Big Think

Transcript:Well I . . . I finished a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in International Affairs. And I joined the U.N. immediately thereafter. Literally I defended my thesis on a Friday, got on a plane Saturday, arrived in Geneva Sunday and began work on Monday morning on the first of May 1978. And I spent just a month shy of 29 years in a U.N. career that meant the world to me. It was an organization that served causes I cared about; that did so with a tremendous amount of . . . of international talent from around the world that dedicated themselves to solving various kinds of problems. I spent eleven and a half years working for refugees, including in some of the toughest and most intractable refugee problems of that time – notably the Vietnamese boat people crisis. But not just those. I got the world’s first Polish refugees when they jumped ship in Singapore with the martial law crackdown on Solidarity back in December ’81, and so on. I had an extraordinary time. And then I left the refugee business to actually come to peacekeeping, where I ended up being part of the small team created in those years which grew dramatically at the end of the Cold War as . . . as the peacekeeping opportunities for the United Nations multiplied dramatically around the world. And after that I . . . the man who became my boss’ head of peacekeeping – Kofi Annan – became elected Secretary General. And I worked with him in the Secretary General’s office, and finally got booted upstairs to head my own department. Which means I ran a . . . a staff of 754 scattered in . . . in 70 odd countries around the world trying to get the message of the U.N. out to the world. And it was from that position that I was nominated by the government of India to succeed Kofi Annan as the official candidate of the government of India. I ran, I thought, a reasonable race. I came a close second, but didn’t quite make it in the end. And I decided to draw the right conclusion from that that the time had come to move on. So in early 2007, I . . . I came to an amicable parting of the ways with the man who was elected Secretary General – ___________. And from the first of April, I have been leading a very interesting kind of double life. I’ve taken on two sorts of tasks. The first is a half-time commitment as Chairman of a Dubai-based partnership called Afras Ventures, which is a . . . a company that’s focusing on investments in India; and in particular, to begin with in my home state of Kerala. We are attempting in Kerala not to invest in existing projects, but actually to devise new projects that can be value added, and then at the same time can make a difference. I said to him that after a lifetime in public service – I said to my partner – I wanted to go into the private sector in the spirit of doing good and doing well at the same time. And so I had to do things that could actually make a different in people’s lives. And we’re now identifying projects in health, in education, in IT, in training which I hope will . . . will meet those two objectives. So that’s one half of my life. In the other half of my life, I’m enjoying the freedom to write. I have a column in the Times of India every Sunday – the biggest selling _________ newspaper in the English language world. I have a column in the Hindu, a more serious newspaper, every second Sunday. My tenth book has just come out, launched in New York yesterday the 17th of September – a book called “The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone”, which is a collection of essays about India that essentially published since my previous big non-fiction on India, which was a book called “India: From Midnight to the Millennium”, which was published for the 50th anniversary of India’s independence. This is the 60th anniversary. It’s kind of a compendium volume. I’ve signed up with a speaker’s bureau in Washington, so I run around making speeches for a fee – which for a former public service is always fun because you’re almost astonished to be paid for doing something you used to do for free all your life. And . . . and I attend conferences, and I’ve also devoted more time than was entirely wise to a number of non-profit causes that I . . . that I care about. I’m on a dozen different Boards ranging from that of my alma mater, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, through . . . through the Human Rights organization Breakthrough; the humanitarian organization The Virtue Foundation; patron of the Dubai Modern High School. I’m trying to advise the Wildlife Conservation Society on tiger protection in India. So I’ve had a lot of different irons in the fire, and some of the requests keep coming in. The International Committee of the Red Cross has just invited me to be on their Board of advisors which, given my U.N. and humanitarian background, is something that I’m about to say yes to as well. So I . . . I’ve taken on a lot; but I feel that having left the U.N. I have the freedom to do that. And I’m . . . I’m enjoying these sorts of two lives – one life in the private sector, and the other in a wide variety of . . . of personal activities.