Prakash Tandon was the son of a civil engineer and born in a canal colony in the Punjab. His autobiographical writings, published in the second half of the twentieth century, give vivid accounts of life in Punjab from the late nineteenth century. Following schooling in Gujarat and Lahore Government College, Tandon sailed for Britain in 1929, aged eighteen years old. His elder brother, Manohar, was already in London. Tandon enrolled at Manchester University with the view to become a Chartered Accountant, of which there were very few qualified Indians at the time.

Tandon spent eight years in Britain. He got involved in the University debating team, and following his degree at Manchester stayed in London to pursue some economics research and his accountancy qualifications. At a students' congress in Oxford, he met his future wife, a Swedish woman, Gärd.

In 1937, Tandon returned to India. He settled in Bombay and he eventually got a job at Unilever. Despite his accountancy qualification, Tandon was employed in the advertising department and earnt less than his British colleagues. He eventually became director of Unilever in 1951. He was a member of the first board of Hindustan Lever in 1956 and then the first Indian Chairman in 1961. Tandon was an extremely influential business leader in independent India, and one of the pioneers of professional management in India.

Born in 1887, Sukumar Ray was the father of the famous Indian film director, Satyajit Ray. Sukumar's father, Upendrakisore, had set up his own printing press in his house in Calcutta and wrote a number of articles on printing for the British printing journal, The Penrose Annual, from 1897 to 1912.

Sukumar Ray arrived in England in the autumn of 1911 and initially lodged with the Northbrook Society at 21 Cromwell Road. He studied printing at the London School of Photo Engraving and Lithography in Bolt Street, run by London County Council, and then went to Manchester and studied at the Manchester School of Technology. In Manchester, he wrote letters to his parents from 12 Thorncliffe Grove and then 65 Ducie Grove. Ray was present in London when Rabindranath Tagore visited the city in 1912; Tagore was a friend of his father's in Calcutta. He often visited the house of Dr and Mrs P. K. Ray in London to eat Indian food and meet other Indians in London. At P. K. Ray's house, Sukumar Ray met K. G. Gupta and later married his niece.

Ray met E. B. Havell in London, whom he had known as Principal of the Calcutta School of Art, and visited Rothenstein's house. Rothenstein suggested to Ray that he make colour reproductions of the Ajanta caves and Indian architecture, influenced by his preoccupations with the India Society. Ray was good friends with Rathindranath, the son of Rabindranath Tagore.

Sukumar Ray was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1922. He was famous for his humourous 'literary nonsense' and was also a story-writer and illustrator.