Globalization and the Human Imagination

September 10, 2003

When the organizers of the International Festival of Literature first invited me to deliver this
lecture, they suggested something that might reconcile my two worlds the UN and literature. In
conceiving my topic for today, I thought about the issues that have dominated my UN life of late:
the forces of globalization, transforming the world irresistibly; the nature of the international
mass media, which I try to influence as a UN official; and the changes that the age of terrorism,
or 9/11 as it is known in America, had wrought in us, once its shadow had fallen across all our
minds and seized our imaginations. Globalization, the media, our imagination one could well
ask: in the world after 9/11, is there such a thing as a global imagination?
In other words, I wondered: Has globalization, which has brought McDonalds and Microsoft to
every land, brought Mickey Mouse and Nintendo, and for that matter Osama bin Laden and
Chemical Ali, to every mind? With the speed of satellite and cable TV, this is a serious
question. The media bring to our breakfast tables and our living rooms, and increasingly our
computers and our mobile phones, glimpses of events from every corner of the globe. Any doubt
I might have had about the reach and influence of global mass communications was dispelled
when I happened to be in St Petersburg, Russia, for a conference and was approached by a
Tibetan Buddhist monk in his robes, thumping a cymbal and chanting his mantras, who paused in
his chanting to say: Ive seen you on BBC! New communications technology has shrunk the
world, and in a real sense made it all one.
And at the risk of being facetious, our major news stories reek of globalization. Take, for
instance, an item circulating on the Internet about the death of Princess Diana. An English
Princess with a Welsh title leaves a French hotel with her Egyptian companion, who has
supplanted a Pakistani; she is driven in a German car with a Dutch engine by a Belgian chauffeur
full of Scottish whisky; they are chased by Italian papparazzi on Japanese motorcycles into a
Swiss-built tunnel and crash; a rescue is attempted by an American doctor using Brazilian
medicines; and the story is now being told to you now by an Indian visiting Berlin. Theres
globalization.
But on Sept 11, 2001, a different challenge arose to the notion of a global imagination. On 9/11,
as the Americans have taught us to call it, the 21st century was born. If, as the historian Eric
Hobsbawm has suggested, the 20th century really began with the assassination in Sarajevo that
sparked the First World War, it is fair to suggest that, in the impact it has already had on the
shape of our era, the 21st century began with the demolition of the World Trade Centre just one
day short of two years ago.
What do I mean by that? The destruction of the World Trade Center struck a blow not only at the
institutions of American and global capitalism but at the self-confidence that undergirded them,
the self-confidence of a social and political system that, without needing to think about it too
much, believed it had found the answer to lifes challenges and could conquer them all. And of
course the outrage of September 11 and the anthrax scare that followed it brought the stark
consciousness of physical vulnerability to a land that, despite fighting a dozen major wars in its
history, has not been directly attacked in living memory. This was the country in which a scholar
could complacently propound the end of history; now history, like Mark Twain, has
proclaimed that reports of its demise were exaggerated. In todays ever smaller world, geography
too offered no protection. If only by bringing home to Americans the end of their insulation from
the passions that bedevil the rest of the globe, September 11 changed the world forever.

But the horrifying events of that one day are emblematic of our new century in another crucial
way. The defining features of todays world are the relentless forces of globalization, the ease of
communications and travel, the shrinking of boundaries, the flow of people of all nationalities
and colours across the world, the swift pulsing of financial transactions with the press of a
button. The plane, the cell phone, and the computer are the tools of our time.
These very forces, which in a more benign moment might have been seen as helping drive the
world towards progress and prosperity, were the forces used by the terrorists in their macabre
dance of death and destruction. They crossed frontiers easily, coordinated their efforts with
technological precision, hijacked jets and crashed them into their targets (as their doomed
victims made last-minute calls on their cell-phones to their loved ones). This was a 21st century
crime, and it has defined the dangers and the potential of our time as nothing else can.
It has also provoked a reaction in the United States that will, in turn, leave an indelible mark on
the new century. The 20th century was famously dubbed, by Time magazines Henry Luce, as
the American century, but the 21st begins with the US in a state of global economic, political,
cultural and military dominance far greater than any world power has ever enjoyed. The US
enjoys a level of comparative military power unprecedented in human history; even the Roman
Empire at its peak did not come close to outstripping the military capacities of the rest of the
world to the extent that the United States does today. But that is not all. When the former French
Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, called the US a hyperpower (hyperpuissance), he was
alluding not only to American military dominance but also to the US as the home of Boeing and
Intel, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonalds and Kodak in short of most
of the major products that dominate daily life around our globe.
And yet before 9/11, Washington had been curiously ambivalent about its exercise of that
dominance, with many influential figures speaking and acting as if the rest of the planet was
irrelevant to Americas existence or to its fabled pursuit of happiness. After September 11, I was
not alone in thinking that there would be no easy retreat into isolationism, no comfort in the
illusion that the problems of the rest of the world need not trouble the United States. I found
myself on CNN the night after, expressing the outrage and solidarity of those of us working at
the United Nations, and I found myself saying not just that we are all New Yorkers now a
sentiment many have echoed but something else: that Americans now understand viscerally the
old cliche of the global village. Because 9/11 made it clear that a fire that starts in a remote
thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest
skyscrapers at the other end of our global village.
From this observation I went on to suggest in an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune that
the 21st century will be the century of one world as never before, with a consciousness that the
tragedies of our time are all global in origin and reach, and that tackling them is also a global
responsibility that must be assumed by us all. Interdependence, I argued, is now the watchword.
Today, two years later, I wonder if I wasnt wrong. One of my favourite stories about the UN
Security Council is one about the American diplomat and the French diplomat arguing about a
practical problem. I know how we can solve this, says the American; we can do this and this
and this and we can solve it. The Frenchman responds, Yes, yes, yes, that will work in practice.
But will it work in theory? Interdependence is a reality in practice in our globalizing world; but
in theory, how can there be genuine interdependence when one country believes it needs
everybody else that much less than everybody else needs it?

But I am not rushing to disavow my earlier faith in international co-operation. Global challenges
require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which even the hyperpuissance can
act completely alone. This truism is being confirmed yet again in Iraq, where the United States is
discovering that it has a greater capacity to win wars alone than to construct peace alone. The
limitations of military strength in nation building are readily apparent; as Talleyrand pointed out,
the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is to sit on it. Equally important, though, is the need
for legitimacy. Acting in the name of international law, and especially through the United
Nations, is always preferable to acting in the name of national security, since everyone has a
stake in the former. So multilateralism still has a future in Washington.
All the more so because the age of terror is a multilateral threat. The terrorist attack of 9/11 was
an assault not just on one country but, in its callous indifference to the lives of innocents from 80
countries around the world, an assault on the very bonds of humanity that tie us all together. To
respond to it effectively we must be united. Terrorism does not originate in one country, its
practitioners are not based in one country, its victims are not found in one country and the
response to it must also involve all countries.
Terrorism emerges from blind hatred of an Other, and that in turn is the product of three factors:
fear, rage and incomprehension. Fear of what the Other might do to you, rage at what you
believe the Other has done to you, and incomprehension about who or what the Other really is
these three elements fuse together in igniting the deadly combustion that kills and destroys
people whose only sin is that they feel none of these things themselves. If terrorism is to be
tackled and ended, we will have to deal with each of these three factors by attacking the
ignorance that sustains them. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as
others see us, learn to recognize hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all
just learn about each other.
This is no small challenge. With the best will in the world, it is easy to misunderstand each other.
Having traveled here from America, I have to share with you I think the evening is sufficiently
advanced to do this my favorite story of international misunderstanding. Its a true story of an
American agricultural expert, sent to India before the Green Revolution, to advise on Indian
farming. He goes and visits an Indian farm in Punjab, and is welcomed by the very gregarious
and hospitable Sikh farmer. The farm, thanks to Indias land reforms and population pressures, is
about the size of this auditorium. And the Indian farmer says very proudly to the American:
welcome to my farm. Heskas, do you see this national highway? and the American looks and
sees a dirt road my land goes all the way upto there. Then he says you see that irrigation
canal? And the American looks and sees a trickle of water, and the Indian says my land goes
upto there. And he says you see that bunch of trees, my land goes upto there. He is very proud
of the farm he has. Then he turns to ask the American, And what about you? The American is
actually a farmer from Kansas or some Midwestern state where the wheat fields stretch on for
miles on end, and so he sort of clears his throat and says Well, in the morning I get into my
tractor and drive 4 hours south to the southern boundary of my land. And I drive another 3 hours
to the western boundary of my land. And then I have a sandwich and drive 5 hours north in my
tractor to the northern boundary of my land. And at sundown I travel another 2 hours south to my
ranch house. The Indian farmer nods very sympathetically, and says I know, I know, I too used
to have a tractor like that. The point is: what you understand depends on what your assumptions
are.

When the United Nations helped reconstruct East Timor from the devastation that accompanied
the Indonesian withdrawal, we had to rebuild an entire society, and that meant, in some cases,
creating institutions that had never existed before. One of them was a judicial system of
international standards, which in practice meant Western standards, complete with the adversarial
system of justice in which a prosecutor and a defence attorney attempt to demolish each others
arguments in the pursuit of truth. The UN experts had to train the Timorese in this system. But
they discovered that there was one flaw. In Timorese culture, the expected practice for the
accused is to confess his crimes and justice to be meted out compassionately. In order to promote
the culture of the not guilty plea required by Western court systems, the UN experts had to
train the Timorese to lie. Their mental processes their imaginations had now truly been
globalized.
This brings me to the second half of my argument today. In one sense, the terrorists of 9/11 were
attacking the globalization of the human imagination the godless, materialist, promiscuous
culture of the dominant West, embodied in a globalization from which people like them felt
excluded. Certainly those who celebrated their act did so from a sense of exclusion. If we speak
of the human imagination today, we need to ask what leads surprisingly large numbers of young
people to follow the desperate course set for them by fanatics and ideologues. A sense of
oppression, of exclusion, of marginalization, can give rise to extremism. Forty years ago, in
1962, the now all-but-forgotten UN Secretary-General U Thant warned that an explosion of
violence could occur as a result of the sense of injustice felt by those living in poverty and
despair in a world of plenty. Some 2600 people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. But
some 26,000 people also died on 9/11, around the world from starvation, unclean water and
preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our global imagination.
But that is, of course, not all. If a State cannot even offer its people hope for a better life for their
children by providing access to basic education then how can we expect those people or
those children to resist the blandishments of terror? It should come as no surprise that the Taliban
recruited its foot soldiers from the religious schools or madrassas that were the only source of
nurture and education for the many children who had no other source of knowledge available
to them; who learned not science or mathematics or computer programming at these schools, but
rather only the creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov the Koran crudely interpreted, the
Kalashnikov crudely made. Their imaginations were, as a result, anything but global.
Which brings me back to the question I raised at the beginning: have we fallen into the
dangerous illusion that the human imagination can be globalized? In considering an answer, we
have to look at the global mass media. The mass media reflects principally the interests of its
producers. What passes for international culture is usually the culture of the economically
developed world. Its your imagination that is being globalized. American movies and television
shows, in particular, can be found on the screens of most countries.
Who else makes the cut to enter the global imagination in our brave new world? Yes, there is the
occasional third world voice, but it speaks a first world language. As far back as the first Congo
civil war of 1962, the journalist Edward Behr saw a TV newsman in a camp of violated Belgian
nuns calling out: Anyone here been raped and speak English? In other words, it was not
enough to have suffered: one must have suffered and be able to express ones suffering in the
language of the journalist. Which leads to the obvious corollary question: Are those speaking for
their cultures in the globalized media the most authentic representatives of them?

