Ataullah Ozai-Durrani — An Afghan immigrant in the US who made name & a fortune with the invention of Minute-Rice recipe in the early 1940s, and left half a million dollars to Harvard university for translating poetic works of Mirza Ghaleb and Mir Taqi Mir.

In 1941, he walked into the office of General Foods Corporation in New York, set up his portable stove and convincingly demonstrated cooking rice in minutes. General Foods were impressed with the significant reduction in cooking time and immediately bought his recipe.

Thanks to the large-scale marketing of Minute Rice and later mass orders by the US army, the product achieved its success. Ozai-Durrani became a millionaire almost overnight.

There is another interesting aspect to Ozai-Durrani’s life, and that is his interest in the poetry of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghaleb and Mir Taqi Mir, famous poets of the subcontinent. It is not clear how he developed interest in their poetry. Could it be during the times when he studied at Aligarh Muslim college in India or later when he befriended Syed Hussain, a disciple of Gandhi who had advocated for freedom of India in the US and delivered lectures in 1920s and 1930s.  Ozai-Durrani wanted to translate the works of Mirza Ghaleb and Mir Taqi Mir into English language. For this purpose, he donated about 100 thousand rupees to Aligarh Muslim University in 1950s. The VC of AMU, Dr. Zakir Hussain was also friend of Ozai-Durrani. However, nothing came out of this program and Ozai-Durrani eventually withdrew his support.