As soon as US Democratic Party candidate Joseph Biden announced that Californian Senator Kamala Devi Harris was going to be his running mate, social media has been buzzing with stories about the mixed-race candidate who has enjoyed a meteoric rise on the US political scene.

Harris is the first African American and the first Asian American to be chosen as the running mate of a major party's presidential candidate, but it's no surprise to those following her career.

The daughter of Shyamala Gopalan, a Chennai-born cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica, she was born in Oakland, California, on Oct 20, 1964...