Can the Internet compensate? Is it a democratizing tool? In the West, perhaps it has become one,
since information is now far more widely accessible to anyone anywhere. But that is not yet true
in the developing world. The stark reality of the Internet today is the digital divide: you can tell
the rich from the poor by their Internet connections. The gap between the technological haves
and have-nots is widening, both between countries and within them. The information revolution,
unlike the French Revolution, is a revolution with a lot of libert, some fraternit, and no egalit.
So the poverty line is not the only line about which we have to think; there is also the high-speed
digital line, the fiber optic line all the lines that exclude those who are literally not plugged in
to the possibilities of our brave new world. The key to the Internet divide is the computer
keyboard. Those who do not have one risk marginalization; their imagination does not cross
borders.
These concerns are real. If they are addressed, if the case for overcoming them is absorbed and
applied, the 21st century could yet become a time of mutual understanding such as we have
never seen before. A world in which it is easier than ever before to meet strangers must also
become a world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers as no different from
ourselves.Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda, and in most modern
conflicts, the men of war prey on the ignorance of the populace to instill fears and arouse
hatreds. That was the case in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where murderous, even genocidal
ideologies took root in the absence of truthful information and honest education. If only half the
effort had gone into teaching those peoples what unites them, and not what divides them,
unspeakable crimes could have been prevented.
Freedom of speech also guarantees diversity. As an Indian writer, I have argued that my
countrys recent experience with the global reach of Western consumer products demonstrates
that we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming coca-colonized. Indias own popular culture is
also part of globalization the products of Bollywood are exported to expatriate Indian
communities abroad. The success of Indian films and music in England and the United States
proves that the Empire can strike back.
And its not just India. A recent study has established that local television programming has
begun to overtake made-in-America shows in more and more countries. And as the globalizing
world changes, it does not do so only in one direction. In England today, Indian curry houses
employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.
In my first novel, The Great Indian Novel, I reinvented a 2000 year-old epic, The Mahabharata,
as a satirical retelling of the story of 20th century India, from the British days to the present. My
motivation was a conscious one. Most developing countries are also formerly colonized
countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriated the cultural definition of
its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done
the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land.
Think of India in the English-speaking world even today, and you think in images conditioned by
Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster, by the Bengal Lancers and The Jewel in the Crown. But
their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine; and my fiction seeks to reclaim my
countrys heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress, a story of
India; for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them. How important is such a
literary reassertion in the face of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India? Can
literature matter in a land of poverty, suffering and underdevelopment? I believe it does.

My novel begins with the proposition that India is not, as people keep calling it, an
underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly
developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such sentiments are the privilege of the satirist; but
as a novelist, I believe, with Molire, that you have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to
what end? What is the responsibility of the creative artist, the writer, in a developing country in
our globalizing world? In my own writing I have pointed to one responsibility to contribute
towards, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, variegated,
and multiple, in the Indian case) of the post-colonial society, caught up in the throes of
globalization. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus
of colonialism; both colonialism and globalization have in many ways fractured and distorted
their cultural self-perceptions.
Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what
we are proud of, and this is what we want to be. In this process, culture and development are
fundamentally linked and inter-dependent. The task of the writer is to find new ways (and revive
old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, in the midst of globalization, to
find new ways of being and becoming.
As a writer committed to Indian pluralism, I see cultural reassertion as a vital part of the
enormous challenges confronting a country like India as vital as economic development. We
are all familiar with the notion that man does not live by bread alone. In India, I would argue
that music, dance, art and the telling of stories are indispensable to our ability to cope with that
vital construct we call the human condition. After all, why does man need bread? To survive. But
why survive, if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life it is to
enrich, and be enriched by, life. Our poorest men and women in the developing world feel the
throb of imagination on their pulse, for they tell stories to their children under the starlit skies
stories of their land and its heroes, stories of the earth and its mysteries, stories that have gone
into making them what they are. And (since my second novel was about Bollywood) they see
and hear stories too, in the flickering lights of the thousands of cinemas in our land, where myth
and escapist fantasy intertwine and moral righteousness almost invariably triumphs with the
closing credits.
Globalization, its advocates say, is about growth and development. But it cannot just be a set of
figures on GNP tables, a subject for economists and businessmen rather than a matter of people.
And if people are to develop, it is unthinkable that they would develop without literature,without
song, and dance, and music, and myth, without stories about themselves, and in turn, without
expressing their views on their present lot and their future hopes. Development implies
dynamism; dynamism requires freedom, the freedom to create; creativity requires, quite simply,
imagination.
But in speaking of a cultural reassertion of imagination, I do not want to defend a closed
construct. I believe Indians will not become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhis metaphor,
we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house.
For me the winds of globalization must blow both ways. The UNESCO Charter memorably tells
us that as war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the foundations of
peace must be constructed. This is true not just of war and peace, but of the entire fabric of
human life and society which must be constructed in the mind. As the acolytes of Osama bin
Laden or the young foot soldiers of the Taliban have taught us, the globe will always have more
than a single mind. And that is why cultural diversity is so essential in our shrinking globe. For

without a multiplicity of cultures, we cannot realize how peoples of other races, religions or
languages share the same dreams, the same hopes. Without a heterogeneous human imagination,
we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the
universality of human aims and aspirations. This is why, as a writer, I would argue that the
specificities of literature are the best antidote to the globalization of the imagination.
Not that literature implies a retreat from the globe: rather, it is the mind shaped by literature that
understands the world and responds to its needs. Literature teaches us to empathise, to look
beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the smaller picture of the ordinary
human beings who are ultimately the objects of all public policy. And above all, to remember
always that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question. Those
are fairly useful prescriptions for public policy makers in the era of globalization
But literature presupposes learning. When we look at the world around us, we can see how vital
education is. It is ignorance, not knowledge, that makes enemies of people. It is ignorance, not
knowledge, that makes fighters of children. It is ignorance, not knowledge, that permits tyranny
rather than democracy. It is ignorance, not knowledge, that makes some argue that human
conflict is inevitable. It is ignorance, not knowledge, that makes others say that there are many
worlds, when we know that there is only one. Ours.
In many ways, the fundamental conflict of our times is the clash between, no, not civilizations,
but doctrines religious and ethnic fundamentalism on the one hand, secular consumerist
capitalism on the other. Thanks to globalization, the world is coming together into a single
international market just as it is simultaneously being torn apart by civil war and the breakup of
nations. The author Benjamin Barber has written of the twin prospects facing humanity as Jihad
versus McWorld Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every
kind of interdependence, against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets;
against modernity itself versus a McWorld of globalization run rampant, a world of fast
music, fast computers and fast food with MTV, Macintosh and McDonalds pressing nations
into one commercially homogenous theme park. Both Jihad and McWorld, of course, end up by
obliterating our most precious possession our identity.
Every one of us has many identities. Sometimes religion obliges us to deny the truth about our
own complexity by obliterating the multiplicity inherent in our identities. Islamic
fundamentalism, in particular, does so because it embodies a passion for pure belonging, a
yearning intensified by the threatening tidal wave of globalization as well as by the nature of
Middle Eastern politics. Of course there is something precious and valuable in a faith that allows
a human being to see himself at one with others stretching their hands out towards God around
the world. But can we separate religion from identity? Can we dream of a world in which
religion has an honoured place but where the need for spirituality will no longer be associated
with the need to belong? If identity can relate principally to citizenship rather than faith, to a land
rather than a doctrine, and if that identity is one that can live in harmony with other identities,
then we might resist both Jihad and McWorld.
And for that we must promote pluralism. To strike a personal note, my own faith in religious
pluralism is a legacy of my upbringing in secular India. Secularism in India did not mean
irreligiousness, which even avowedly atheist parties like the Communists or the southern DMK
party found unpopular amongst their voters; indeed, in Calcuttas annual Durga Puja, the
Communist parties compete with each other to put up the most lavish Puja pandals. Rather,
secularism meant, in the Indian tradition, a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged

by the state. I remember how, in the Calcutta neighbourhood where I lived during my high
school years, the wail of the muezzin calling the Islamic faithful to prayer blended with the chant
of the mantras at the Hindu Shiva temple and the crackling loudspeakers outside the Sikh
gurudwara reciting verses from the Granth Sahib. And just two minutes down the road stood St
Pauls Cathedral. Students, office workers, government officials, were all free to wear turbans,
veils, caps, whatever their religion demanded of them. That is Indian secularism: accept
everyone, privilege no one; nothing is exceptional, no one is humiliated. This secularism is under
threat from some in India today, but it remains a precious heritage of all Indians.
Pluralism can only be protected by supporting the development of democracy at a local, national
and international level to provide a context for cultural pluralism to thrive. We must encourage a
liberal, free-thinking education that opens minds everywhere rather than closes them. We must
take a stance of respect and humility in our approaches to others, to strive for inclusiveness
rather than marginalization.
When the terrorists of today and tomorrow have been defeated, our world will still be facing, to
use UN Secretary-General Kofi Annans phrase, innumerable problemswithout passports
problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common
environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs,
of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however
powerful, can solve alone, and which are unavoidably the shared responsibility of humankind.
They cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers.
Today, whether one is from Tbingen or Tallahassee, it is simply not realistic to think only in
terms of ones own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction; people,
goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and
ease. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in South-East Asia or Southern
Africa? From democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS can affect lives in
Germany. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream.
Robert Kagans famous, if fatuous, proposition that Americans are from Mars and Europeans
from Venus has gained wide currency lately. If that is so, where are Africans from? Pluto? They
might as well inhabit the most remote planet for all the attention they are paid by either
Americans or Europeans. Yet their problems are an affront to our consciences. Individual
countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to
ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are
tackled; it is also the only way. Everyone Americans, Germans, Indians will be safer in a
world improved by the efforts of the United Nations, efforts in which all the worlds people
shave a stake and all enjoy the opportunity to participate. And these efforts will be needed long
after Iraq has passed from the headlines.
I have perhaps taken too long in tackling the themes I raised at the beginning of this talk. So let
me pull my threads together.
In much of the world there exist societies whose richness lies in their soul and not in their soil,
whose past may offer more wealth than their present, whose imagination is more valuable than
their technology. Recognizing that this might be the case, and affirming that the imaginationis as
central to humanitys sense of its own worth as the ability to eat and drink and sleep under a roof,
is part of the challenge before the world today. The only way to ensure that this challenge is met
is to preserve cultural and imaginative freedom in all societies; to guarantee that individual
voices find expression, that all ideas and forms of art are enabled to flourish and contend for their

