Beyond the Crisis

Abstract

I would first like to say how honored I feel to have the opportunity of giving this year’s Asia and Pacific Lecture. I also appreciate the fact that I am being hosted by two extremely distinguished intellectual institutions: the Japan Center for International Exchange and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. I also value the chance of speaking here today on a quintessentially “Asian” subject. I feel particularly privileged for two distinct reasons. There is, first, an entirely personal reason for my satisfaction. My sense of Asian identity is very strong. I was lucky to go to a school that was very keen on educating students about Asia. This was the progressive school, in Santiniketan, established by Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and visionary thinker. In addition to insisting on a good classical education, especially in Sanskrit, the school also offered remarkable opportunities for learning about the history and culture of including China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, on the one hand, and about Arabic and Persian traditions, on the other. My childhood was spent partly in India (including what later became Bangladesh), but also in Mandalay in Burma, where my father taught for three years when I was a young boy. Much later, when I went to spend some months in Thailand, there was an immediate sense of being at home, instantly on arrival. There was also a sense of nearness that I experienced when later on I traveled in other regions of including Japan and China and elsewhere (such as the Philippines and Korea). This was not only because I was constantly reminded of what I had learned about these—and other—Asian countries in my childhood, but also because by the time I was a teenager my sense of Asian identity had taken deep roots. I am delighted to be in Singapore now, which I have only once visited earlier. It is wonderful for me to see the remarkable economic and cultural achievements of this great country. This country’s success in economic development as well as in building a vibrant and harmonious multicultural society has been exceptional. In classical Sanskrit, Singapore is “the city of lion”—the place of the king of the entire animal world. The achievements of Singapore Beyond the Crisis: Development Strategies in Asia, Sustainable Development and Human Security: Second Intellectual Dialogue on Building Asia's Tomorrow; (ed. Pamela J. Noda), Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, 1999, pp. 15-37.