The Hindu : In father's footsteps

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 01, 2003

International

International

In father's footsteps

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON: "Like father, like son" is no longer a figure of speech in the Maini household which has become the first British Asian family in which a son has followed in his father's footsteps to get a non-hereditary knighthood. Forty-six years after his father was knighted in 1957, the India-born Ravinder Mani, Professor of Rheumatology at Imperial College, London, was on Wednesday given a knighthood for his path-breaking research on rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers were hard put to recall any other case in this category of knighthood where both father and son were thus honoured in recent memory. In other categories, however, this is not so rare. `Sir' Ravinder (65), was born in India, grew up in East Africa and came to Britain when he was 15. His father Amar Maini, who died in 1999, was once a mayor of Kampala, and was knighted for public services in East Africa. Would there be a hat-trick some time in the future with Sir Ravinder's son — a young barrister — picking up a knighthood for himself?

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