place in the sun. We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That
goal is increasingly being realized; it is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for
diversity.
There is an old Indian story about Truth. It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior
sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the warrior was a bit too
cocksure and callow; he told him he could only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So
the young warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to monasteries, to
mountaintops where sages meditated and to forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but
nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking refuge from a thunderstorm, he
found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was an old hag, with warts on her
face and matted hair, her skin hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her breath
malodorous. She greeted him; she seemed to know what he was looking for. They talked all
night, and with each word she spoke, the warrior realized he had come to the end of his quest.
She was Truth. In the morning, when the storm broke, the warrior prepared to return to claim his
bride. Now that I have found Truth, he said, what shall I tell them at the palace about you?
The wizened old crone smiled. Tell them, she said, tell them that I am young and beautiful.
So Truth is not always true; but that does not mean Truth does not exist. The terrorists failed to
see their victims as human beings entitled to their own imaginations. They saw only objects,
dispensable pawns in their drive for destruction. Our only effective answer to them must be to
defiantly assert our own humanity; to say that each one of us, whoever we are and wherever we
are, has the right to live, to love, to hope, to dream, and to aspire to a world in which everyone
has that right. A world in which the scourge of terrorism is fought, but so also are the scourges of
poverty, of famine, of illiteracy, of ill-health, of injustice, and of human insecurity. A world, in
other words, in which terror will have no chance to flourish. That could be the world of the 21st
century that has just been born, and it could be the most hopeful legacy of the horror that has
given it birth.
Since you have been told I am an Indian writer, let me tell you an Indian story a tale from our
ancient Puranas. It is a typical Indian story of a sage and his disciples. The sage asks his
disciples, when does the night end? And the disciples say, at dawn, of course. The sage says,
I know that. But when does the night end and the dawn begin? The first disciple, who is from
the tropical south of India where I come from, replies: When the first glimmer of light across
the sky reveals the palm fronds on the coconut trees swaying in the breeze, that is when the night
ends and the dawn begins. The sage says no, so the second disciple, who is from the cold
north, ventures: When the first streaks of sunshine make the snow and ice gleam white on the
mountaintops of the Himalayas, that is when the night ends and the dawn begins. The sage says,
no, my sons. When two travelers from opposite ends of our land meet and embrace each other
as brothers, and when they realize they sleep under the same sky, see the same stars and dream
the same dreams that is when the night ends and the dawn begins.
There has been a many a terrible night in the century that has just passed; let us preserve the
diversity of the human spirit to ensure that we will all have a new dawn in the century that has
just begun.
Thank you!

Psychology at the UN: Accomplishments and Future Directions

July 16, 2006

Thank you for that kind introduction. And thanks to Michael Frese, your President, to the
indefatigable Judy Kuriansky, and to IAAP for offering me this opportunity to speak to you about
the role that applied psychology can play at the United Nations.
I am certain that there is no need for me to convince this august gathering of experts that
psychology is keenly applied by diplomats and those of us who work for the United Nations,
even if we dont always know that this is what we are doing. But allow me to share with you one
of my favourite tales of the application of psychological pressure in the service of world peace.
In 1949, just a few short years after the UN was established, one of its guiding lights the great
African-American Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, was charged with hammering out a truce
between the newly established State of Israel and Egypt after the first round of the bitter conflict
that followed the partition of what was previously British Mandate of Palestine. Aware that this
would be an almost Herculean task, particularly given the strength of feeling on both sides,
Bunche chose a neutral location for these negotiations the Hotel des Roses on the island of
Rhodes.
Bunche certainly had a plan, and a bundle of political proposals to address the expected sticking
points. And his skills as a negotiator were without par. But he also understood that his
interlocutors, while speaking for their people and their nations, were individuals, and therefore
prey to all the normal human responses to their environment. And he used some clever nonpolitical ploys that he knew would influence those present to come to terms.
Both parties had committed to staying in the hotel, and there was little outside it by way of
distractions to allow them to escape from the discussions. In fact, the only extra-curricular
activities available were billiards and ping pong strangely enough, both games at which
Bunche excelled. To help pass the time, he organized small tournaments tournaments that he
almost always won. What impression his mastery made on his interlocutors, I will leave it to you
the experts to gauge.
But it was his second psychological weapon that was the most devious and devastating. The
hotel food was, in the words of his advance party and I quote appalling.
Bunches diplomatic success in this instance was widely credited to his skills and his patience,
but those who served under him report that the atrocious meals also played a vital role in
convincing the seemingly intransigent parties that the time to reach an agreement and thereafter
leave the hotel had come. And, in support of this interpretation, history records that the
Egyptians insisted on shipping in food from Cairo for the celebratory banquet.
Which leads me to the conclusion that, amongst his many skills, Bunche was an amateur but
talented psychologist.
Such anecdotes aside, I think it is fair to say that until recently the United Nations had struggled
to find ways to engage organizations like yours in our multilateral processes, even though we
have long been aware that your expertise could help us deliver on the promises of the UN
Charter. And in 1998, a colleague of yours Professor Patricia Licuanan, a psychologist with
some experience of multilateral fora, having played an important role at the Beijing Fourth
World Conference on Women, said that psychologists, too, had some ground to make up because
they hadnt paid due attention to the social issues and problems like poverty and lack of
education that underlay many a psychological issue.
Both sides of this equation have, I believe, changed.

In September of this year my Department at the United Nations the Department of Public
Information, is co-hosting the fifty-ninth annual DPI-NGO Conference at UN headquarters.
Representatives of many of the 3,700 non-governmental organizations holding consultative
status with UN entities will attend, either virtually or in person. The title of this years
conference is Unfinished Business: Effective Partnerships for Human Security and Sustainable
Development. The title is particularly apt. Although non-governmental organizations have been
part and parcel of the UN since its foundation, few would argue with the proposition that some of
the UNs Member States its owners have historically viewed the advice of civil society
organizations as, at best, an irritating but necessary diversion from the real business of
multilateral diplomacy and, at worst, an unwelcome impediment to the achievement of their
aims.
However one valuable side-effect of the attempts to renew the international system, after the
divisions in the UN Security Council in 2003 over Iraq made it clear that this system needed
updating, has been much more serious engagement with civil society.
Immediately prior to the 2005 World Summit, at which the largest ever gathering of world
leaders met to discuss Secretary-General Annans proposed reforms, the President of the General
Assembly the UNs universal legislative body held an unprecedented series of consultations
with non-governmental organizations. He actually asked experts from various disciplines in civil
society what needed to be done, and he listened to their answers. And those hearings led, for the
first time ever, to a series of roundtable discussions at which Ambassadors of Member States and
representative of NGOs debated our collective future, during the 2005 Annual DPI/NGO
Conference.
Difficult questions and expert opinions from civil society were not just voiced at the UN, but
they were actually heard and addressed by the official representatives of the worlds
Government. And so the stage was set for a much stronger relationship between the United
Nations and civil society. Although this cooperation has continued unabated since then, we now
need to find ways to institutionalize this level of engagement and to create serious, viable and
valuable partnerships. This, then, is the unfinished business that the title of this years NGO
Conference refers.
Many of the issues with which the international community and the United Nations, are
struggling require answers that are unlikely to be found if our analysis and our actions are limited
to those of traditional diplomacy, concerned, as it is, with the behaviour of States. Key among
our priorities over the past few years have been the achievement of the Millennium Development
Goals a series of time bound and measurable goals and targets for combating poverty, hunger,
disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women, agreed to by
world leaders in September 2000. Actions by governments those of the rich world and those of
the developing world must be taken if we are to even approach those goals, and we must all
apply what pressure we can to ensure those actions are forthcoming.
But their achievement will also be dependent on our ability to understand and influence the
behaviour of individuals, of groups and of societies to motivate some and empower others and
challenge yet others. And, of course, this depends on our ability to communicate effectively with
people all over the world, and the languages they speak, but also in words they can absorb and
understand. We need to make it clear, to people in both rich and poor States, just how important
these goals are to all our futures. I am sure you can see how an understanding of applied
psychology is essential to this noble project.

The torrid start of the twenty-first century has also made it clear that we must develop means to
successfully respond to the proliferation of terrorism that has been its horrible hallmark. The
terrorist attack of 9/11 like its horrible descendents in London and Madrid, in Bali and Delhi
and Mumbai were assaults not just on one country but, in their callous indifference to the lives
of innocents, an assault on the very bonds of humanity that tie us all together. To respond to them
effectively we must be united. Terrorism does not originate in one country, and its practitioners
are not based in one country, its victims are not found in one country and the response to it
must also involve all countries.
Governments and people around the world are slowly coming to understand this. One of the less
widely reported outcomes of the great gathering of world leaders that I mentioned took place at
the UN last September was a first-ever clear and unqualified condemnation, by all governments,
of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for
whatever purposes.
There are still those on our world who would seek to excuse terror, to find extenuation in the
wrongs the terrorists claim to be seeking to redress. But with this unambiguous declaration by
every country on earth, we now have moral clarity, and legal clarity should follow. There is much
for States to do if we are to address this scourge, including working together to eliminate the safe
havens in which terrorists have thrived, and to deprive them of their escape routes.
But to cure the world of the blight of terrorism, a law-and-order approach is not enough. The
limitations of military strength in global problem-solving are readily apparent; as Talleyrand
pointed out, the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is to sit on it. To deal with terrorism, we
must also cut off its sources of succour and sustenance.
I have argued that, at least in one sense, these terrorists are attacking the globalization of the
human imagination the so-called godless, materialist, promiscuous culture of the dominant
West, embodied in a globalization from which the people who applauded them felt excluded.
Terrorism emerges from blind hatred of an Other, and that in turn is the product of three factors:
fear, rage and incomprehension. Fear of what the Other might do to you, rage at what you
believe the Other has done to you, and incomprehension about who or what the Other really is
these three elements fuse together in igniting the deadly combustion that kills and destroys
people whose only sin is that they feel none of these things themselves.
If terrorism is to be tackled and ended, we will have to deal with each of these three factors by
attacking the ignorance that sustains them. We will have to know each other better, learn to see
ourselves as others see us, learn to recognize hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear,
and above all just learn about each other. This is no small challenge, and it is one where your
skills and your insights will obviously be vital. We need to understand what factors and what
assumptions lead surprisingly large numbers of young people to follow a desperate course set for
them by fanatics and ideologues, and even more importantly how we can address them.
Terrorism is a criminal act, but it is more than mere criminality. To overcome the problem of
terrorism it is necessary to understand its political nature as well as its basic psychology. And the
United Nations will need your help to do this.
Allow me to outline one final area where I am convinced you can be of help. Just as the UNs
role is being reassessed, our Organization is undergoing major changes. Change is always
difficult and perhaps even more so for UN staff, who work in a highly political environment and
in most cases far from the support mechanisms provided by ones extended family, ones
native culture and ones society.

