He came to Portugal to participate in the Estoril Conferences, where his conference was entitled Persistence, My Key to Hope. How did “perseverance” become your word, the word that best defines you?
It has a lot to do with my journey of discovering who I was as an individual, what I believe in, what my values are. We often take these values for granted as we grow up and our parents often repeat them. I grew up with a father figure whom I admired and knew the values he had. But I didn’t know exactly who I was: what’s good, what’s the gray area, how do I identify, what should I stay away from? When I was chosen as leader by the Obama Foundation, they asked me what values I identified with, how I would describe myself. And it’s very difficult to do, because when we try to identify ourselves and read what other people have written about us, it’s difficult to be exactly aware of that. It’s easy to get carried away with words they throw around, like “inspirational” or “visionary.” At the time, I thought those words didn’t tell my whole story. Then “perseverance” came to me. Everyone in my family knows that I am someone who never gives up. [risos]. Sometimes in a less positive way: many embassies in the many countries around the world where I have traveled and worked will tell you this. Given the environment I lived in, I had no other choice.
I know you attended eight different schools before going to college… Did your family move a lot for work?
In India, civil servants are hired for life after passing a national exam. And the political system has no interference in public services. Which is ideally a good thing. But it doesn’t work in that ideal way. And when an official comes into conflict or has an intellectual disagreement with the political leadership, at the local or regional level, he is ultimately transferred. Therefore, the result of my father’s positions was that we moved from city to city. And the way to survive was this: persevere. A word that I only discovered later.
Source: DN
