Hardeep Singh Puri is an Indian politician and former Indian Foreign Service officer. In July 2021, he became the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs in India.In an interview, Puri confessed that his grandfather was among those who protested at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919.In the same interview, he claimed that his father was a partition refugee and was one of the persons who took the Frontier Mail from Pakistan to Amritsar in 1947. While talking about his father in an Instagram post, he said, Being a partition refugee he started his life from a scratch & faced great difficulties. A source of strength & a role model, he sacrificed his comforts to give my younger brother & me a decent education & life. Hardeep Singh Puris father.His childhood dream was to become a pilot, but he could not fulfil his dreams as he joined the IFS. In an Instagram post, he wrote, Sitting in a state-of-the-art & as real as it gets flight simulator of a prototype of 777x at the CAE Facility, I got an exhilarating opportunity to live a part of my childhood dream! Tough job but! A childhood picture of Hardeep Singh Puri with his parents.While pursuing his studies at the Hindu College, he won many university prizes. He was also the Prime Minister of the college Student Parliament from 1971 to 1972.After his post-graduation, Puri taught History at St. Stephens College, the University of Delhi.In 2013, he retired from the Indian Foreign Service and joined as the Senior Advisor at the International Peace Institute (IPI), New York, an independent non-profit lobby group that specialises in multilateral approaches to peace and security issues. He worked there from June to December 2013. Subsequently, Puri served as the Vice President at IPI, a position he left on 31 March 2016. Hardeep Singh Puri during a talk session at the International Peace Institute (IPI).He also served as the Secretary-General of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism (ICM) till April 2016.He is a writer who has written articles in many publications. He wrote an article titled Libya: Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the Ghost of Rwanda (2016) for The Globalist and Trade Policy Dilemma and the Role of Domestic Reform for Carnegie India.In 2016, he penned the book Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, which was published by HarperCollins.