And our field-staff work in some of the most troubled and difficult regions of the world, and
carry both the privilege and the burden of a responsibility to improve the lot of people suffering
from the effects of war, of disasters and of desperate poverty. That ours is a highly stressful
occupation will come as no surprise to you. And here too, your advice particularly in areas like
change management and stress management can play an important role.I said earlier that the
UNs approach to civil society was changing. But I must add that, even if we accept Professor
Licuanans initial observation, I see evidence that your profession has also changed its approach.
And one of the important indicators of that change is the association that IAAP has developed
with the United Nations.
Your accredited representatives, Judy Kuriansky andLaura Barbanel, who work with my
Department, the UN Department of Public Information, and Walter Reichman and Mary ONeill
Berry working with the Economic and Social Council, have made their presence felt in many
ways, including through participation in UN Conferences and events. And they have played
important roles in the last two annual NGO conferences, and in the planning of the 2006 event.
Particularly valuable has been their input into discussions on mental health issues and global
issues. The input your organization has contributed on serious matters, like the problems that
militate against the successful reintegration of former child soldiers, have helped guide our
efforts to help this especially vulnerable group of victims of conflict. And I am also most grateful
for the recent assistance provided to my Department, in the form of a pro bono survey of NGO
Representatives on ways to enhance partnerships between NGOs and the UN. We are currently
studying the results of that survey, and they will, no doubt, be of real value.
There are, of course, many other things that IAAP members can do, ranging from applying your
science to the most important issues of the day, to advocating in your communities. My sense is
that you are the best judges of where you can best contribute and what you can reasonably
achieve, and I have faith in the ability of your UN representatives to offer you advice of how that
can link in with our global agenda.
But I think the most important thing I can ask you to do for the United Nations today is to take
ownership of what is as much your organization as it is mine. The engagement of concerned
people the world over is essential if the UN is to contribute to making our world a better place
for everyone. The UN needs the support of the We, the Peoples in whose name the UN Charter
was written. Of course, I am not speaking of blind support. But I do believe that when people
properly understand what our Organization is, and what it does, they come to clearly see what an
incredible force for good it can be, and often is.
And when they take ownership of it demanding change when necessary and pressing their
representatives to use the UN for the noble ends its creators intended they are doing their part
to ensure those ends are met.
Those of us who work for the United Nations can create are trying to create an environment
conducive to a wider understanding of the global problems that the UN is addressing, and the
role that international cooperation must play in addressing them. But our success will ultimately
depend on whether there is a reciprocal commitment from those who share our mission. I count
IAAP amongst those whose help we need.
Thank you, and good luck with your deliberations.

Keynote Address by Dr. Shashi Tharoor at IIM World Conference, Goa

May 31, 2013

Keynote Address by Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State, MHRD

Let me begin by saying how delighted I am to be amongst you all today for
the inaugural edition of the IIM World Conference with the theme
Emerging Issues in Management. Coming, as I am, from an academic
background devoid of any formal education in management theory
unlike my senior colleague Pallam Raju, who actually has an MBA but,
given my seven years of professional experience managing the largest
department of the United Nations Secretariat, with over 800 staff in 77
offices around the world, a shrinking budget and political pressure to
prune overheads, the theme I have chosen for my remarks today - and one
of the overarching themes being addressed at this conference - is Looking
Beyond Profit. I chose it because I think it represents a vital area where
management theory meets the challenges of the real world and is forced to
acknowledge both its internal limitations and external constraints. Given
the experience of the developed world in the last half-decade or so,
especially the recent backlash against the Anglo-American model of laissez
faire capitalism, in the wake of the global recession, and given the difficult
choices we have had to make during our own six decades of experience as
an independent nation, and we will need to make for the foreseeable
future, I am sure you will all agree that it is a theme that is more relevant
than ever for not just teachers and students of management such as
yourselves but for all of us who care for Indias present and future.
Before I do so, let me compliment the Directors and faculty members of the
IIMs who were part who the team that has conceived and organised this
conference. In over six decades of their existence, Brand IIM has well and
truly come into its own and is today synonymous with a world-class
management education with a distinctively Indian flavour. The story of the
recent economic resurgence of India would be essentially incomplete
without acknowledging the critical role collectively played by the IIMs in
providing our country with an amazingly talented, highly motivated and
highly successful group of managers who have gone on to transform every
area of our society and economy with their exceptional leadership. I cannot

even begin to enumerate the extraordinary achievements of IIM Alumni

and the difference they have made to India. But I am proud to affirm that
your alumni have more than realized the hopes and vision with which
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru first envisaged your existence. As in so many
other areas of our nation-building, we must pay homage to his
farsightedness for realizing that to meet its tryst with destiny India would
need world class leaders of business and industry.
I want to outline before you my view of the challenges we will face in the
21st century, and I put it to you that how we think of profit must also
change to reflect the ways in which we, as a society and a nation, will take
on those challenges. We are dealing with two topics of long-standing
controversy here: the role of profit in economic activity, and the role of
government in economic activity. The former has seen much debate and
evolution since Adam Smiths work on The Wealth of Nations was decried
as promoting the worship of Mammon. The latter, too, has seen its share
of theorists and trials, be it the dominant Keynesian formulations of the
20th century, or Indias own experiments with Nehruvian / Fabian socialism
and the planned economy.
What we are seeing evolve today, however, is a sophisticated and
interconnected system which I like to think of as an emerging knowledge
society. Note that I say knowledge society, and not merely the knowledge
economy whose benefits, we are told, India stands to reap. A knowledge
society is dedicated to the greater goals of development and integration in
an atmosphere of enlightenment; the rules of the market economy certainly
have their role to play, and indeed are of great benefit when applied in their
proper place, but that is no invitation to apply the economics of the marketplace indiscriminately to every field of human endeavour. After all, another
long-running debate has been about whether rules of economic rationality
also approximate rules of justice, fairness and morality. The jury is still out
on this one there is, for instance, Justice Richard Posners persuasive
writing in the USA regarding the economic efficiency of the Common Law
but suffice it to say that human rationality can factor in more variables
than the traditional economic model would permit. In this emerging (also,

emergent) system, our concept of profit too must be re-examined, to align

more closely to what is profitable in a knowledge society.
Traditionally, profit (and its related concept, profitability) reflect simply an
assessment of the extent of returns one can expect from any economic
enterprise that is, how much one can expect to make over and above the
amounts needed to cover the costs involved in that enterprise. Profitability
is also a factor for assessing the merit of any such enterprise. The rationale
for such evaluation is elegant in its simplicity: the goal of any such
economic activity is to provide the greatest possible returns on the
resources invested in it, presumably with each investor gaining a share
proportionate to their contributions. A profitable endeavour can best
provide such returns, hence succeeding in its prime goal. That is to say,
barring any form of impropriety or diversion, shareholders can expect to
see their share of profits generated by enterprises in which they have
invested.
This is, of course, an exaggeratedly simplified view of profit and business.
The devil is in the details, or in this case, in the definition. We all know
profit equals earnings less costs, but exploring that simple formulation in
any detail opens a fair few cans of worms. What revenue qualifies as an
earning, and what exactly does one account as a cost? What exactly does
one do with whatever amount has been identified as profit, and what (if
any) implications does that have for profitability? And on which of these
does one have to pay taxes, as opposed to those on which one can safely
claim an exemption? (Incidentally, it is by virtue of their mastery over this
arcane knowledge that CAs, CFAs and tax lawyers are such feared and
respected figures in our community. This is an example of information
arbitrage, and it is one of the traditional means of cornering profits which
the 21st century knowledge society, with its tax submitting software, might
well make increasingly obsolete.)
The moment we delve into the definition of profit, some reservations can
arise. One is fairly evident and well explored: a preoccupation with profit
in the present too often translates into neglecting the sustainability of profit
(or the enterprise, community or society itself) into the future. The

practically universal adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

norms and practices can be seen as one form of awareness of this
shortcoming: businesses across the world now accept that their earnings,
their profits, come from society, and as such they must take steps to ensure
the health and vibrancy of society if they are to thrive. Further, as we are
coming to realise, globalisation and a shrinking planet on which, more to
follow do not permit the commercial equivalent of slash and burn
agriculture. Rather, a society or community must be cultivated with care
and attention if it is to serve as a lasting asset. As the global financial crisis
most recently established, anyone who erodes parts of the foundational
linkages between economics and people anywhere in the world soon finds
that he has undercut himself in the bargain. Regaining a steady footing
from that position is proving a challenge for two entire continents even
today, and the measures those nations take in this effort continue to have
implications for every one of us, even here in India. The changing profile of
tourists visiting the lovely state of Goa and the nationalities of those
purchasing property here is but one illustration of how financial instability,
change and rebalancing in the economic centres of the West can be
transmitted to our shores!
This idea that profits ultimately stem from society can be thought of in
terms of Public Trust doctrine. Gandhiji had spoken of trusteeship, this is a
related idea. Simply put, we are given only temporary stewardship over the
resources we use, which makes it our duty to pass on to our successors
resources undiminished in quality or value, though they may be
transmuted in form. (Environmentalists have long made this argument: an
African proverb says the Earth is not ours, it is a treasure we are meant to
safeguard for the next generation.) This leads to an entirely new
understanding of profit one which would restrict it largely to the benefit
gained from our resources, without depleting the resources to which
others, including future generations, are entitled. This is the exact opposite
of the traditional view of using resources to generate profits, from whence
comes our concern with efficiency, i.e. reducing the extent of those
resources wasted in this conversion. In this new conception, 100% efficiency

