Fullbright for Bharmal

In the summer before his final year at Oxford University where he was reading physics, Zahaan Bharmal interned with Britain’s foreign office in its embassy in Washington, notes a write-up from his grandfather, author Burjor Karanjia. After his graduation with honors, he worked for a year as a strategy consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton before joining the UK cabinet office as policy adviser responsible for broadband and e-Government strategy. In 2004 Zahaan joined the UK Department of International Development to write the Government’s new strategy for tackling HIV-AIDS in the developing world. The strategy was adjudged "the best UK Government policy of the year,” notes the release.

Thereafter Zahaan worked on the UK policy for supporting governments in Africa and Asia in their effort to get more children, especially girls, into school, a subject of interest to the 28-year-old who, between completion of school at St Paul’s, London, and entry into Oxford, had spent five months teaching English in Hong Kong.

Bharmal: multifaceted accomplishments

Widely traveled, including two months spent in China, India and Nepal during the fallow months before joining university, as well as back-packing in New Zealand, Australia and North America, Bharmal’s travel pieces have been published in various publications including The Daily Telegraph. In his Oxford years he wrote for The Cherwell, a student paper, as well as edited his college’s Alternative Prospectus. A tennis and cricket buff and a long distance runner — he is a member of the Serpentine Running Club — Bharmal recently completed the Great North Run, raising over £ 1,000 for Cancer Research UK, states Karanjia. Zahaan loves to read, sketch and paint and took art as an extra A-level subject, adds his mother Rutton (née Karan­jia), a physiotherapist at the Middlesex Hospital in London.

The son of dentist Dr Zulfikar Bharmal, Zahaan has just begun his masters in business administration at Stanford University, USA as a Fullbright scholar. The Bharmals’ daughter Ayesha is a public relations consultant in London.