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Those whom the Gods love...

Born: May 12, 1952
Died: August 23, 2000
Age: 48

He had been suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, a kind of blood cancer, and was admitted one week before his death to New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences with a mild fever.

An energetic member of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's third Cabinet, Ranga Kumaramangalam was the Union power minister at the time of his untimely death.

He hailed from a family of leaders -- his father Mohan, a minister in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet and one of her key advisors, died in an aircrash in 1973; his grandfather P Subbaroyan was governor of Maharashtra and a Congress leader of repute; his uncle General P P Kumaramangalam was Chief of the Army Staff in the late 1960s.

Ranga began his career as a student leader and later became a trade union leader. He was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984 at the age of 32 from Salem in Tamil Nadu. A member of the Congress party, like his father and grandfather before him, he served Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao. In 1998 he joined the BJP. Before his career could take off in his new party, he was dead.