is the minimum we demand, because trading off our resources for gains in
the short term would be a loss. Applying gains to improving our stock of
resources would be true profit.
The implication is that the idea of profit must be reconsidered, to reflect not
so much those who can best secure value for the resources they hold in
trust, but rather those who can ensure that their resources will be
maintained and even grow in value. Profit is inherently judged also in
terms of the capacity to make future profits. I put it to you, then, that an
understanding of profit suitable to the 21stcentury is this: profit is a
measure of capacity building, and profitability is the ability to improve on
existing assets.
In thinking of profit as capacity-building, we resolve many of the
definitional conflicts to which I earlier alluded. For instance, when we
speak of improvements on existing assets, this must take into account the
extent to which our activities are consuming or degrading them in the first
place. Evidently, profitability refers to net improvement. (I say this is
evident, because if resources are held in trust by society at large, then
distinctions between my resources and someone elses resources are
rather artificial. If using my resources to generate a profit also causes the
degradation of someone elses resources, then that is a loss, and a loss that
must be taken into account before declaring a profit!) Again, we have
environmentalists to thank for drawing our attention to this concern. In the
decades since Rachel Carson first wrote about the environmental costs of
pollution, most nations have brought in legislation to ensure that firms are
forced to take account of at least the most egregious of these implicit costs
paying taxes equivalent to the damage they cannot avoid, and liable to
massive fines if they cause damage by negligence. Whether it is superfund
legislation in the USA, methane taxes on livestock in New Zealand,
international treaties to protect fish stocks under the Law of the Sea, or our
own Supreme Courts 2009 judgment in the Vedanta / Niyamgiri alumina
mining case, we already have an understanding that costs are no less real
merely because they are imposed on others. How else can one explain the
outrage against clothing or sporting goods multinationals when their

products were found to be the result of sweatshop labour, or the

willingness of customers to pay a premium a loss to them! for Fair Trade
goods?
The challenges and opportunities that corporations and industries pose for
business leaders, nations and governments pose for politicians. Despite the
different habitats inhabited by our two apparently different species, I
would suggest that the temperament, the intellectual ability and the
qualities of endurance and patience that are required in a successful
business leader are entirely the qualities that no self respecting politician
desiring recognition and seeking public office can do without. Owing to my
own background, much of what I have to share with you about leadership
today will be applicable to both business and politics in equal measure.
By now, most of you would have heard endless times that a new age is
upon us. This is a banal and trivial truism if ever there was one, for new
ages are always dawning upon the generations that live in them. The old
order is always changing and yielding to the new, sometimes smoothly and
sometimes in extremely disruptive and disorienting ways. What, then,
makes this new age of our times so different from the new ages of the past?
I believe it is the speed with which it has come into being. In the last 25
years or so, beginning with the fall of Communism in 1989, a paradigm
shift has taken place in politics and business. But what characterizes the
defining features of this shift, the changes that leaders must deal with
today? What does this new age mean for you?
It means several things to me. As I see it, the salient features of this
paradigm shift are - the spread of globalization, the growth and success of
democracy and universal ethical standards, and the occurrence of sudden
systemic shocks both in politics and business. Related to these three
prominent features are the no less significant changes caused by the spread
of technology and environmental degradation.
The first challenge for leaders in our new age is of course globalization.
Now more than ever, leaders must be able to grasp and balance the scales
of a globalized world economy and society. "Globalization" is a fairly new
term. Professor Theodore Levitt, a marketing professor at the Harvard

Business School, first employed it in a 1983 article in the Harvard Business

Review. Globalization became a buzzword following the end of the Cold
War, but the phenomenon has long been a factor in the foreign relations of
the United States and has deep roots in history. Globalization is a complex,
controversial, and synergistic process in which improvements in
technology (especially in communications and transportation) combine
with the deregulation of markets and open borders to bring about vastly
expanded flows of people, money, goods, services, and information. This
process integrates people, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and
nations into larger networks. Globalization promotes convergence,
harmonization, efficiency, growth, and, perhaps, democratization and
homogenization.
But globalization has a dark side too. It promotes convergence but also
disruption: the era of increasing globalisation is also an age of terrorism,
religious intolerance, and the so-called clash of civilisations. It produces
economic and social dislocations and arouses public concerns over job
security; the distribution of economic gains; and the impact of volatility on
families, communities, and nations. As modern day leaders, one must learn
how to handle the thorns that come with the roses.
In the words of the distinguished Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, We cannot
reverse the economic predicament of the poor across the world by with
holding from them the great advantages of contemporary technology, the
well-established efficiency of international trade and exchange, and the
social as well as economic merits of living in an open society. Rather, the
main issue is how to make good use of the remarkable benefits of economic
intercourse and technological progress in a way that pays adequate
attention to the interests of the deprived and the underdog. The question is
not just whether the poor, too, gain something from globalization, but
whether they get a fair share and a fair opportunity. The assets of the 200
richest people in the world are more than the combined income of 41% of
the world's people; this would be one indication that our ideas of profit and
profitability have some disconnect from ground reality.

The second element of leadership in the new age is learning how to deal
with black swans especially the psychological bias that makes people
individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the
massive role of rare events. Black swans have existed throughout history,
yet their shape has transformed. The Cretaceous-Palaeogene extinction
event, almost 66 million years ago, wiped out the entire dinosaur
population; while closer home, one of the greatest financial crisis of all
times threatened to throw the Euro zone into darkness. Uncertainty affects
decision making in many ways. For instance, if firms cannot predict future
levels of effective demand or growth rates, how can they take a rational
decision regarding investment? Similarly, how can banks lend to potential
borrowers if they do not know whether they will be able to repay their
loans, given the uncertain levels of effective demand in the future?
Malcolm Gladwells theory on uncertainty provides some valuable insights.
In his book Blink, Gladwell narrates the story of a statue dealer. A dealer
brings a new statue to the Getty Museum, a Greek Kouros. The Museum
was ecstatic, but first wanted to check the statues authenticity. The lawyers
went first and found no problem with the paperwork. Next the Museum
checked the stone to see if it came from the right quarries and see if it had
been out of the ground long enough. So far, so good. Gettys then decided
to buy it, pay a huge amount of money ($10M) for it and invite an expert to
see it. The expert takes one look at the statue and says its a fake, but cant
explain why. Another expert is called in; he too gives the same immediate
response, but is unable to say why. The Museum takes the statue to Greece
and unveils it to a huge audience of experts who then have the same
response. When they get back, the lawyers call to say that there is now in
fact a problem with the paperwork and the geologists calls to say that there
is a problem with the age test. In the end, the data proves that it is indeed a
fake, just like the experts thought it was. In the statue example the experts
were doing a kind of complex pattern matching taking a pattern they had
in their head about real Kouros statues and matching it to the actual
example in front of them. In military circles they talk about coup doeil at a
glance the ability to see immediately what was needed. Building such

deep levels of intuition requires great amounts of experience. Research

suggests that a person needs 10,000 hours of experience to build the kind of
knack we described.
One of the effects of globalisation and the knowledge society will be to give
any person easier access to others who possess such expertise, and to
reduce the opportunities for arbitrage based on unequal access to
information (though opportunities for discretionary arbitrage will remain
nonetheless). Despite that advantage, though, not everyone can be an
expert, and even an expert can be wrong. In dealing with uncertainty, there
will always be those who make the wrong bet; I put it to you that there is
nothing wrong with this, unless (as with white swans) they persist in
making the wrong bets by being repeatedly and predictably wrong. Failure
is an important part of learning, and learning is at the core of adaptation
and capacity building. To borrow the words of Rudyard Kipling, in his
poem IF,
If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
and risk it on a turn of pitch-and-toss,
and lose, and start again at your beginnings,
and never breathe a word about your loss.
then you could still profit from your failure.
There is a case to be made here, once again, for our traditional
understanding of profit and loss to be re-examined.
The third and last element relevant in this new age that I would like to talk
about is one that is often characterized by grey - ethics in business. The key
difficulty surrounding business ethics is that ethics, by definition, goes
beyond the merely legal but how far beyond? No institutionalized rules
exist defining an upper limit. Public opinion is not a very good guide. It is
subject to change. Ask Ramalingam Raju! Then as leaders how do we judge
what is right and what is wrong? A great philosopher who sought to
establish ethical rules on the firmest possible foundation was Immanuel
Kant. His deontological ethics principle puts forth a simple question
What if everyone did that? When one is in doubt about a particular course
of action, consider the impact if everyone does the same thing. If it will lead

to greater harm to society to a loss to everyone involved then it is just as

wrong for even a single person to do it. This is a simple Kantian insight, but
I believe that this simple logic, except in some cases, works as an eloquent
compass in times of moral dilemmas.
Ajit Balakrishnan began this morning by talking about corruption.
Undoubtedly much of this stems from politics and politicians, from their
ability to profit from the power to permit. When a business has to factor in
what needs to be paid to obtain a licence to perform an economic activity or
sometimes merely to expedite its processing and especially if these are
costs that cannot even be legally accounted for it distorts not just ideas of
profit and loss but even of the viability of the business. Indian politics has
seen its fair share of scams and scandals in the recent past, and as a result
lost not just domestic but foreign investor confidence. Ethics in business &
government has to be the anti-clogging device that cleans the system every
now and then, lest it burst from the pressures of greed and corruption. So
in a world mired with shaky souls and broken promises, we must each find
the will to stick to the right path as leaders of not only a knowledge-driven
but also a value-driven society. Only then will we see the positive economic
connotations from the creation of trust, even as we see the negatives today.
The experience will be an eloquent argument for appreciating the role of
societal context in determining profit, and of ensuring that we do our part
to protect and maintain that context in its most conducive state.
Before I wrap up, Id like to end by quoting a few lines by Rabindranath
Tagore, he says that The highest education is that which does not merely
give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. This
is a wonderfully Indian idea a Tagorean idea of harmony. I believe that
the IIM World Conference is just such an event that creates this harmony
for educators and business leaders alike. I thank you all for contributing to
it so tunefully, and hope that I have been able to strike some modest chords
of my own. I look forward to your comments and questions.
Thank you, and Jai Hind!

Speech by Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Hon'ble Minister of State HRD at the release
of the book 'Jihad & Other Essays'
Dr. M K Muneer, Dr.Zoya Hasan, Prof. Achin Vanaik, Dr. Anwar Alam, Sri
Venkitesh Ramakrishnan, Sri Shajahan Madampat, Distinguished members
of the audience, Ladies and gentlemen
Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer was a scholar, a teacher, a reformer and a prolific
writer. With his passing, we have lost one of the most prominent voices
speaking with intellect and moderation in the understanding and
articulation of Islam, and in its interactions with the modern world. His
writings, which I appreciated greatly, offered a glimpse into his keen
intellect, as also his abiding sense of faith and compassion; I would have
enjoyed a conversation with him, but regret that I will never have the
opportunity. We meet one week after his loss, which makes this a sad and
poignant occasion.
Dr. Engineer did not have an easy life; his work at the forefront of the
Progressive Dawoodi Bohra movement and his reformist approach to
religion often attracted the criticism of some members of his own
community. He lamented this disharmony in some of his writings, but also
reaffirmed the courage of his convictions, and his commitment to restoring
harmony.
Perhaps his commitment, and his ongoing efforts to make sure that the
message of peace he described as the literal heart of Islam, can best be
understood in terms of his own philosophy what he believed made one a
good Muslim, and indeed a good human being. To Dr. Engineer, it was
never enough for one to be virtuous or law abiding merely in personal
conduct; he held that one could not silently abide the persecution or
suppression of others without forfeiting such claims to virtue. The essence
of religion, to him, is to oppose injustice with principled conduct this was
his idea of the true jihad of the 21stcentury. It would be a struggle for
understanding and enlightenment ijtehad, the striving for knowledge.

