P Chidambaram was born on September 16, 1945 in Kandanur, Tamil Nadu. He was appointed as the Minister of Finance on May 24, 2004. But very few know that P Chidambaram, the US educated votary of free enterprise and unbridled economic reforms used to be a hard-core leftist arguing in favor of the command economy in the late 1960s. Since then he has come a long way.