The person of the year 2013: Edward Snowden

New Delhi: 2013 has lived up to its billing of being an entirely nasty year. The simple chore for us here is to sift through the year's massive luggage of political and socio economic actions and inactions to pick a person, who has in 2013, influenced world events for good or bad.Our pick of the year is Edward Snowden.Edward Snowden is an ambivalent choice, albeit a durable one, in terms of the massive size of his revelations on US Surveillance of friends and foes alike, and their importance to the management of information, communication and global governance, in all ramifications.Here is a the list of five top persoons in the list:Edward Snowden We can call him Galileo of the Information Age in 2013. US Administration is pursuing Snowden for damaging revelation on equally damaging and unexpected surveillance of nations and their citizens. For daring to draw the line in the use of the Computer and Communications and using his technical skills to prod a sleeping world to an apparent misuse of power and technology.He is living in restrictive conditions in Russia, his temporary asylum up for renewal in the summer. If Vladimir Putin was to decide his propaganda value has dwindled, he might even find himself in a few years traded for a prominent Russian held in the US. And yet he was prepared to swap a well-paid job and relatively comfortable life with his girlfriend in Hawaii for this uncertain life. For him, it was a price worth paying. He believes state surveillance had expanded well beyond a point that is acceptable and that people needed to know about it.The US is not sure what to make of Snowden, who in his Xmas message said that he felt that all that the US needed for information from anybody was to ask and not to spy on them.Pope Francis The first non-European Pope in 1,200 years has changed the perception of the 2,000-year-old institution in an extraordinary way in a short time.Since taking over at the Vatican, he has urged the Catholic Church not to be obsessed with “small-minded rules” and to emphasize compassion over condemnation in dealing with touchy topics like abortion, gays and contraception.He arrives for meetings with heads of state in a blue Ford Focus; he wears old shoes; he astonishes members of the global public who have written to him by picking up the phone and calling them himself. He cradles the faces of the disfigured, declaring that every human being has worth. He is spreading the message of humanity around the globe. He just believes in imparting love.Edith Windsor Growing up gay in America, Windsor, now 84, is a long term gay activist for her activism in actualising equal rights for gays in the US. She is an icon of the gay-rights movement.Waris Dirie Waris Dirie is a nomadic child from Somalia. She is a human rights activist, a supermodel, and a best-selling author who has received numerous prestigious awards for her work and her commitment in the fight against female genital mutilation.She has fronted campaigns for Chanel and Revlon and even starred in a James Bond movie.But Waris Dirie really caught the world's attention in 1997 when she opened up about her horrific female genital mutilation (FGM) ordeal.She has since campaigned tirelessly against the practice.Waris, now 48 and living in Poland with her four children, was just five years old when she was subjected to FGM in her home country of Somalia.She was then forced into marrying a 60-year-old man when she was just thirteen, a threat which left her no choice but to flee to Mogadishu, where she had family.She later moved to London to live with relatives and worked in a local McDonald's before getting her big break when she was scouted by a fashion photographer in the 1990s.Ted CruzNo politician had a greater impact on the past year than freshman U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In his historic first speech on the Senate floor to support Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's quest to force the Obama administration to agree not to use drones to kill Americans on American soil, Cruz showed he would sacrifice personal glory for the cause of liberty. By helping shine a constitutional light on the Justice Department's unwillingness to unequivocally declare that the federal government cannot just send a missile through the windshield of American citizens driving down I-95, Cruz chose to take his first stand on a seemingly esoteric, but important, constitutional issue.Cruz came from the Lone Star State not owing the D.C. political establishment anything, after he beat the chosen replacement for Kay Bailey Hutchison in an underfunded, grassroots driven Republican primary election.