The book we hold today Jihad & Other Essays is a faithful reflection of
this philosophy, as he saw it playing out in various aspects of society. In it,
Dr. Engineer notes that now that jihad in its new interpretation as terrorism
what some would call the confusion between jihad and terrorism is
being denounced by all prominent ulama of the Islamic world, it is time
that ijtihad was devoted to developing solutions for the many legal and
social problems affecting Muslim societies today. Blind imitation and
stagnation have become the bane of Islamic law. He proposes various steps
to evolve and re-formulate ijtihad: chiefly, through, ulama and Muslim
intellectuals. There are many who have been trained in the traditional
Islamic literature of interpretation, tradition and jurisprudence and who
feel the need for change; indeed Dr. Engineer himself was the son of a
Muslim priest and was trained in Quranic tafsir, tawil, fiqh and hadith, and
learned Arabic before becoming an engineer. So he is well qualified to
argue that intellectuals and theologians must show courage and come
forward to develop a fresh approach, defying powerful vested interests
manning the religious establishment, as it were.
The goal, to Dr. Engineer, was to transcend all existing schools of Islamic
law and develop a unified law applicable to all Muslims, bringing
substance to the otherwise hollow slogan of Islamic unity. With this, a
new ijma (consensus) could be developed on issues that are specific to our
age and time for, if the ulama could do it in the first three centuries of
Islam, why not the scholars of today? In a globalised world, a much wider
consensus across schools & sects can be developed and the tradition that
holds that the learned shall not be united in error surely gains weight from
this broader consensus.
Dr. Engineer explores, as well, the origins of terrorism. It does not, as he
wryly notes, suddenly drop out of heaven; it originates here on Earth,
sometimes in response to acts of omission or commission by the ruling
classes, and soon acquires dynamics of its own more malignant than mere
retaliation. Terrorism is also cynically used by many who have nothing to
do with religion, as we know from our experience, most recently on the

26thof November 2011. Religious terrorism also turns on itself we have

seen it grow more vicious, such as the attacks on Ahmadi Mosques in
Lahore killing the faithful who were praying inside. These and similar
acts, he says, have shaken the conscience of humanity.
The irony is that India produced an apostle of nonviolence in the person of
Gandhi but such acts raise questions about the relevance of Gandhijis
nonviolence in our era. Has Gandhi become irrelevant? He asks, is Gandhi
fit only for the paying of tributes on his birthday or the day of his
martyrdom, and nothing else? It will be our weakness to wait for a new
Gandhi. We need collective value-based thinking. We must transform our
education system and make it accessible to poorest of poor again through
creative methods, creating an education system, which is cooperative, not
competitive.
To Dr. Engineer, such a philosophy of non-violence is truly, spiritually,
Islamic. The Qurn clearly lays down that killing any person without a just
cause is akin to killing all humanity, and saving one persons life amounts
to saving all humanity. Killing hundreds of innocent people cannot qualify
for being a religious act by any stretch of imagination. In that sense,
whether or not fundamentalism and terrorism are linked together, both are
curses for humanity. No truly religious person should approve of such a
gross misuse of religion. One can conclude from closer study of Qurn and
hadith that compassion is the best human quality and no one deserves to
be called human or Muslim who is not compassionate. Even fasting during
the month of Ramadan, according to Dr. Engineer, can be interpreted both
spiritually and materially. Fasting in a spiritual sense is a form of ibadat i.e.,
a form of prayer and an attempt to shun material needs for cultivating ones
spiritual potentialities. But it also helps mak eone sensitive to others pangs
of hunger, and develop sensitivity to others suffering, thus to develop
compassion towards the poor.
One of the most fascinating essays is titled The Burqa, and discusses
issues of a Muslim woman wearing a burqa, a veil or a scarf over her head.

Dr. Engineer holds that a truly democratic nation would respect other cultural
and religious practices and would not treat its own citizens as aliens and ban their
practices. If some Muslim women decide to wear burqa covering their bodies from
head to toe, it is their decision even if it tortures them.
The challenge is that this must be a democratic and freely made decision,
and not a coerced one. Today, he writes, many women wear it out of social
or family compulsion only some wear it voluntarily as a mark of Islamic
tradition. Ultimately, women are safest in a suitable social environment
with the democratic enforcement of law and order, where their rights are
respected. He would have disapproved of Frances ban on the burqa and
supported Indias position on this, but he would also have opposed a
husband or father who forced a woman to wear a burqa if she does not
want to. In other words, Mulsim women should be free to wear or not wear
the burqa this is a position that upholds culture while opposing coercion.
Another essay that I found particularly topical, entitled Muslim Women:
Between Tradition and Modernity, is one in which he recounts a recent
incident. In a televised poetry recital in Saudi Arabia, a poetess
participating burst out against the strict control regime for women in her
country. It was a voice of protest - and a very bold protest at that but more
importantly, she got loud cheers from the audience and won a place in the
competitions final round. Yet, it also brought her death threats posted on
several militant web sites. Too often, in the name of Islamic traditions,
women are being denied their rights and free choice according to their
conscience. This may not be the condition in all Islamic countries, but
traditional Muslim societies have imposed several restrictions and appear
unwilling to adapt.
Historical experience, Dr. Engineer says, must not be neglected. Most of the
traditions, except those pertaining to ibadat (i.e. matters of worship) and
morality reflect Arab culture on the one hand, and Medieval West Asian or
Central Asian culture, on the other. Jurists have also maintained
that arabadat (customs and traditions) could become part of law, and

many arah laws incorporate the arab adat. Today we must change this
cultural base through direct reflections and fresh understanding of the
Qurnic verses relevant to women. This attempt would establish
individual dignity and freedom of choice for women. Freedom of
conscience is an important doctrine of the Qurn and so is individual
dignity. The Qurn is far more in harmony with human dignity and
freedom than the traditional medieval cultural practices, is the argument
Dr. Engineer presents. Thus, such an approach will in no way injure the
divine nature of arah, and indeed would liberate it from its traditional
cultural basis incorporating patriarchal values of Arab culture rather than
the divine spirit of the Qurn.
It is with such incisive writing and a compassionate understanding of
Islamic theory, jurisprudence and philosophy that Dr. Engineer put into
practice his own call for ijtehaad. I am privileged to release this edition of
his final offering to the world. It has been a week since Dr. Engineer left us,
but the strength of his beliefs and the truly timely nature of his ideas, as
much as the sheer erudition and compassion with which he has
propounded them, will continue to shape the world for years to come. I
pray that we may find ourselves guided to the world he sought to shape
with these writings.
Thank you for giving me this privilege, and Jai Hind!

International Conference on Literacy through Literature - Keynote Address by Dr. Shashi Tharoor
February 7, 2014
International Conference on Literacy through Literature
Keynote Address by Dr. Shashi Tharoor
Honble Minister of State for HRD
New Delhi, 7th February 2014

Ms. Nilima Sinha, Ms. Manorama Jafa, distinguished ladies on the podium
and in the audience, authors, illustrators, book lovers, friends,
Apologies for being unable to be part of the conference yesterday. At the first
glance, the title of the conference, Literacy through Literature seems to be a
contradiction in itself because you need to be literate in the first place to be
even able to read literature. But when I think back to my own infancy, I realise
that my love for literature began with my mother reading out stories to me. My
mother often jokes that as a child I might have taken to reading fervently at an
early age because she read them out so badly that I just had to read the same
stories by myself. As a consequence, my first incentive for reading was
curiosity engendered by the fables that I heard.
This primarily oral tradition of reading out or telling stories from memory to
young children is one of the oldest cultural traits of humanity. India, itself, has
always had a rich oral tradition of storytelling which in modern times has
acquired myriad manifestations such as folk tales, street plays, films
(Bollywood) and documentaries. Indian grandmothers are famous for the tales
they tell from the epics! Through the evocative, delightful, and often thoughtprovoking images and ideas created by these traditions of stories, even the

pre-literate in our country have always had a flavour for literature. In order to
enhance their interest in books or motivate them to acquire literacy, it only
remains a matter of igniting in them an interest for reading as a way of gaining
greater access to the world of the imagination and the intellect. For instance,
some decades ago, merely the ability to sign your name and make sense of
simple instructions was the critical difference between being able to draw any
benefit from the opportunities available, and being left behind. The quest for
empowerment has been an important catalyst in motivating previous
generations to learn to read and write. It has helped leverage pre-literacy
created by our oral traditions and transform it to a higher literacy rate today.
Today, the ability of literacy to make or break individual destinies is greater
than ever before. And yet, even in these materialistic times, the ability of
literature to unlock the human potential remains a crucial indicator of our
collective achievements as a sentient, evolved species.
But the objective of literacy is not limited to the fundamentals of signing your
name, and knowing which bus goes where. It is imperative to progress
beyond the basics of reading street signs and knowing the alphabet of a
language. Literature is one way to give the literate exposure to ideas that are
both new, and timeless. It keeps them reading and helps them solidify their
urge to be fully literate. Reading is unique in the sense that it is an activity that
reinforces itself since the pleasure of reading stimulates interest and creates
an incentive to read more. It is a self-renewing, self-regenerating activity. And
with each book, the reader unravels new ideas within one subject, or makes a
leap to new subjects. Of course as a writer, I have a selfish interest in
promoting reading as it means a larger audience for the books I write, and it
also is a greater encouragement for me to write more. But more significantly,
reading is important for the reason that even the literate often cease to remain
literate because they stop reading, and literature can offer the hook that keeps
them interested. In that sense, the act of reading is nothing less than an act of
affirmation of being alive. As central to our self-conception as other
fundamental acts such as love and hope.
To me, as I wrote in my introduction to Bookless in Baghdad books are like
the toddy tappers hatchet, striking through the rough husk that enshrouds our
minds to tap into the exhilaration that ferments within. And its not just books in
the conventional sense, with black letters on white pages that stimulate the
mind and fire our imaginations. There is a wealth of different and new kinds of
exciting formats for engaging, exciting and retaining young readers that are
often overlooked. For instance comics books that are often sneered at, offer
an inestimable advantage in stimulating reading because of their use of
simple and easy to comprehend language, familiar contexts, and illustrations
that help understand the meaning of unfamiliar words. And not every comic

