Three Indians Walk Into TIME 100

Every April, TIME does its thing. A hundred names, a hundred profiles, a hundred short essays written by people who admire — or at least diplomatically respect — the honoree in question. It's a little bit journalism, more pageantry, and mostly a cultural temperature check of where we stand. This year, three Indians made the cut: a Bollywood actor about to carry the weight of the most anticipated Hindu epic ever put to film, a chef from Amritsar who once sold chole bhature on the streets and now runs one of New York's most talked-about restaurants, and the man who is now regarded as the architect of the world’s most widely-used AI products.

Ranbir Kapoor

Ranbir KapoorTIME

Let's start with the obvious question: why now?

Ranbir Kapoor has been one of Hindi cinema's finest actors for the better part of fifteen years. Rockstar, Barfi, Tamasha, Sanju — the man has delivered, whether you like him or not. But the industry has a complicated relationship with rewarding restraint. You can be great and still get passed over for the conversation. So what changed now?

Ramayana changed it. Nitesh Tiwari's adaptation — possibly the most expensive Indian film ever mounted — has Ranbir playing Lord Rama. Alongside Yash, Sai Pallavi, and Sunny Deol, with a score co-written by A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer, this is a cultural event that the country has been building toward, consciously or not, for years. And Ranbir is the face of it.

That context is everything. The TIME 100 is not a lifetime achievement award. It responds to momentum, to what's about to happen as much as what already has. Ayushmann Khurrana, who wrote Ranbir's profile — and who knows a thing or two about this, having been on this very list in 2020 — frames it well: "There are actors who chase legacy and there are actors who become one through their craft. Ranbir Kapoor is the latter."

Vikas Khanna

This one, honestly, is the best story on the Indian list and possibly one of the best stories on the whole list.

Vikas Khanna was born in Amritsar with a clubfoot, he was bullied through school, and hee learned to cook in his grandmother's kitchen. His mother, when asked about her son's prospects, said: "My son is not born to walk, he is born to fly."

He's 54 now, and yes he’s Michelin-starred. Owner of Bungalow in New York, a restaurant he named for his late sister Radhika. Chef Eric Ripert — one of the most respected figures in fine dining — wrote his TIME profile, and notably, Ripert spends almost none of it talking about food technique. Instead, he describes Khanna as "a man of extraordinary heart," someone whose influence goes well beyond the kitchen, into communities, into culture, into the way Indian food is understood and respected on the global stage.

That last part matters. Indian cuisine has spent decades being flattened in the Western imagination — reduced to a handful of dishes, stripped of its regional complexity, treated as cheap and cheerful rather than serious. Khanna, through Bungalow and through his work as a filmmaker and author, has been pushing back against that for years.

Sundar Pichai

Sundar PichaiTIME

This is probably the least surprising name on this list, and also the one carrying the heaviest load right now.

Pichai has been CEO of Google since 2015. He's seen the company through its mobile dominance years, its antitrust battles, its internal culture wars. But nothing compares to the pressure of the current moment. AI has reordered the entire technology industry, and Google — for all its resources and talent — spent the better part of two years looking like it might be caught off guard by OpenAI.

Pichai's bet has been on breadth over speed. Gemini, AI Studio, and the integration of AI into Search are not flashy in the way that ChatGPT was flashy. They are infrastructure plays — the kind of moves designed to ensure that AI becomes something billions of people use without thinking about it, the way they use Google Maps or Gmail. Andrew Ng, who wrote Pichai's profile, makes this point cleanly: the influence isn't just in what Google builds, it's in the scale at which it reaches people.

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Also on the list are two prominent Indian-origin figures — Zohran Mamdani, the New York politician whose democratic socialist politics have made him one of the more closely watched figures in American municipal politics, and Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube. Their presence underlines what has become a broader pattern: Indian-origin talent shaping institutions far from where they were born.

Three from India. Two from the diaspora. Different industries, different decades, different definitions of what it means to matter. The list gets it right more often than it gets it wrong. This year, on these names at least, it got it right.