MAX DESFOR / AP PHOTO

BROTHERS IN SPIRIT: India's founding fathers share a

joke in Bombay in 1946
Gandhi & Nehru
They were opposite in nature, but they shared a passion for freedom and justice, and together created a giant
of democracy
By Shashi Tharoor

The 20th century produced many remarkable leaders, but few nations were blessed with a pair quite like
India's Mahatma Gandhi and his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was idealistic, quirky, quixotic and
determined, a cross between a saint and a ward politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distill the
qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions. Nehru was a moody, idealistic intellectual who felt an
almost mystical empathy for the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat who had passionate socialist convictions;
a product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an
unlikely follower of the deeply spiritual Mahatma. Together they brought a nation to freedom and laid the
underpinnings for the world's largest democracy.

Gandhi was the extraordinary leader of the world's first successful nonviolent movement for independence
from colonial rule. To describe his method, he coined the expression satyagraha—literally, "holding on to truth"
or, as he variously described it, truth force, love force or soul force. He disliked the English term passive
resistance because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to
obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive. You had to be prepared actively to suffer for truth. It
was satyagraha that first bound Nehru to Gandhi, soon after the latter's return to India in 1915 from a long
sojourn in South Africa, where his morally charged leadership of the Indian community against racial
discrimination had earned him the sobriquet of Mahatma ("Great Soul," a term he detested).

Gandhi's unique method of resistance through civil disobedience, allied to a talent for organization, gave the
Indian nationalist movement both a saint and a strategist. His singular insight was that self-government would
never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected élite pursuing the politics of the
drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of India's suffering multitudes in
whose name the upper classes were clamoring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India's
political class, which consisted largely of maharajahs and lawyers—men of means who discoursed in English and
demanded the rights of Englishmen.
 To put his principles into practice, Gandhi lived in near-absolute poverty in an ashram and
traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against
untouchability, poor sanitation and child marriage, while also preaching an eclectic set of
virtues from sexual abstinence and frequent enemas to the weaving of hand-spun cotton
cloth. That he was an eccentric was beyond doubt. That he had touched a chord amongst
the masses was equally apparent. That he was a potent political force soon became clear.
He captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of
a higher law ("the voice of conscience") and challenging the British to jail him.

Jun. 30, 1947 Despite differences over both tactics (Nehru wanted independence immediately whereas
Table of Contents Gandhi believed Indians had to be made ready for their own freedom) and philosophy (the
Large Cover agnostic Nehru had little patience for the Mahatma's spirituality), the two men proved a
formidable combination. Gandhi guided Nehru to the political pinnacle; Nehru in turn proved an inspirational
campaigner as President of the Indian National Congress, electrifying the nation with his speeches and tireless
travel. Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a
technique to which the British had no response. By abstaining from violence Gandhi wrested the moral
advantage. By breaking the law nonviolently he demonstrated the injustice of the law. By accepting the
punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing
suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in
defense of what he considered right. Gandhi's moral rectitude and Nehru's political passion made the
perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.

Of course there was much more to Gandhism—physical self-denial, self-reliance, a belief in the human capacity
for selfless love, religious ecumenism, idealistic internationalism, and a passionate commitment to equality
and social justice. The improvement of his fellow human beings was arguably more important to him than the
political goal of ridding India of the British. But it is his central tenet of nonviolence in the pursuit of these
ends that represents his most significant original contribution to the world. Martin Luther King in the U.S.,
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in Argentina, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma all sought
inspiration from the Mahatma's teachings.

Upon Gandhi's assassination in 1948, a year after independence, Nehru, the country's first
Prime Minister, became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of
India's struggle for freedom. Gandhi's death could have led Nehru to assume untrammeled
power. Instead, he spent a lifetime trying to instill the habits of democracy in his people—
a disdain for dictators, a respect for parliamentary procedures, an abiding faith in the
constitutional system. He himself was such a convinced democrat that, at the crest of his
rise, he authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial
temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. "He must be checked," he wrote of himself. "We want no
Caesars." During Nehru's 17 years as Prime Minister, democratic values became so
Oct. 17, 1949 entrenched that when his daughter Indira suspended India's freedoms with a State of
Table of Contents Emergency for 21 months, she felt compelled to return to the Indian people for
Large Cover vindication, held an election, and comprehensively lost it.