book is about the adventures of Archie or Betty in Riverdale. Amar Chitra

Katha, Jataka Tales, and comics inspired from our countrys epics have been
grossly underestimated in terms of their potential in augmenting efforts to
promote reading, and enhancing the quality of literacy. Even as an adult,
when learning French, I chose to reread Asterix and Tintin, comics of my
childhood in order to improve my French and get a lively feel for idiomatic and
expressive language. Besides comics, formats such as picture books, and
graphics novels, are innovative ways to expand the options available for
advancing the literacy agenda. After all a picture says a thousand words, so
why not use their power to captivate and engage for attracting more people to
the knowledge and rich expression in good writing.
The proliferation of new materials is equally important to safeguard the literacy
of those who are forced to drop out of the system due to circumstances rather
than choice. In particular, the myriad manifestations of books are vital in
sustaining efforts for the education of women. For young girls who do not
have access to class rooms after a certain age, but have learnt the
fundamentals of reading and writing, books are a vital instrument for
preserving and advancing their ability to continue to be literate. Scholarly
studies and research projects have established what common sense might
already have told us: that if you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if
you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community. The
evidence is striking. Increased schooling of mothers has a measureable
impact on the health of their children, on the future schooling of the child, and
on the child's adult productivity. The children of educated mothers consistently
out-perform children with educated fathers and illiterate mothers. Given that
they spend most of their time with their mothers, this is hardly surprising.
The Government of India has designed a literacy programme called Saakshar
Bharat that takes cognisance of the power of literacy in promoting gender
equality and the empowerment of women, effective tools to combat poverty
and stimulate development to promote the values of humanity and peace.
Apart from gender equality, in this new age of digital literacy, computers must
also be seen as source for promoting literacy through literature. There is a
fashionable lament that as children are spending increasingly longer hours
before computer screens, they have less time for many other things, and are
driving kids away from reading books. On the contrary, by learning how to
navigate a computer, accessing the Internet, studying online, and even
playing computer games, children are involved in the process of reading.
While I am not a technology determinist, the multiplier effect of computers
cannot be ignored. Literature can benefit from the information age, and
communication networks facilitated by the Internet and computers. It is much
easier to transmit, share, and even translate stories and the written word for

readers of different ages and capabilities. With the development of low cost
tablets, and digital formats for books, a simple hand-held computing device
can serve as a thousand books in one. From being bastions of elitist privilege,
the Universities and libraries of the world have themselves evolved, and today
the digital revolution has ensured an ever growing democratisation of
knowledge. As for the argument that e-books are expensive and unaffordable,
many of the outstanding classics of literature that we have enjoyed are easily
available as free downloads today, as copyrights, in various countries, on
such published works expire 60 to 75 years after the author has passed away.
Simultaneously, the advent of Creative Commons has transformed the
dissemination of knowledge, making new works more accessible.
This digitisation and democratisation of reading augurs well for literacy in
India, with its multitude of languages and wealth of literature present in those
languages. Since Independence, we have made monumental progress in
education and our literacy rate has grown to about 74 per cent. Though true
literacy for me will only be achieved when every child in India will have the
confidence and ability to read any good book, with full comprehension and in
a language of their choice. Good luck for your discussions and deliberations
on this important topic, and I wish you all an enriching and rewarding
conference.
Thank you, and Jai Hind!

Security Council Reform: Past, Present, and Future

December 15, 2011

Security
Council
Reform:
Past,
Present,
and
Future
Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 25.4 (Winter 2011)
Even though it has been more than a year since I left the service of the United Nations, the one
question people have not stopped asking me here in India is when our country, with 1.2 billion
people and a booming economy, is going to become a permanent member of the Security
Council. The short answer is not this year, and probably not the next. But there are so many
misconceptions about this issue that a longer answer is clearly necessary.
The problem of reforming the Security Council is rather akin to a situation in which a number of
doctors gather around a patient and all agree on the diagnosis, but they cannot agree on the
prescription. The diagnosis is clear: the Security Council (SC) reflects the geopolitical realities of
1945 and not of today. This situation can be anatomized mathematically, geographically, and
politically,
as
well
as
in
terms
of
equity.
Mathematically: When the UN was founded in 1945, the Council consisted of 11 members out of
a total UN membership of 51 countries; in other words, some 22 percent of the member states
were on the Security Council. Today, there are 192 members of the UN, and only 15 members of

the Councifewer than 8 percent. So many more countries, both in absolute numbers and as a
proportion of the membership, do not feel adequately represented on the body.
Geographically: The current composition of the Council also gives undue weight to the balance
of power of at least a half century ago. Europe, for instance, which accounts for barely 5 percent
of the worlds population, still controls 33 percent of the SC seats in any given year (and that
does not count Russia, regarded by much of the world as another European power).
Politically: The Councils five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, Russia,
and China) enjoy their position, as well as the privilege of a veto over any Council resolution or
decision, by virtue of having won a war sixty-six years ago. (In the case of China, the word
won
needs
to
be
placed
within
quotation
marks.)
In terms of simple considerations of equity, this situation is unjust to those countries whose
financial contributions to the United Nations outweigh those of four of the five permanent
members. Specifically, Japan and Germany have for decades been the second- and third-largest
contributors to the UN budget, at roughly 19 percent and 12 percent, respectively, while still
being referred to as enemy states in the United Nations Charter (since the UN was set up by
the victorious Allies of World War II). Further, the current Council membership denies
opportunities to other states that have contributed in kind (through participation in peacekeeping
operations, for example) or by size, or both, to the evolution of world affairs in the more than six
decades since the organization was born. India and Brazil are notable examples of this latter case.
So the Security Council is clearly ripe for reform to bring it into the second decade of the twentyfirst century. The UN recognized the need for action as early as 1992, when the Open-Ended
Working Group of the General Assembly was established to look into the issue, in the hopeor
so then secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali declaredof finding a formula for SC reform in
time for the organizations fiftieth anniversary in 1995. But the Open-Ended Working Group
soon began to be known in the UN corridors as the Never-Ending Shirking Group. Rather than
identifying a solution or moving toward compromise, the group remains in existence to this day,
having missed not only the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations but the sixtieth and now the
sixty-fifth. Left to their own devices, they will be arguing the merits of the case well past the
UNs
centenary.
For a decade now, the Group of Four (or G-4)Brazil, Germany, India, and Japanhave been in
the forefront of an attempt to win passage of Security Council reform, fully expecting to be the
beneficiaries of any expansion in the category of permanent members. They have been
repeatedly thwarted. The problem is quite simple: for every state that feels it deserves a place on
the Security Council, and especially the handful of countries that believe their status in the world
ought to be recognized as being in no way inferior to at least three if not four of the existing
permanent members, there are several who know they will not benefit from any reform. The
small countries, which make up more than half the UNs membership, accept this reality and are
content to compete occasionally for the five nonpermanent Council seats that come up for a vote
every year. (These five seats are voted on by all members of the General Assembly, and the
candidates are generally regarded as representing their various regionsthus, often creating

vigorous

lobbying

and

campaigning

among

the

nations

within

given

region.)

At the same time, the medium-sized and large countries that are the rivals of the prospective
beneficiaries (that is, the G-4) deeply resent the prospect of a select few breaking free of their
current second-rank status in the world body. Some of the objectors, such as Canada and Spain,
are genuinely motivated by principle: they consider the very existence of permanent membership
to be wrong, and they have no desire to compound the original sin by adding more members to a
category they dislike. Many others, however, are openly animated by a spirit of competition,
historical grievance, or simple envy. Together, they have banded into an effective coalitionfirst
called the coffee club and now, more cynically, Uniting for Consensusto thwart reform of
the permanent membership of the Council. They say they would accept some other formula that
does not give a few countries privileges that they do not currently enjoy.
Let us remember that the bar to amending the UN Charter has been set rather high. Any
amendment requires a two-thirds majority of the overall UN membershipin other words, 128
of the 192 states in the General Assembly. An amendment would further have to be ratified by
two-thirds of the member states (and ratification is usually a parliamentary procedure, so in most
countries this means it is not enough for the government of the day to be in favor of a reform; its
Parliament or Congress must also agree to the change). Thus, the only prescription that has any
chance of passing is one that will both (1) persuade two-thirds of the UN member states to
support it and (2) not attract the opposition of any of the existing Perm Five (or even that of a
powerful U.S. senator who could block ratification in Washington). That has proved to be a tall
order,
indeed.
After all, what countries would the world want to see on an expanded Security Council?
Obviously, states that displace some weight in the world and have a record of making major
contributions to the UN system. But when Japan and Germany began pressing their claims to
permanent seats, the then foreign minister of Italy, Susanna Agnelli, wisecracked, Whats all
this talk about Japan and Germany? We lost the war, too! (Other historical factors intrude:
neither China nor South Korea is keen on seeing Japan rewarded today, given its record of
atrocities seven decades ago.) Even assuming such objections (notably from Italy, Spain, Canada,
and Korea, and among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries)
could be overcome, adding these two security council reform to the Council would, of course,
further skew the existing North-South imbalance. So they would have to be balanced by new
permanent members from the developing world. But which would these be?
In Asia, India, as the worlds largest democracy, its fifth-largest economy, and a long-standing
contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, seems an obvious contender. But Pakistan, which
fancies itself Indias strategic rival on the subcontinent, is unalterably opposed, and to some
extent Indonesia seems to feel threatened by the prospect of an Indian seat. Similarly, in Latin
America, Brazil occupies a place analogous to Indias, but Argentina and Mexico have other
ideas, pointing to Portuguese-speaking Brazils inferior credentials in representing largely
Hispanic Latin America. And in Africa, how is one to adjudicate the rival credentials of the
continents largest democracy, Nigeria, its largest economy, South Africa, and its oldest
civilization,
Egypt?

