Mamata Banerjee (Bengali: মমতা বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়, pronounced [mɔːmoːt̪ʰaː bɛːnaːrjiː]; born 5 January 1955) is the 11th and current Chief Minister of West Bengal. She is the first woman to hold the office. Banerjee founded All India Trinamool Congress in 1997 and became chairperson, after separating from the Indian National Congress. She is usually called "Didi" (meaning elder sister). She is often cited by the media and critics to be as "megalomaniac, eccentric and populist politician".

Banerjee pulled off a landslide victory for the All India Trinamul Congress (AITMC ) or (TMC) in West Bengal by defeating the world's longest-serving democratically-elected communist government, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government, bringing to an end 34 years of Left Front rule in the state. Banerjee previously served as a Minister of Railways twice, Minister of Coal, and Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Department of Youth Affairs and Sports and Women and Child Development in the cabinet of the Indian government. She opposed forceful land acquisition for industrialisation by the then communist government in West Bengal for Special Economic Zones at the cost of agriculturalists and farmers.

Pranab Kumar Mukherjee (born 11 December 1935, Mirati; West Bengal, India) is the current Finance Minister of India and leader of the current 15th Lok Sabha.

Mukherjee is a senior member of the Cabinet Committees on Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Parliamentary Affairs, Political Affairs, Prices, Security, Unique Identification Authority of India, World Trade Organization, and heads the Group of Ministers Committee on the Dabhol dispute. He is a member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC).

His father Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee was a member of AICC, and West Bengal Legislative Council (1952–64), and President, District Congress Committee, Birbhum (WB). He attended the Suri Vidyasagar College, Suri (Birbhum), then affiliated with the University of Calcutta.

He holds a Master of Arts degrees in History and Political Science & has a degree in law from the University of Calcutta. He has been an advocate and a college teacher in his long public career.^{[citation needed]} In 2011 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by University of Wolverhampton.

Taslima Nasrin (Bengali: তসলিমা নাসরিন, Arabic: تسليمة نسرین‎ Toslima Nasrin) (born 25 August 1962) is a Bangladeshi author and former physician who has been living in exile since 1994. From a modest literary profile in the late 1980s, she rose to global fame by the end of the 20th century owing to her feminist views and her criticism of Islam in particular and of religion in general.

Since fleeing Bangladesh in 1994 she has lived in many countries, and currently (June 2011) lives in New Delhi. She works to build support for secular humanism, freedom of thought, equality for women, and human rights by publishing, lecturing, and campaigning. Her name, Taslima Nasrin, is also spelled Taslima Nasreen.

She was born to Rajab Ali and Idul Ara in the town of Mymensingh in 1962. Her father was a physician, and she followed in his footsteps. She later revealed in her autobiography Amar Meyebela that as a child she was physically abused by her parents and molested by two of her uncles.

After high school in 1976 (SSC) and higher secondary studies in college (HSC) in 1978, she studied medicine at the Mymensingh Medical College an affiliated medical college of the University of Dhaka and graduated in 1984 with an MBBS degree; in college, she showed a propensity for poetry by writing as well as editing a poetry journal. After graduation, she practiced gynaecology at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, "where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped," and heard women in the delivery room cry out in despair if their baby was a girl. She was reassigned in 1990 to work in Dhaka. Born into a Muslim family she became an atheist over time. In course of writing she took a feminist approach

Uddhav Thackeray (Marathi: उद्धव ठाकरे) (born 27 July 1960) is the executive president of the Shiv Sena, a right-wing, Marathi ethnocentric regional political party based in the Indian state of Maharashtra. He was given this role in 2004, taking over from his father and party founder, Hindu nationalist politician Balasaheb Thackeray.

Earlier, Uddhav was looking after Saamana (a daily Marathi newspaper) while being actively involved in election campaigning activities. The party won the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation election in 2002 and, thereafter, he was appointed as the party working president in 2003. Differences between Thackeray and former Shiv Sena leader Narayan Rane culminated in the expulsion of Rane from the Shiv Sena. Another split in the Sena came when Thackeray and his cousin Raj Thackeray had a falling-out, leading to Raj leaving the Shiv Sena in 2006 to form his own party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena.

The Maharashtra Desha, a book by Uddhav, depicts the heritage of Maharashtra in the form of aerial photographs.