Krishan Kumar Modi

Krishan Kumar Modi (K.K. Modi), (born 27 August 1940), is an Indian entrepreneur who is the President of Modi Enterprises. Among his three children is Lalit Modi.

Background

Modi was born on 27 August 1940 in Patiala, the eldest son of Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi by his second wife Dayawati Modi. Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi was the founder of the Modi Group. He started his first sugar factory in 1933 and gradually built up a vast business empire by venturing into various industrial sectors in the period before and after independence. The young K.K. Modi thus grew up in exciting times, when his father was building the family fortunes, and the country was grappling with major social and political changes.

Career

In 1959, at the age of just 19, Krishan Kumar accompanied his uncle Kedarnath Modi (Gujarmal's step-brother) to several European countries, to explore the possibility of purchasing the latest textile machinery to produce higher quality cloth. Managing the textile production in the silk mill was the next project entrusted to him. In 1965, he was appointed as the Vice-President of Modipon—the then newly established nylon yarn manufacturing unit in Modinagar.

Krishan Kumar

Krishan Kumar (born 1942) is an Indian sociologist who is currently Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia, where he holds the titles University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology.

Kumar was educated at William Ellis School in London and studied as an undergraduate at St John's College, Cambridge and for a master's degree at the London School of Economics. He then worked as a lecturer at the University of Kent from 1967, where he also studied for a PhD, and had a spell as a producer for the talks and documentaries department of the BBC. He remained at Kent, attaining the position of Professor of Social and Political Thought, until his appointment at Virginia in 1996.

Kumar has held several visiting professorships, including at the University of Bristol, the Central European University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research interests include nationalism and European and global history.