While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence and war in the 20th century, Gandhi taught the
virtues of truth, nonviolence and peace. The principal pillars of Nehru's legacy—democratic institution-building,
staunch pan-Indian secularism, socialist economics at home and a foreign policy of nonalignment—were all
integral to a vision of Indianness that sustained the nation for decades. Today, both legacies are fundamentally
contested, and many Indians have strayed from the ideals bequeathed to them by Gandhi and Nehru. Yet they,
in their very different ways, each represented that rare kind of leader who is not diminished by the
inadequacies of his followers. The American editor Norman Cousins once asked Nehru what he hoped his legacy
to India would be. "Four hundred million people capable of governing themselves," Nehru replied. The numbers
have grown, but the very fact that each day over a billion Indians govern themselves in a pluralist democracy is
testimony to the deeds and words of these two men.
Shashi Tharoor, an Under Secretary-General at the United Nations, is the author of India: From Midnight to the
Millennium and Nehru: The Invention of India
Corazon Aquino
A Philippine widow harnessed the power of prayer and protest to overthrow tyranny
By Sheila Coronel

When the People Power revolt broke out in Manila in 1986, Corazon Aquino was in Cebu, 580
km to the south, to kick off a civil-disobedience campaign against the dictator Ferdinand
Marcos. Her supporters, fearing for her life, urged her to flee the country or go into hiding.
Instead she went to the convent of the Carmelites, a contemplative order of Catholic nuns, and
spent the night praying with them. "I just felt so at peace," she recalls. "I felt that whatever
happened, I'd be ready for it." Three days later, Aquino—the woman derided by Marcos as "a
mere housewife"—was President. She was ill prepared to rule over a fractious nation ruined by
20 years of corruption and abuse. But, armed with the same prayerful fatalism she showed that
night, she led her country as it underwent a rocky transition to democracy.

Aquino was the symbol of People Power and an inspiration to others around the world
struggling against tyranny. The widow of popular opposition leader Benigno Aquino, who was
murdered at Manila airport in 1983 on his return from exile in Boston, she showed a quiet
courage that moved millions. To Filipinos, who are devoutly Catholic, she was both Mater
Dolorosa and Joan of Arc.

When an icon becomes President, however, she loses her shine. Running against Marcos in an
election prior to People Power, Aquino did not present a political platform. Instead, she would
tell the story of her husband's homecoming and death. Filipinos saw their suffering mirrored in
hers. "I am like you," she told them. "I am a victim of Marcos." Yet Aquino is not like most of us
Filipinos. Born to privilege, she was the dutiful political wife, who stayed in the background
while her husband, also from a wealthy family that had held public office for generations, was
on the fast track. He believed that one day he would be President. That office would be hers
instead.

Aquino's six-year presidency was marred by attempted military coups, human-rights abuses by a
still-powerful army, and general incompetence. She is also blamed for resurrecting a political
system dominated by élite clans, causing disappointed supporters to say that she could not
transcend the interests of her class. But she will always be remembered for uniting Filipinos in
their fight for freedom. Today, Aquino, 73, remains a political and moral force. "I don't know
how [people] will judge my presidency," she says, "but I hope they will realize it was not easy
restoring democracy after a dictatorship." For sure it was not. And we Filipinos will always be
grateful that Corazon Aquino was there when we needed her most.

Sheila Coronel heads Columbia University's program for investigative journalism

Aung San & Aung San Suu Kyi
A daughter takes up the fight for freedom begun by her father
By Andrew Marshall

Imagine Indians forgetting all about

Gandhi. Or Indonesians failing to honor Sukarno. Impossible? Yet that's what seems to have
happened with another independence hero, Aung San of Burma, who fought both the British
and the Japanese to secure his country's freedom from foreign rule. Aung San's name has been
dropped from official speeches. His boyish face has disappeared from Burmese bank notes. His
grave has been closed to the public for years. One academic has described the process as "Aung
San amnesia."

Blame it on the very institution he founded, the Burmese army, which seized power in a 1962
coup. Ordinary Burmese still privately revere Aung San as the father of the nation. But for
Burma's generals, he is primarily the father of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi,
whose name they will go to any lengths to forget—even dishonoring their independence hero in
the process.

