Rajat Gupta

* How did Rajat Gupta, who belonged to the highest echelons of corporate America, the golden boy of Indian Americans, get convicted of insider trading? How did Rajaratnam get tips on companies like Intel? * Rajat Gupta's impending journey into the federal prison system for criminal insider trading ends a remarkable success story and punctuates his swift fall from grace. * A native of Kolkata, Mr. Gupta, 63 years old, moved at a young age to New Delhi. His father, Ashwini, a disciple of Mohandas Gandhi, was jailed for years in the fight for independence from the British and later was a journalist. His mother, Pran, was a Montessori schoolteacher and principal. * He studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, where he was a "a big man on campus, bright, talented, popular," and head of student government, according to his wife, Anita, who met him there taking part in a one-act play in 1968. * He wrote his essays to apply to Harvard Business School in a local coffee shop. * "It seemed like such a dream," Anita Gupta wrote in a letter last month to the judge who sentenced him Wednesday for giving a hedge-fund manager inside information about Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he was a director. Mr. Gupta agonized when he was accepted to Harvard about leaving his siblings, his wife added, but "decided it was an opportunity he could not afford to miss." * Besides breaking ground in the U.S., Mr. Gupta's success inspired people in his home country. McKinsey was one of a few global companies in which many Indians made their careers, but Mr. Gupta blazed the trail for other Indians who joined the small club of multinational CEOs, including former Citigroup Inc * "He was a hero from an Indian perspective," said Richard Rekhy, head of advisory services for consulting firm KPMG in India. * He came to the U.S. in 1971, delivering newspapers at Harvard to help support himself. Two years later, in New York, he broke into