What should we remember about the noughties? The gadgets, the information at your fingertips, and the nifty communications devices that altered our lives beyond recognition? Hmmm. Let’s give all that a miss. We’d prefer to look back — sometimes in fondness and sometimes not — at the larger-than-life, globe-straddling characters who dominated the Blue Planet and India. Let’s swivel the camera backwards and zoom in on the 10 nuttiest and most outrageous personalities that the decade threw up.

B. Ramalinga Raju Former chairman, Satyam Computer Services

If you owned Satyam Computer Services shares and sold them before the crash, you’re probably sending a note of thanks to businessman B. Ramalinga Raju. Plenty of people made heaps of money on Satyam shares which stayed at respectably high levels for years — thanks to Raju propping up the price by inventing phantom earnings and, in general, making it appear that the company was going great guns. The crash, when it came, turned into India’s greatest corporate scam. When exactly and why Raju started to cook the books are still mysteries. Was it just that Satyam started to lose ground to the biggies like Infosys and Wipro? Or, was it his love for real estate which made him ‘borrow’ money from the software company?

Raju’s now cooling his heels in Hyderabad Central Jail and the police are still struggling to unravel a case of Byzantine complexity, on a scale they’ve never tackled before.

Paris Hilton Socialite and heiress

Is she the tart with the heart of gold? Or the trust fund babe who’s adding to her stash in the bank. Let’s just say she is unputdownable (where did we get that one from?) and the paparazzi love her like the society princess that she is. Paris Hilton shot to fame in an unforgettable manner when videos of her making out with her boyfriend went viral on the Internet and turned her into an inadvertent porn star. But was Paris fazed by this? Not a bit of it. She went on to dump her boyfriend and grasp the poisoned chalice of celebritydom. She also served a few agonising days in jail and was disowned by some of her family. But, at the end of the decade, she’s had more than her 10 minutes of fame — and she’s way richer for the experience.

Osama bin Laden The world's most wanted man

There’s a joke doing the rounds about Osama bin Laden in Pakistan’s Pashtun belt: “Watch out if you are over 6ft tall. The CIA’s Predator missiles have been programmed to kill anyone over 6ft, hoping one of them may be Bin Laden.” But seriously, how does it feel to be the most wanted man in the world? We’d ask Osama Bin Laden if we could only find him — and, indeed, if he’s still alive.

But alive or not, Bin Laden has cast his dark shadow over the entire decade. The Americans missed him at Tora Bora and they say he has vanished into Pakistan’s badlands on the border with Afghanistan — though Indian intelligence officers say he has spent time in Karachi’s Binori Mosque. But, from that fateful day in 2001, when the planes slammed into the World Trade Centre towers, it has been a question of they seek him here, they seek him there. That damned elusive Bin Laden.

Greg Chappell Former Indian cricket coach

Should the coach call the shots in cricket or should it be the captain who’s the lord of all he surveys? Australian cricketer Greg Chappell definitely believed that the coach should be boss and he didn’t hesitate to throw his weight around. His spats with Sourav Ganguly are now the stuff of legends. Amazingly so because it was a reckless fight to get into considering that Dada was always extremely close to the powers-that-were in Indian cricket.

But that didn’t stop Greg C penning down his explosive thoughts about Sourav’s batting and alleging that he showed: “nervousness at the crease facing bowlers like Shane Bond”. The letter, inevitably, made 72-pt headlines even before it reached the person it was intended for.

Greg came to India talking about a “Commitment to Excellence” but that had been hit to the covers long before he left Indian shores. Eventually, Sourav Ganguly hung up his boots and Chappell got the boot, but while he was here Indian cricket was turned into a war zone and the battling just wasn’t cricket.

Silvio Berlusconi Prime Minister of Italy

Can a bloody and broken nose stop Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s most famous soap opera star —sorry, we meant to say prime minister? Not likely. At 73, he has turned Italian politics into a smash hit theatrical production with beautiful babes — there’s no other word to describe them — by the dozen parading across the stage.

Cut to glamourous ladies like Barbera Matera, 28, a former Miss Italy and Angela Sozio, a one-time Big Brother contestant, both of whom he tried to nominate for the European Parliament. At a more cradle-snatching level, there was Noemi Letizia, the 18-year-old whose birthday party he turned up at provoking the acerbic comment from his wife: “That really surprised me because he has never come to the 18th birthday parties of any of our children despite being invited.” Berlusconi fondly signed off to Noemi as, “her little daddy teacher”.

