YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY:

Saviour of the Republicans (Alec MacGillis, 08 January 2009, New Statesman)

[S]lowing down Bobby Jindal's delivery may be beyond the powers of even the best consultant. His rush of words is likely linked to the rush of his ambition, and his ambition - at 37, just two years above the minimum to be president - appears beyond restraint. He began his assimilation aged four, when he announced to his parents, a civil engineer and state official who moved from the Punjab to Louisiana before their son was born, that he wanted to be called "Bobby", after a character in the 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch, rather than his given name, Piyush. He further adapted to his surroundings in his late teens when he left behind his Hindu heritage and converted to Catholicism, a move he chronicled in lengthy confessional writings while at Brown University and then Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

After a brief stint as a management consultant, he got his first job in government at 24, when, with the backing of a congressman he had interned for, he submitted a proposal to reform the state's public health-care system. The governor, impressed, offered him a job as a health department deputy. Jindal all but demanded that he be given the top job instead - and he was. This was followed by spells running the state university system and as a top bureaucrat in the federal health department. He ran for governor at 32, but lost to a Democrat, won a congressional seat the following year, and ran again for governor in 2007 after his former rival had been discredited by her handling of Hurricane Katrina. This time he won, to banner headlines across India. A year later, a few weeks after Barack Obama beat John McCain, there was Bobby Jindal visiting the good people of Cedar Rapids, Iowa - which will hold the first vote three years from now to determine who will lead the Republican rebirth.

Jindal says he has no plans to run for president in 2012. While it is possible he will wait until 2016 if Obama is looking too formidable, it's the rare Louisianan who is actually taking him at his word. "Anybody who knows Bobby Jindal knows he desperately wants to be president," said Bob Mann, a former top aide to a Democratic senator. "Nobody goes to Iowa in November just for pleasure."