No wonder the search for a reform prescriptiona formula that is simultaneously acceptable to a
two-thirds majority and not unacceptable to the Perm Fivehas proved so elusive. And while
composition is the central challenge, it is not the only one. Questions of the eventual size of a
reformed Council are also raised and further complicate the discussion. This is because it is
generally agreed that once additional permanent members have been added to the Council, they
must also be joined by additional nonpermanent ones in order to give more representation to
such regions as Latin America and Eastern Europe, which would otherwise risk being
marginalized in the new body. Might the Council, then, become too large to function effectively?
And what about the veto? Permanent membership currently comes with the privilege of a veto,
but there appears to be less support across the full UN membership for new veto wielders than
there is for the abolition of the veto altogether. The G-4, sensing the mood, announced they
would voluntarily forgo the privilege of a veto for ten years, but this did not noticeably add
momentum
to
their
cause.
For all of these impediments, I do still believe the Security Council has to change sooner or later.
The best argument for reform is that the absence of reform could discredit the United Nations
itself. Britain and France have become converts to this point of view. I remember the late British
foreign secretary Robin Cook saying in 1997 (on his first UN visit in that capacity) that if the
Council was not reformed without delay, his own voters would not understand why. Mr. Cook, a
fine statesman and a man of principle, did not realize that he was not destined to see any Council
reform in his lifetime, let alone during his term of office. And yet he understood that reform was
essential, because what merely looks anomalous today will seem absurd tomorrow. Imagine in
2020 a British or French veto of a resolution affecting South Asia with India absent from the
table, or of one affecting southern Africa with South Africa not voting: who would take the
Council
seriously
then?
There is perhaps another reason why the British and the French are genuinely keen on seeing the
Council reformed right now. Currently, everyone is speaking only of expanding the permanent
membership of the Council, not replacing the existing permanent members. If reform is delayed
by another decade, there is a real risk that the position of London and Paris will no longer be so
secure, and the clamor for replacing them with one permanent European Union seat could prove
irresistible.
To date, the other three permanent members have been somewhat more lukewarm about reform.
Russia has officially pledged to support it, and has explicitly backed the claims of Germany,
Japan, and India to new permanent seats, but it is a matter for debate as to how enthusiastic
Moscow really is. Its permanent seat on the Council was the one asset that, even during the
shambolic years of the 1990s, allowed Russia to punch above its weight in international affairs.
Few Russians really want to see that position of privilege diluted by having to be shared with
several
new
countries.
The United States and China are even more skeptical. China shares Moscows reluctance to see
its stature diminished, but this is all the more true since it now sees itself, quite justifiably, as

having no peer in the world other than the United States, whose economy it is on course to
overtake within the next two decades. The thought of sharing permanent status with India and
Japan is not one that evokes much joy in Beijing. As for the United States, it is still the sole
superpower, and its isolation in recent years on various issues, notably relating to the Middle
East, made the Bush administration profoundly wary of giving new powers to countries that may
stand in its way. It was striking that Washingtons support of a seat for Germany faded away in
the wake of Germanys vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, and it took years for the United
States to formally endorse Indias bid, because it was conscious that New Delhi votes more often
against Washington in UN forums than with it. That reluctance was finally removed in
November 2010 during a visit to New Delhi by President Obama that was aimed at sealing a
strategic partnership, the credibility of which would have been undermined by continued
reticence on a Security Council seat for New Delhi. In addition, the United States likes a Council
it can dominate; Washington is conscious that a larger body would be more unwieldy and a
bigger collection of permanent members more difficult to manage. If it aint broke, dont fix it,
American
diplomats
like
to
say.
But to much of the rest of the world, the Security Council is indeed broke, and the more
decisions it is called upon to make that affect many countriesauthorizing wars, declaring
sanctions, launching peacekeeping interventionsthe greater the risk that its decisions will be
seen as made by an unrepresentative body and, therefore, rejected as illegitimate. The United
Nations is the one universal body we all have, the one organization to which every country in the
world belongs; if it is discredited, the world as a whole will lose an institution that is truly
irreplaceable.
And that could happen. My worry, as an old UN hand, is that if Security Council reform drags on
indefinitely and inconclusively, key countries could begin to look for an alternative. Five years
ago, as a candidate for secretary-general, I asked in a speech: What if the G-8, which is not
bound by any charter and writes its own rules, decided one day to expand its membership to
embrace, say, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa? That is precisely what has happened since,
with the establishment of the G-20, albeit as the premier global macroeconomic forum, rather
than the peace and security institution that the Security Council is. Nonetheless, China aside, the
other countries could well say, Well, were now on the high table at lastwhy not focus our
energies on this body and ignore the one that refuses to seat us? The result could be a United
Nations dramatically diminished by the decision of some of its most important members to
ignore or neglect it, while the G-20 could well arrogate political responsibilities to itself,
unrestricted by any charter constraint other than its own self-restraint.
If that were to occur, the loss will be that of the rest of the world, which at least today has a
universal organization to hold it together under the rules of international lawsomething vastly
preferable to a directoire of self-appointed oligarchs that an expanded G-8 could become. So
those small and medium-sized countries that are throwing up petty obstacles to reform are being
rather shortsighted, not only because they fail to address the fundamental problem that I
described above but because their opposition, if it succeeds, could potentially undermine the very
institution that many of these countries, now in the forefront of opposition to reform, have long
seen as a bulwark for their own security and safety in an unequal world.

So whats the answer? In 2010 the G-4 took the debate away from the feckless Open-Ended
Working Group and into the General Assembly plenary, and persuaded the facilitator of the
process, the ambassador of Afghanistan, to come up with a text for discussion. Though his efforts
have been hailed by enthusiasts as heralding a genuine breakthrough in the process, his text is
still replete with square brackets indicating unresolved language, and thus revealing entrenched
and
irreconcilable
positions.
Tinkering with a reform resolution will continue, but no resolution can attract enough votes
unless the 54-member African Union (AU) is persuaded to step off the fence that it has been
straddling for years. African opponents of Council reform have adroitly maneuvered the African
Union into an impossible position under the label the Ezulwini Consensus (named for the
Swazi town in which the formula was agreed). The Ezulwini Consensus demands two vetowielding permanent seats for Africa in a reformed Council, a demand couched in terms of
African self-respect but pushed precisely by those countries that know it is unlikely ever to be
granted. The AUs rules mean that African positions are adopted by consensus, thus taking 54
potential votes out of the equation in favor of a political compromise. (As an Indian minister of
state lobbying in Addis Ababa for Security Council reform, I pointed out privately that
Ezulwini meant Paradise; but that after years of insisting upon, and failing to obtain,
Paradise, it was necessary for African countries to settle for what could be achieved on earth.)
Africas naysayers also know that insisting on a consensus decision makes it difficult for the
majority favoring reform to move the process forward. After years of accepting this approach,
such countries as South Africa appear to be challenging the timehonored emphasis on consensus.
If the African Union were to agree to a free vote in the General Assembly, the prospects of a
reform resolution attracting the necessary 128 votes would brighten immeasurably.
As with most global issues, the key to breaking the logjam lies in Washington. Most of the
naysayers are U.S. allies who have been given a free hand by Washingtons own lack of
enthusiasm for reform. If a new U.S. administration could be persuaded that it is in Americas
self-interest to maintain a revitalized United Nations, credible enough for its support to be
valuable to the United States and legitimate enough to be a bulwark of world order in the
imminent future when the United States is no longer the worlds only superpower, Washington
could
bring
enough
countries
in
its
wake
to
transform
the
debate.
That is a task that the Security Council aspirantsand notably the government of a
transforming India now entering into a strategic partnership with Washingtonare well
positioned to perform. India clearly feels very strongly that there is a definite need for an
expansion of the Security Council in both categories, permanent and nonpermanent. But it also
sees the Security Council as part of a broader process of renewing the United Nationsnot
because it has failed, but because it has succeeded often enough to be worth reforming. Like
many developing countries, India would like to see the General Assembly strengthened as the
primary intergovernmental legislative body, which it is not yet; it has become too often a
rhetorical forum, prone to declaratory effulgence without effect, rather than one that acts as a
legislative body driving the action of the UN organization. The UNs Economic and Social
Council, too, should become a more meaningful development-oriented body and a serious

instrument of development governance. A greater sharpening is also required in the focus and the
operational efficiency of the UN funds, agencies, and programs, whose effectiveness is so
important
for
so
many
of
the
worlds
vulnerable
people.
India is conscious, too, that the international financial institutions set up at Bretton Woods in
1944 are also in need of reform, since they too reflect the realities of a vanished era; till last year,
for instance, Belgium disposed of the same weighted vote as China in these institutions. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009 set in motion a process for global redesign of the
international financial and economic architecture, and is thus emerging as the premier forum for
international economic cooperation. The G-20 has become a meaningful platform for NorthSouth dialogue precisely because the South is not completely outweighed by the North in the
composition of the G-20. In the years ahead, India will use its position in this grouping to pursue
a long-term objective of broad parity between the developed countries and the developing and
transitional economies in the international financial institutions. After all, the recent global
financial crisis showed that the surveillance of risk by international institutions and earlywarning mechanisms are needed for all countries. In other words, it is important that, in the
context of global governance, the developing countries should have a voice in overseeing the
global financial performance of all nations, rather than it simply being a case of the rich
supervising
the
economic
delinquency
of
the
poor.
A reform package that incorporates both the Security Council and Bretton Woods institutions
could transform global governance, whereas failure to reform could doom the prospects for an
effective and equitable world order. The international systemas constructed following the
Second World Warwill be almost unrecognizable by 2030 owing to the rise of emerging
powers, a transformed global economy, a real transfer of relative wealth and economic power
from the West (or the North) to other countries in the global South, and the growing influence of
nonstate actors, including terrorists, multinational corporations, and criminal networks. Over the
next two decades this new international system will be coping with the issues of aging
populations in the developed world; increasing energy, food, and water constraints; and worries
about climate change and migration. Global changes, including Indias own transformation, will
mean that resource issuesincluding energy, food, and water, on all of which demand is
projected to outstrip easily available supplies over the next decade or sowill gain prominence
on the international agenda. The need for increased, more democratic, and more equitable global
governance
will
therefore
be
even
greater.
Let us look even further than the next two decades. Growth projections for Brazil, Russia, India,
and China (the BRIC countries) indicate they will collectively match the original G-7s share of
global gross domestic product by 20402050. All four, probably, will continue to enjoy relatively
rapid economic growth and will strive for a multipolar world in which their capitals are among
the poles. The experts tell us that historically emerging multipolar systems have been more
unstable than bipolar or unipolar ones. The recent, indeed ongoing, global financial crisis
underlines that the next twenty years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks. Global
policy-makers will have to cope with a growing demand for multilateral cooperation when the
international system will be stressed by the incomplete transition from the old to the new order.
And the new players will not want to cooperate under the old rules.

The multiplicity of actors on the international scene could, if properly accommodated, add
strength to our aging postWorld War II institutions, or they could fragment the international
system and reduce international cooperation. Such countries as India have no desire to challenge
the international system, as did such other rising powers as Germany and Japan in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. But they certainly wish to be given a place at the global high table.
Without that, they would be unlikely to volunteer to share the primary burden for dealing with
such issues as terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, and energy securityall of which
concern the entire globe.
As someone who has devoted three decades of his life to multilateral cooperation at the United
Nations, I will say very strongly that my big fear remains that if reform does not come, many
countries will despair and lose interest in the working of the world body. Alternative structures of
world governance could emerge that would in the end undermine the one truly effective
universal organization the world has built up since 1945. Reform or die is a clich that has
been inflicted on many institutions. For the United Nations, at this time and on this issue, the
hoary phrase has the merit of being true.