Aung San was born in 1915 in Natmauk, a small town 400 km north of the capital Rangoon. He
had rebellion in his blood: his great-uncle had been beheaded for fighting the British. After
graduating from the élite Rangoon University, where he was a student firebrand, Aung San
joined a radical nationalist group whose members addressed each other as thakin, or "master"—
a phrase Burmese were supposed to reserve for their British rulers. In World War II, his forces
fought alongside the Japanese, but switched sides to join the allies in his single-minded pursuit
of independence. Quick-tempered, direct and searingly honest, Aung San negotiated Burma's
postwar freedom from the British and won the respect of millions of his own people in this
large and ethnically diverse land.

In July 1947, just six months before Burma's independence, Aung San and
six members of his provisional cabinet were gunned down on the orders of
a political rival. His murder, at the age of 32, was Burma's tragedy.
Deprived of his drive and authority, the country disintegrated into civil
war. The military seized power 15 years later and led Burma into poverty,
isolation and fear.

While the junta ignores Aung San, ordinary Burmese have forgotten neither
him nor his daughter, who has now endured more than 4,000 days under
arrest. In a tribute to her father, Suu Kyi described him as a leader "who
put the interests of the country before his own needs, who remained poor and unassuming at
the height of his power, who accepted the responsibilities of leadership without hankering
after the privileges, and who retained at the core of his being a deep simplicity." Many
Burmese would describe his courageous daughter in exactly the same way.

Andrew Marshall, a Bangkok-based journalist, is the author of The Trouser People: A Story of
Burma in the Shadow of the Empire
Ahmad Shah Massoud
This legendary warrior defied Afghanistan's Soviet invaders, only to be assassinated by al-Qaeda
By Peter Bergen

The two Arab TV journalists who had been hanging around for weeks to secure an interview
with the storied Afghan military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud finally got their chance to
speak with him on Sept. 9, 2001. They set up their gear and asked a question about Osama bin
Laden. Then one of them detonated a bomb hidden in a camera, killing himself and mortally
wounding Massoud. The journalists were, in fact, al-Qaeda assassins, and it was bin Laden who
had ordered the hit just before the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

Historians will record Massoud's assassination as the curtain raiser for the attacks on New York
City and Washington D.C. that followed. The Afghan leader was the principal antagonist of the
Taliban; by engineering his death bin Laden gave the Taliban something they desperately
wanted, and ensured that the Taliban would protect al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11.

More than five years after his assassination Massoud remains a national hero to many Afghans.
Passengers at Kabul airport are greeted by a mural of him standing several stories high.
Massoud's place in history is assured by the fact that he was arguably the most brilliant
practitioner of guerrilla warfare in the late 20th century. In the 1980s, during the war against
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he survived six major Soviet operations aimed at
defeating him. Then, in 1992, he seized Kabul from the Afghan communist regime that had
replaced the occupying Soviets. Afghanistan was subsequently plunged into civil war as
competing factions vied for control of the capital. During the fighting I met Massoud at his
headquarters north of Kabul and was struck by his intense integrity, charisma and disarming
humor.

The struggles between bin Laden and Massoud are emblematic of the divisions in the Muslim
world between militants who advocate violence against the West and those who favor peaceful
coexistence. Massoud's Islam was a moderate kind of fundamentalism leavened by tolerance for
others. The world will be a much safer place if Massoud's vision wins out.

Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama
bin Laden I Know
Deng Xiaoping
The Maoist who reinvented himself, transformed a nation, and changed the world
By Jonathan Spence

Though the name of Mao Zedong

still has resonance around the world, the man who has inherited the mantle of Chinese hero is
Deng Xiaoping. While Mao is now mainly associated with the idea of revolutionary excess and
periods of colossal suffering, Deng has come to be linked to China's astonishing economic
development, and to the steering of China away from its Leninist and Maoist organizational
straitjacket into a wider world of technological growth and international trade. When we think
of Deng, it tends to be within a context where Mao's revolutionary legacy is seen as irrelevant.
As Mao shrinks in the historical balance, Deng rises; it is Deng who is hailed as the pragmatist,
as the man who introduced a new economic dynamism with his striking phrase that it did not
matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it could catch mice.

