Meet Mrs. Jindal

• By EMILY KERN HEBERT
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 22, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The first time Bobby Jindal asked his future wife on a date she turned him down because her family was moving.
Supriya Jolly was a freshman at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. Bobby Jindal was a year ahead of her, so the two didn’t have any classes together.

But, Jindal admired her from afar.

“She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen,” he said.

Supriya Jolly Jindal grew up in Louisiana as a child of Indian immigrants, just like her husband.
She lived in New Orleans until the age of 4 when her family moved to Baton Rouge.

At the end of her freshman year of high school, she moved back to New Orleans where she graduated from Grace King High School in 1989.

She attended Tulane University, earning a degree in chemical engineering and then an MBA.

“I would say I’m a southern girl, a little bit of Baton Rouge and New Orleans,” Supriya Jindal said. “I find myself at home in both places.”

Her first job was at Monsanto Chemicals, a plant along the Mississippi River. She worked with the unit that makes the herbicide Roundup.

She could be found climbing a tank vessel wearing a hard hat and steel-toed boots.

It was then that she started dating the future governor.

“I think Bobby got a kick out of seeing me when he met me at work for one of our first dates,” Supriya Jindal said.

The two hadn’t talked since high school, but Bobby Jindal remembered Supriya Jolly and called her up when a date cancelled on him.
For their first date, Jindal, then  secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, took her to a Mardi Gras ball.

They had an “amazing” time, Bobby Jindal said, and were married several months later at St. Joseph’s?? Cathedral in 1997.
Six years ago the Jindals had their first of three children.