Early Life
Leela Naidu was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India to Dr. Pattipati Ramaiah Naidu, a well known nuclear physicist from Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, who worked under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Marie Curie for his doctoral thesis in Paris and ran one of her labs. He set up medical radiation equipment devised at the Curie Institute in the United States and India. He had to leave laboratory research after getting cancer from working with radioactive materials. He was Scientific Advisor to UNESCO for Southeast Asia, and later, an advisor to the Tata group. Her mother, journalist and Indologist Dr. Marthe Mange Naidu, was of Swiss-French origin, and earned her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne.. She was the only surviving child out of eight pregnancies as Marthe had seven miscarriages. In her 2009 semi-biography of anecdotes co-authored with Jerry Pinto, it was related that her grandfather on her mother's side owned a factory where he fired a young Benito Mussolini for beating up a coworker, and her grandmother had a strange interlude with a Russian prince who was their next door neighbour who later turned out to be one of Rasputin's assassins.
On her father's side, her aunt was Indian independence fighter Sarojini Naidu and she was thus well acquainted growing up with and knowing prominent Indians like Gandhi, Nehru, and Indira Gandhi to name a few.
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