prime Minister's VP Singh's Janata Dal. In 1990, he became a Rajya Sabha member from West Bengal. He went on to become the Chairman, Passengers Amenities Committee, Ministry of Railways. However, he joined Mamata Banerjee before too long and was one of the founder members and the first general secretary of the All India Trinamool Congress.
As a second term member of the Rajya Sabha, he served on the Committee on Rules, Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Committee on Finance and Committee on Commerce.
In the 2009 elections, Trivedi contested for the Trinamool Congress and won from Barrackpore to join the lower house in Parliament. He joined the cabinet as the Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare in 2009, a post that he offered to resign from in support of Anna Hazare. In 2011, after Mamata Banerjee quit as the Railway Minister to become the Chief Minister of West Bengal, he was appointed as the Cabinet Minister for Railways after the PM rejected Trinamool MP Mukul Roy who was Mamata's first choice.
Following his presentation of the Railway Budget 2012 on March 14 where Trivedi proposed the first ever passenger fare hike in over a decade, the Trinamool rank came down heavily on him. He finally resigned on March 18. The PM was forced to admit that his loss to the Union Cabinet was significant and that he personally approved of the Railway Budget Trivedi had prepared.
During his tenure as the Railway Minister, Trivedi showed interest in starting high speed passenger trains in India with Japanese or French support. In 2011, the script of the James Bond film Skyfall, part of which was shot on trains in India, had to be changed when Trivedi insisted that people should not be shown travelling on the roofs of trains since it was illegal.
Married to Minal, who holds a PhD in genetics and whose family has roots in Bengal for over the last 150 years, Dinesh Trivedi has a son. Parthsarathi is currently pursuing aerospace engineering from Purdue University, US.
A trained pilot, a fine golfer, a connoisseur of classical music, Dinesh Trivedi is a misfit, in every sense of the word, when it comes to Trinamool Congress whose ranks are dominated by street fighters and masters of electioneering. No wonder he proved to be Mamata's bee in the bonnet.
After the humiliation of having to step down, it needs to be seen if he sticks with the Trinamool flock for long.
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