- Lived:
- born in Govindpura village, Muzaffargarh district, Punjab (now in Pakistan) — the date is the record's, not his; he said nobody in his village wrote such things down — orphaned by Partition at seventeen, remade in an army cantonment at Secunderabad, settled finally in Chandigarh
- Field:
- athletics — the 400 metres, the one-lap race that is a sprint run at the edge of what a human body can pay for
- The Big Idea:
- A boy who lost nearly everything in 1947 turned grief into velocity — and the race he lost, fourth at Rome in 1960, stood as India's national record for thirty-eight years and as its definition of how good an Indian could be.
- In their words:
- "Bhaag Milkha, bhaag" — "Run, Milkha, run": his father's last words to him, by his own telling, the night Partition took his family
- If you remember one thing:
- The most famous race an Indian ever ran ended without a medal — and India kept the story anyway, because a man who starts from a refugee camp and finishes 0.13 seconds from an Olympic podium has already told you everything about what is possible.