Deng is now thought of, both within China and in the world at large, as having been in some
measure heroic. That is due almost entirely to the stances he adopted, and the policies he
helped propel into motion, after he had survived two purges and was called back to power in
1977, at the age of 73. What Deng had the intelligence to see was that China would have to
break out of its Maoist mold of state control—that the nation's long-dormant entrepreneurial
spirit had to be encouraged, not inhibited, and that the capitalist nature of some of the
needed changes had to be openly accepted, whatever the political fallout.

Yet Deng did not just focus on the economy. He identified other areas where changes had to be
made for China to become a world power: there was the need to revamp the educational
system, especially universities and research institutes; the military had to be streamlined and
professionalized; lawyers had to be trained in the intricacies of commercial and corporate law,
and be able to have cases heard in a viable and expanded judicial system; more Chinese had to
be permitted to study overseas, and foreign students and tourists to come to China. As a
complementary move, Deng ordered far-reaching reviews of the cases of hundreds of thousands
of intellectuals, students and professionals who had been sent into internal exile in
impoverished rural areas after the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1957, and later during the
Cultural Revolution; under Deng, many were allowed to return to their homes and families.

Taking a broad view of the intellectual and creative worlds that had
essentially been banned in the radical Maoist years, Deng authorized the
loosening of controls over filmmaking, fashion, music and the visual arts.
Investigative journalists were encouraged to lay bare local abuses, even if
they might implicate members of the Communist Party. In late 1978 a
stretch of blank wall not far from the headquarters of the Party was
opened for the airing of political and cultural views in the form of written
posters and poems; swiftly dubbed Democracy Wall, it became a focal
point for tough-minded criticism of local and national government, a
Sep. 26, 1983 critique from which not even Deng or Mao were spared.
Table of Contents
Large Cover When Deng is described in heroic terms, it is largely because of the long-
range effects of this remarkable torrent of change that he set in motion. Leading China down
the capitalist path, Deng relaxed all manner of economic controls and launched Special
Economic Zones—free-trade enclaves that demonstrated the prosperous potential of a
liberalized economy. These initiatives helped transport millions of Chinese out of poverty in
the space of just a few decades, a feat unprecedented in history; transformed China into the
global manufacturing behemoth that it now is; and heralded the country's arrival on the world
stage as a major geopolitical and financial player.
 But the reforms Deng activated should not be allowed to expunge the
ongoing effects of the changes he abandoned or chose not to make.
Democracy Wall, for example, was closed down as a protest site early in
1979, and several of the most strident protestors were convicted of crimes
against the state and given lengthy prison sentences. Many of the
underground journals were banned, and the poets were silenced. Even as
Deng visited the U.S. in 1979, a journey in which he charmed Americans
with his apparently folksy ways and made major deals with Boeing and
Coca-Cola, Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in an attempt to undercut
Russian power in the region. University leaders were removed if their
demands for new freedoms were deemed to be too strenuous, and Deng purged his own
protégé Hu Yaobang on the grounds that he was pursuing too much change too fast.

The intolerance reflected by the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement resurfaced
during the massive demonstrations that began at Tiananmen Square in April 1989 with Hu's
funeral and were so bloodily put down in June that year. In his use of the deadly force of the
People's Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen Square, Deng showed how deep was his mingled
contempt for and fear of the student and other leaders who, he believed, threatened to spread
chaos across the country in the name of democracy. The Party's verdict on the Tiananmen
protests—that they amounted to a counterrevolutionary act—was never reversed by Deng, and
is also an indissoluble part of his legacy.

If Deng's actions were often cautious or even negative, it was because he had fought and lived
a revolution for over 60 years, and he could not summon up the conviction that those years had
been in vain. Deng could never forget that it was a Maoist vision, however flawed and ruthless,
that had helped unite China after its decades of fragmentation. Mao might have pulled the
nation together, but it was Deng who pushed it toward prosperity and modernity, and a future
as one of the world's great powers.

Jonathan Spence teaches the history of modern China at Yale University. His books include The
Death of Woman Wang, The Question of Hu and The Search for Modern China
Mohammad Hatta
Indonesia's other hero of independence was a leader of quiet strength
By Emil Salim

Indonesia's struggle for independence is typically identified with one larger-than-life figure: the
irrepressible Sukarno—proud, charismatic, a firebrand orator, but also capricious and wont to
personal mood shifts that would jostle the country. While Sukarno was the flamboyant face of
the fight to liberate Indonesia from Dutch rule, he was only one-half of a tandem that was a
study in contrasts. Sukarno's cohort was Mohammad Hatta, studiously humble, deeply Muslim
yet open to all faiths, and unfailingly direct. Indonesians may worship Sukarno, Indonesia's first
President, but they love his former deputy Hatta, not just for what he did for his country but
for what he, rather than Sukarno, still represents. Today, 26 years after his death, Hatta
remains a symbol of what Indonesia aspired to become but has yet to fully achieve: an
egalitarian and tolerant land with dignity for all.

