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Indian to carry Olympic torch

A 35-year-old woman who studied in Mumbai has won a rare honour by becoming only one of eight foreigners in China to be elected to carry the torch for the Beijing Olympics 2008.

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Barot from Mumbai is one of the eight foreigners in China to win the honour

A 35-year-old woman who studied in Mumbai has won a rare honour by becoming only one of eight foreigners in China to be elected to carry the torch for the Beijing Olympics 2008.

Meena Barot, who hails from Belapur and works and lives in Shijiazhuang in Hebei province, near the Chinese capital, will carry the torch for 200 metres as part of an international torch relay ahead of next year’s Olympics, which promises to be the grandest sporting spectacle ever.

Barot won that privilege when she secured the fourth highest votes (from among 262 applicants from 47 countries) in a month-long public online poll organised by the Chinese computer maker and Olympic sponsor Lenovo Group and the official China Daily newspaper.

All the candidates were required to appreciate Chinese culture and history and be devoted to communicating the “real China” to the world, China Daily noted.

The seven other winners are Jenny Bowen (US), Marcos Torres (the Philippines), Werner Ebel (Germany), Yoshitoshi Mizuya (Japan) Luis Hong-Sanchez (Colombia), Yury Ilyakhin (Russia) and Deirdre Smyth (British-Venezuelan).

Two other Americans, including Serena Gao, a four-year-old girl, secured enough votes to make the final list, but were dropped in order to restrict the winners to one per country.

Barot graduated in science from the Swami Vivekanand College in Chembur, and earned a management diploma from the Narsee Monji Institute of Management Studies.
A business manager for Shalina Laboratories, a Mumbai-headquartered pharma and healthcare company, Barot took up the China assignment in March 2005.

“I was very scared when I arrived in China,” Barot recalls. “I did not know anyone and had no friends here. Had it not been for some good people I met during my first 2-3 months in China, I wouldn’t have been here for so long… There is nothing in China that can match the kindness and patience of its people.”

Among the 246 contestants for the honour were the ambassadors of Greece and Seychelles, and some top executives for multinationals in China.

(With inputs from Prajakta Chavan)

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