Background

Mr. Mahbubani, welcome to Berkeley.

Happy to be here.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Singapore in 1948. It was then a British colony, and it was then a typical poor, developing country. My family came from fairly modest circumstances, so from childhood I experienced what it was like to live in a developing country. At the age of six, when I went to school for the first time, they weighed me and discovered that I was undernourished, so I was put on a special feeding program. I mention that because that gave me an insight into how the majority of the world lives, even today.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

To be honest, I had a relatively difficult childhood. My dad was in and out of jobs, and as I mention in the book, he even went to jail for a while because of his gambling debts. So, from my father, I guess, I got, to some extent, a negative example of what not to do, how not to drink and gamble and smoke when you grow up, even though in the end, we became close to each other. Through my mother I discovered the virtues of strength, because she obviously went through hell, being a single mother of four young children. We were living often on $50 a month for five of us. That was tough, but the fact that she never broke down under all the stress meant that I decided at a very young age that no matter what happens, I cannot break down, because she set a very high standard.

She had survived the trauma of the breakup of India, and she and your father had emigrated to Singapore.

Yes, my father actually came out earlier but my mother had a very close shave, because she actually came out as the partition was taking place. She was leaving one night in a train across the desert and she was in the last compartment, and the last compartment decoupled from the rest of the train. So, you had maybe about fifty to a hundred Hindu women by themselves with one old Sikh guard with a single-shot rifle protecting all of them, and if they had been caught by a marauding band of young Pakistani militants, they would all have been raped and slaughtered. But fortunately, the next day, the next train came along and pushed them along to the train station, so she survived. When you hear stories like that, you understand how precarious life is and how you've got to value what you have.

I get the sense from what you're saying and from reading your book that you were privileged to learn about diversity and to learn about inequality, as you just said, and that this process opened your horizons in an important way.

Yes. People who have grown up in middle-class homes have no idea of the depth of despair that poverty creates. The sense of hopelessness can be debilitating. It can damage your soul and corrupt it almost absolutely. So having experienced that, I can, as I say, empathize a bit with the one billion poor people in the world, because I've lived through -- maybe my conditions were not as desperate as theirs, but they were quite tough in their own way.

Singapore then was a typical developing country. You had racial riots. My neighbor came home with blood stains on his clothes because he was caught accidentally in a racial riot. I would see gangs fighting each other with broken beer bottles, and so you could see gushing wounds with blood, and so on and so forth.

Having experienced all that, when you finally reach a situation where there's peace and order and stability, you realize that these are not natural conditions, that it takes a lot of effort to achieve them and if you have them, appreciate them.

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