As you might imagine, Jindal's story is big in India. HindustanTimes.
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The woman behind the successful Bobby Jindal
Indo-Asian News Service
Washington, October 28
The wife of Bobby Jindal, who is the top contender for the governor's position in Louisiana, is being written about in local newspapers as "humble and methodical and brilliant".
A newspaper in Louisiana said it is not just Bobby who is a high achiever but Supriya Jolly Jindal was also brilliant as a student at Tulane University majoring in chemistry.
She underplayed her intelligence to her friends, her college friend Lisanne McDearman, a former CNN auditor who's now an Atlanta wedding planner said, according to a report in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, published from Louisiana.
"She would turn in a chemical engineering project and say, 'I'm sure I failed,' and then she would get the highest grade in the class," said Lisanne, adding that "We would laugh at her about it."
McDearman says Supriya Jindal is "extremely intelligent, but so down-to-earth about it, so humble."
Now the 31-year-old underplays how she handles her chemical engineering job with Albemarle Corp., her 21-month-old daughter, pregnancy with a second child, helping in her husband's political campaign and working on a doctoral degree.
"I'm just like a lot of other working moms," she said. "You have to juggle a lot of things during the day to make it work. We're lucky we have the support of our families."
Unlike many other working moms, one of the things she juggles is speaking engagements on her husband's behalf. Her most recent appearance was an address to the Acadiana Republican Women's Association in Lafayette.
She doesn't consider herself a politician's wife because "Bobby's not a traditional politician. He's never run for office before and he never envisioned running for an elected office."
Bobby Jindal has emerged as an improbably strong contender for governor of this conservative southern state and the November 15 polls will decide whether this over-achieving America-born son of Indian immigrants will become the only Indian American to have won Louisiana's highest elected office.
Asked whether she will continue working if her husband wins the November 15 election, she said: "We'll see how it goes one day at a time."
She laughs when asked what kind of influence she has over her husband's political decisions.
"We talk in the evenings," she said, "but we don't really get into issues. Our typical conversations are about Selia (their daughter) and our personal lives."
Occasionally, the two discuss strategy "but he makes his own decisions at the end of the day", she said.
On the campaign trail, "we do some things together", she said, but she sometimes travels without her husband. "He obviously does the bulk of the campaigning."
Trey Williams, the Jindal campaign's media consultant, says the campaign schedule is arranged so the candidate can come home as often as possible. He spends more nights at their Baton Rouge home than on the road.
The Jindals met in high school but never dated. She says he asked for a date once and she turned him down because her family was moving to New Orleans.
After Bobby Jindal became the head of the State Department of Health and Hospitals, the pair met again by accident. They were married less than a year later.
The Jindals are both former Hindus converted to Catholicism. His parents migrated to the U.S, from Punjab.
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