Walking down London’s Regent Street, the second most impressive tech store you'll encounter after Apple’s is Bose’s. As music lovers know, Bose is one of the biggest names in audio speakers and headphones. What many Indians don’t realise is that it was started by Amar Bose, a Bengali. Amar is the son of a Bengali freedom fighter who fled political persecution in 1920 to settle down in the US. Born in 1929, he graduated from MIT in the early 1950’s with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. After a short stint at Philips Electronics in Netherlands and as a Fulbright scholar in New Delhi, Amar returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor, and continued to work there as a Professor till 2001, even when he had his own company. A talented violinist, he was famously underwhelmed by the quality of a high-end stereo speaker he bought in 1956, and jumped into the field of acoustics to come up with two very important patents in loudspeaker design. He started Bose Corp. in 1964, vowing to deliver ‘better sound through research’. This has led to Bose becoming a household name with its products used everywhere, from Olympics to NASA shuttles. In May this year he donated his entire $1 billion wealth to MIT for “enhancing knowledge”.