'Reform and change are essential for the UN'
Since you bring up the subject of internal reform, much debate recently has centered around the need for reform and reorganisation of the United Nations in general, and of the Security Council in particular, to reflect the realities of a changing world. Those are not part of the three-point plan -- would you want to comment on those issues?
I believe that reform and change are essential for the UN. Mahatma Gandhi put it best: 'You must be the change you wish to see in the world.' What is true for individuals is true also for institutions. If the UN wants to change the world, we must change too.
Security Council reform has been on the table since 1992, and member states have not yet agreed on a formula -- it is rather like a malady in which the doctors gather around the patient, everyone agrees on the diagnosis but they cannot agree on the prescription! I think reform is necessary but when it will occur, and what form it will take, depends on the member States.
Given your background, you could have become almost anything you chose to, gone into any field of activity you wanted to -- so when and why did you pick the UN as your lifetime career option?
I in fact did get into both the IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) -- in those days, there were only two and I got into both of them. At the time, I asked myself seriously whether as an individual I wanted to judge the worth of each day lived by what I had achieved as a dollar-figure bottom line or a rupee-figure bottom line, and the answer, the honest answer to myself was no, that was not something that motivated me.
What did motivate me was the world at large, and the question of how I could possibly make a difference in it. Fundamentally, there are people who do very well in the private sector and people who are made for public service, and I have always seen myself as one of the latter. For me, it is in public service, grappling with issues that concern humanity at large, that I find the greatest satisfaction.
When we have talked in the past, your writing has always emerged as the leitmotif, the one indispensable adjunct to your existence. You have spoken of your frustration in not having sufficient time to write - and now, you are announcing for a job that will put time even more at a premium.
There is no question that there will be a very long suspension as far as my writing for publication is concerned. Even now, as under secretary general, I find it very difficult.
I am used to writing on weekends, but in this job the evenings were the first to disappear, then the weekends began disappearing, and there is the additional burden of travel, which I frequently tend to do over weekends in order to minimise time away from the office.
Even so, I come back to the office and I find I have to spend additional weekends catching up on all that has piled up while I was away, and that I couldn't deal with on my Blackberry -- so it has been very much the sense that the time available for ideas has pretty much vanished from my life.
The other complication is that with fiction particularly -- and I have for a long time now wanted to go back to fiction: I began a novel three Christmases ago which I haven't been able to touch since -- for fiction, you need not just time, which I do not have anyway, but a space inside your head to create an alternate universe, one populated with characters and issues and situations that are as real to you as the ones you encounter in real life. And the sad truth for me is that space isn't there in my mind right now.
That said, this election might well be the final catharsis: one way or the other it may resolve the dilemma of how and when to find time. If I win, I will have to put all thought of personal writing away for the duration of my tenure; and if I lose, I will have all the time in the world to write.
Photograph: Paresh Gandhi
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