IN: Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 - 9 September 2012), known as the 'Father of the White Revolution' in India, was a social entrepreneur whose "billion-litre idea", Operation Flood - the world's largest agricultural dairy development programme, made dairy farming India's largest self-sustaining industry and the largest rural employment provider, being a third of all rural income, with benefits of raising incomes and credit, riddance of debt dependence, nutrition, education, health, gender parity and empowerment, breakdown of caste barriers and grassroots democracy and leadership. It made India the world's largest milk producer from a milk-deficient nation, which doubled milk available per person and increased milk output four-fold, in 30 years. He pioneered the "Anand pattern" of dairy cooperatives to replicate it nationwide, based on Amul, his standalone cooperative then, and today India's largest food brand, where 70-80% of the price paid by consumers went as cash to dairy farmers who controlled the marketing, the procurement and the processing of milk and milk products as the cooperative's owners, while hiring professionals for their skills and inducting technology, in managing it. Rather than focusing directly on removing caste and class conflicts which get entrenched as vested interests, instead, he worked singularly on the belief that economic self-interest of all sections of the village-society would make them align together to grow their cooperative.

He was born on 26 November 1921 at Calicut, Madras Presidency (now Kozhikode, Kerala) in a Syrian Christian family. He schooled at Diamond Jubilee Higher Secondary School, Gobichettipalayam, in Coimbatore district (now in Erode district, Tamil Nadu) while his father worked as a civil surgeon at the government hospital there. He joined Loyola College, Madras (now, Chennai) at the age of 14, graduating in science with physics in 1940, and then got a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras, in 1943 He had to fend for himself as he was young for his age in every class. This according to him, developed his sense of independence. He lost his father at 22 and his grand-uncle moved his family to his home in Trichur (now Thrissur). A keen military cadet and a boxer at college, when he wanted to join the army as an engineer, his mother persuaded him to join the Tata Steel Technical Institute, Jamshedpur on a recommendation to the management by his uncle, who was a director with the Tatas, and from where he graduated in 1946, but soon found himself wanting to get away from the hangers-on and yesmen of his uncle.  So he left and applied for a government of India scholarship, and was chosen to study dairy engineering, an irrelevant discipline, much to his surprise and reluctance, but this time his uncle (by now, the finance minister) refused to bail him out. He was thus, sent to the Imperial Institute of Animal Husbandry in Bangalore (now, National Dairy Research Institute, southern station, Bengaluru) where he spent nine months, and merely bid time out to be sent to America. Here too, by choosing some dairying electives, rather perfunctorily, at Michigan State University, he returned with a master's degree in mechanical engineering (metallurgy) (with a minor in nuclear physics), instead, in 1948. While there, when he found himself at the receiving end of racist jibes, the Indian in him saw him, in his words, "put the natives back in their place".  Later, he would say, "I was sent to ... study dairy engineering (on the only government scholarship left) ... I cheated a bit though, and studied metallurgical and nuclear engineering, disciplines ... likely to be of far greater use to my soon-to-be independent country and, quite frankly, to me."  He did train in dairy technology, with a sense of purpose eventually, in 1952-53, on a government sponsorship to New Zealand, a bastion of cooperative dairying then, and to Australia, when he had to learn to set up the Amul dairy.
QUESTION: What did he do after college?
IN: Thomas was born in Woodington, Darke County, Ohio, to Harry and Harriet (nee Wagoner) Thomas. His father was a doctor, his mother a teacher. In 1900, the family moved to the mining town of Victor, Colorado. Thomas worked there as a gold miner, a cook, and a reporter on the newspaper.

Thomas's most amusing on-air gaffe occurred during one of his daily broadcasts in the early 1960s. He was reading a story "cold" (going on the air without pre-reading his copy, contrary to his usual practice) which contained the phrase "She suffered a near fatal heart attack". The line came out of Thomas's mouth as "She suffered a near fart ... err fatal heart attack". Realizing instantly what he had said, he tried to continue but eventually collapsed into gales of laughter, which continued into - and beyond - his announcer's chuckling sign-off for the day.  Thomas' long-time friend and ghostwriter Prosper Buranelli wrote the nightly newscasts. The day's script was sent by teletype to Thomas' home in Pawling, NY from which he usually did his broadcast. One evening, Buranelli's final story was about an actress going into a Los Angeles hotel with a Great Dane. The dog's tail got caught in the revolving door and she sued the hotel for $10,000. Buranelli added a comment to the story to give Thomas a laugh before going on air, but Thomas read the story as written with Buranelli's comment, "Who ever thought a piece of tail was worth 10 grand?"  Another on-air mishap had Thomas reading a story about President Eisenhower's visit to Hershey, Pennsylvania "where he was greeted by the folks who make chocolate bars, with and without nuts." ("Nuts" is a euphemism for "testicles.") As Thomas read the next story, he could hear the announcer breaking up with laughter in the New York City studio, which caused Thomas to break up, as well. Air checks of some of Thomas' gaffes (as well as recreations of his "bloopers") are available to collectors.
QUESTION:
Did Buranelli also write that for him ?