Quick Facts
Biography
Fatima Zakaria (Hindi/Konkani: फ़ातिमा ज़कारिया) was an editor of the Mumbai Times, and Sunday editor of The Times of India, and is now the editor of the Taj magazine of the Taj Hotels. Her office is in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai.
Family
She is the second widow of Rafiq Zakaria, who was an Indian politician and Islamic religious cleric.
Fatima Zakaria is the step-mother or mother of four step-children or children: The eldest, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, art historian and writer, living in Mumbai, the second, Mansoor Zakaria, the third, Arshad Zakaria runs a hedge fund, and the youngest Fareed Zakaria is an editor of Newsweek, an anchor on CNN, and an Alumni Fellow of Yale College.
Career
Rafiq Zakaria established The Maulana Azad Education Trust in the historic city of Aurangabad Maharashtra India. It was his Assembly Constituency from which he got elected quite a few times and served as a Minister in the State cabinet. Fatima transformed those educational institutions in Aurangabad to such an extent that they can be compared with the best centres of learning in Asia.
Zakaria joined the Taj Group of Hotels to establish the first rate five star Hotel, The Taj Residency, on the campus of The Maulana Azad Education Trust in Aurangabad. She became editor of the coffee table magazine Taj. Thereafter, she introduced a Hotel Management Course in alliance with a British University. The course is acknowledged as the finest and most respected in India. She is on the board of Indian Institute of Hotel Management Aurangabad
She is in the process of establishing a Centre for Higher Learning on the lines of Centre for Advanced Studies, Shimla. It will become functional from June 2010 and will help genuine scholars and academicians to carry on research activities. The upcoming Centre will also launch two research journals, one for Social Sciences and the other for Natural and Exact Sciences. Zakaria, is regarded as a secularist, however she takes special care to cater to the educational needs of the Muslims.
The award Padma Shri was conferred on her by the Government of India in 2006.