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She is bold, she is smart, she is talented and more than anything else, Arianna Huffington, queen of new media, is a woman who refuses to take success lying down. No moping and self-pity bouts for this out-spoken face of possibly one of the most-visited Internet news websites in the world, aptly named Huffington Post.

Last week, when US Internet provider AOL announced it would slash out an estimated $350 million to buy the website from her, Arianna Huffington very likely left her detractors and critics huffing and puffing in shock and envy.

But those who have read her many books —13 published till date – will know that hardships and troubles are not something that scares or distracts her from her goal. In fact, they seem to play the role of a catalyst which is not surprising considering the fact that she is the daughter of a Greek couple — a mother who believed in the redeeming power of education and a father who brought out a string of newspapers in Athens including an underground one during the German occupation of Greece for which he was put in concentration camp for years.

Though her parents divorced when she was 11, the little girl learnt priceless lessons from both of them. “My mother instilled in me that failure was not something to be afraid of, that it was not the opposite of success. It was a stepping stone to success. So I had no fear of failure. Perseverance is everything. I don’t give up.

Everybody has failures, but successful people keep on going…. She was my life mentor.” Huffington’s life has been a roller-coaster ride that has taken her from her home in Athens to Cambridge where she learnt economics, to the United States where she carved her name as a journalist with a niche in radio, print and television and as an author with an admirable body of work, including her internationally best-selling 1981 biography of opera star Maria Callas, a high-profile 1988 biography of Pablo Picasso that became a movie, and the 2003 New York Times Best-Seller Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America.

In between she married oil tycoon Michael Huffington, campaigned for his unsuccessful senate bid in 1994, had two daughters from him and separated after 11 years during which she toed his hard-line conservative ideas. In 2003 she made an unsuccessful bid in California’s gubernatorial race, an attempt that would have left lesser mortals red-faced and running for cover but had this woman rising from the ashes and seeking her next goal.

On May 9, 2005, The Huffington Post was born. “The launch was greeted by a cacophony of ill-wishers,” Huffington wrote in Fearless. Nikki Finke another reputed and formidable internet journo and blogger wrote at that time in her article headlined “Why Arianna’s Blog Blows” that Huffington has “made an online ass of herself…. This website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable.”

The AOL deal probably has Finke and others eating their words , though, in all fairness only an year after the launch she described The Huffington Post as “an asset to the Internet dialogue” that contains stories missing from mainstream news sites.

Over the years, Arianna has changed her political affiliations and is now a staunch democrat who appeared on endless chat shows rooting for the then democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

Rated by Forbes in 2009 as the 12^th Most Influential Women In Media list, Arianna consolidated this last week with the AOL deal which makes her president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include The Huffington Post and existing AOL properties such as Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch Media, and StyleList.

The New Media group will have a combined base of 117 million visitors a month and Huffington said her website would continue on the same path it has been on earlier. “This is truly a merger of visions and a perfect fit for us”.

What could be more perfect that bloggers on your site including the President of the United States, his Secretary of State and the pleasure of $300 million in your bank?

—sudhamenon2006@gmail.com