What made them different?

Some periods in history seem to be throw up groups of remarkable people, who are different from each other but can work together, can see beyond their times and show some wisdom relevant in all ages. India and USA have seen such a groups during their freedom struggles and as one would expect many more studies are available about the Americans and Tom Paine. Gore Vidal has written extensively about the founding fathers. There is a recent book by Gordon Wood "Revolutionary characters: What made the founders different" which gives a clue. From the excellent review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19295
by Fred Anderson ( this needs subscription):
"Wood finds the key to the Founders' leadership in the hierarchical world into which they had been born. Eighteenth-century British America, like Britain itself, was dominated socially and politically by "gentlemen" —a comparatively tiny minority of men whose liberal education and public spirit, so it was thought, enabled them to perceive the common good, and whose fortunes gave them the leisure to pursue it without compromising their livelihoods. Such advantages of wisdom and wealth obliged gentlemen to take the lead in public life. Those who did so demonstrated their "virtue," or ability to rise above the self-interest that absorbed the energies and limited the views of lesser men. All of the Founders, Wood argues, aspired to this kind of leadership, and all the more intensely because none was a gentleman by birth."
"The Founders' consciousness that they acted on a public stage, defending the common good and pursuing fame, explains much about their leadership in the 1770s and 1780s. Unfortunately for them and their values, Gordon Wood writes, the Revolution released acquisitive, individualist energies that no one had foreseen, and which could not be contained. As the nineteenth century began and ordinary Americans seized the opportunity to pursue private interests without restraint, the disinterested aristocratic ideal central to the Founders' identity crumbled. In a scrambling, self-interested, petit-bourgeois America, the common good became a concept that somehow arose from the sum of all individual strivings. The self-sacrificing political virtue that had been the supreme attribute of a gentleman fragmented into the private virtues of honesty, temperance, charity, prudence, and piety."
I hope that there will be a similar study about the Indian stalwarts.