Berlusconi is surely the most powerful man in Italy because he’s also a billionaire and the country’s biggest media tycoon (and he owns A.C. Milan football club). He also faced flak for spending the night with a call girl and … you get the general idea.

Ajmal Kasab Islamic terrorist

He’s the little boy playing at being a jihadi with his cargo pants and proudly brandished sub-machine gun at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus . The youthful, puzzling face of the purest evil. Ajmal Kasab has made it into the history books by having the dubious honour of being the first jihadi suicide warrior to be captured alive (all credit to ASI Tukaram Omble). The son of a pushcart seller in Faridkot in Pakistan Punjab, Kasab claimed, at one time that his father had ‘sold’ him to the Lashkar-e-Toiba (though he has now changed his story in court). He has sat through court proceedings for the last few months looking alternately bored and sullen as one prosecution witness after another testified against him. There are many who would say that Kasab doesn’t deserve his day in court, but let’s call it a celebration of the Indian judicial system.

Britney Spears Singer and popstar

It was a category invented by Madonna in her younger and wilder days. But now stages around the world are filled with bad girls who make splashy headlines whenever they step out in public — and when they party in private. But in the last decade the darling of the paparazzi and the baddest girl of them all has been Britney Spears, the youthful lass with the perfect curves who wasn’t afraid to display her imperfections in public.

Britney’s been so bad that, under a court order, her father has been in charge of her personal life and her considerable wealth even though she’s now touching 28 and is a long way from being a minor.

Nevertheless, there’s no escaping the fact, that Britney, in between her various escapades, has sold 37 million albums. Also, people tend to forget it now but Britney was a child star who made her first public appearance circa the age of 11.

Can too much fame and too much money at a youthful age be bad for you? Don’t answer: just say Britney.

Madhu Koda Former Jharkhand chief minster

Madhu Koda, who has put Jharkhand firmly on the national map in recent months, has come close to breaking many records. He came to power as the chief minister of the poverty-ridden state when he was a relatively youthful 35. At a different level, he was only the third chief minister in India to come to power as an independent. Now it looks like he may have broken records as the chief minister who gave the words quick money-making a new meaning and raked in more cash in a shorter time than anyone before him.

It’s an extraordinary fact that the former chief minister who came from humble origins appears to have mastered international finance in double-fast time and is suspected of siphoning huge quantities of cash out of the country to buy assets like a hotel in Thailand and coal mines in Liberia.

At the time of going to press, Koda was still in judicial custody and if the Income Tax and the Enforcement Departments can do anything about it he isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. But the son of a labourer and the man who started his career as a mine-worker may find jail life is now a bit too Spartan for his tastes.

Tiger Woods Ace golfer

Has the Tiger turned out to be a low-down hound with a taste for plasticky Barbie Doll babes? You can say one thing for sure: there aren’t any skeletons in Tiger Woods’s closet but the Barbie Doll babes are tumbling out one after another. The result is the juiciest sporting scandal of the decade and a crashing fall from the pedestal for the crowd-pulling star of the greens. Now the questions are flying fast and furious: Will he give up golf for his family? Will he marry one of bimbettes who’ve stepped into the glare of the flashbulbs? Will his drive — on the golf course, of course, what else did you think — ever be the same again? After he finishes paying alimony will there be enough cash left to pay hush money to the groupies (whoops, that should be ladies) he sleeps with? And, most important of all, will he leave his golf clubs lying round the house in future?

Rakhi Sawant Dancer and reality show star

She’s not exactly the stereotype of the blushing Indian bride peeping out from behind her pallu on her marriage day. In fact, item girl to reality show queen Rakhi Sawant overturns all the stereotypes about demure, butter-won’t-melt-in-their-mouths Indian women. She shot to fame by cultivating a brazen hussy image with a motormouth to match that went down perfectly with media mavens searching for a quick quote (“Jejus [sic] loves me”) and photographers who wanted a cleavage shot.

But it was her reality show Rakhi Ka Swayamvar that was a game changer for the fast-talking actress. The show took ‘reality’ —and the ratings — to new heights and had the entire country talking about who she would or wouldn’t wed. And once the show finished the entire country was buzzing with gossip about whether she would wed at all — the answer’s finally no, of course, and the only question now is: what will Rakhi do for an encore.