A most impressive speaker at the Asia Society Conference was Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
Speaking without notes, Singapore's minister of education spoke most eloquently for over 20 minutes about the power of ideas, the need to unleash them in a Knowledge Economy.
He spoke about how countries need to learn from each other, and how it would benefit them in the long run.
Befitting a graduate of the Cambridge and Harvard universities, his speech -- which we hope to transcribe and publish on these pages soon -- was marked with unusual insight about how the world is changing and how nations and individuals can benefit from it.
Shanmugaratnam -- who is of Sri Lankan Tamil descent -- also spoke about how Singapore had partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai and the Christian Medical College, Vellore, to bring to his country the quality education these Indian institutions provide.
The minister -- who was BusinessWeek magazine's Stars of Asia in 2001 -- is a trained economist. As BusinessWeek noted, ' Largely thanks to Shanmugaratnam's reforms, bankers say Singapore is better prepared for global shocks than any other Southeast Asian economy."