Four Indian-Americans on Forbes rich list

Four Indian Americans -- Acoustics pioneer Amar Bose, Google founder director Kavitark Shriram, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Bharat Desai CEO of an infotech outsourcing firm -- have made it to the Forbes list of richest Americans.

With a net worth of $1.8 billion, The 77-year-old sultan of sound, Amar Bose, shares the 271st place in the list, released yesterday, with a founder director of Google Kavitark Shriram.

Both Bose and Shriram, shared 242nd spot last year, went down the list but their personal fortunes have gone up from $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion.

Bose, an acoustics pioneer, formed his firm 43 years ago, which today thrives on the latest in iPod speaker docks, home theatre systems, noise-killing headphones, with a sale of $2 billion.

While 51-year-old Kavitark Shriram, an India-born financier, is an early investor and a board member of Google who owns 1.7 million shares worth $870 million despite selling over 3 million shares in 2004, when it went public.

Another NRI Bharat Desai and his wife Neerja Sethi, founders of an info-tech outsourcing firm Syntel, have been ranked 286th with a fortune of $1.7 billion in the list.

While Indian-American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who had made his presence in the list almost continuously, this time figured at 317th place with a net worth of $1.5 billion.

The 54-year-old Desai, who was born in Kenya but moved to India at the age of 11, studied engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, took programming job in US at Tata Consultancy Services in 1976.