That was Hatta's goal, and the path to it first required shaking off the colonial yoke. Hatta was
born on Sumatra in 1902, but moved to the Netherlands as a student in 1921 and spent more
than a decade there. During that period, he created the Indonesian Association in the
Netherlands, at a time when just saying the name Indonesia was a radical act (the Dutch called
the archipelago Netherlands Indie). He launched a "non-cooperation" campaign in the
Netherlands, which drew the attention of nationalists in Indonesia like Sukarno. In 1927, the
Dutch imprisoned Hatta for being antigovernment. The charges didn't stick; Hatta was released
and went back to his studies in Rotterdam. He returned to Indonesia in 1932, organized a
political movement against the Dutch, and spent eight of the next 10 years in jail. When the
Japanese ousted the Dutch in 1942, Hatta was freed because the Japanese wanted his and
Sukarno's help to run the sprawling archipelago. They went along, all the while putting
together a shadow administration for the day the Japanese would themselves surrender. In the
run-up to independence in August 1945, Hatta persuaded Islamic leaders to drop their demand
that the President had to be Muslim and that shari'a law be enacted for Muslim citizens, and
enshrined in the constitution the recognition of other religions and the rights to assembly and
expression.

Ten years later, Hatta broke with Sukarno. I was a student leader at the time and he gave me
and 11 of my associates the news firsthand on the verandah of his official residence in Jakarta.
Hatta opposed Sukarno's increasing authoritarianism and his strategy of playing off nationalists,
communists, Islamists and the military against one another—which Hatta believed would bring
the nation grief. It did. In 1965, a major-general called Suharto used the chaos created by such
intrigue to seize power in a bloody coup—some half a million people died—to prevent an
alleged communist takeover.

Hatta went on to teach economics and politics at a university in Yogyakarta, but continued to
criticize policies he felt were detrimental to Indonesia, under both Sukarno and Suharto. He
spoke out against corruption, poor governance, a weak judiciary, the gap between rich and
poor. Today, Indonesia has progressed on all these fronts, but not so far as to be able to do
without a Hatta. When he died in 1980 at the age of 77, he was buried not in the Heroes
Cemetery in Jakarta but, as he requested, a few kilometers away in a common graveyard. I
remember watching as thousands lined up, with tears in their eyes, to pay their respects to the
country's first truly democratic leader.

Emil Salim, a former Indonesian cabinet minister, led the team that published the Complete
Writings of Bung Hatta
General Vo Nguyen Giap
In defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu, he heralded the end of imperialism

At age 95, his face is sunken and his white hair a mere wisp. But in 1954, General Vo Nguyen
Giap masterminded the bloody 57-day siege against a French garrison in Dien Bien Phu in
northwestern Vietnam—which signaled the coming end of colonialism. Fourteen years later,
Giap triumphed in another epic battle, the Tet offensive, widely considered the turning point
of the Vietnam War.

The communist Viet Minh's victory at Dien Bien Phu was the first by an Asian resistance group
against a colonial army in a conventional fight. It struck down the myth of Western
invincibility, led to the ignominious withdrawal of the French from Vietnam, and inspired anti-
imperial forces worldwide.

Today, still dashing in his uniform, Giap modestly rejects the notion that these military feats
made him a hero. They were merely proof, he insists, that "the Vietnamese people, with the
spirit of patriotism, can do extraordinary things." True. But Giap showed them the way.
Sir Murray MacLehose
China's most forward-looking city owes much to a no-nonsense Scottish knight

Hong Kong's progress—from postwar ruin to global business center—has been so well
documented and admired that we assume it to have been inevitable. But it was not always
fated to become China's most dazzling metropolis. As recently as the 1960s, it was a stuffy
colonial backwater. Public spending—on education, health, the arts, indeed almost every
field—was kept to a miserly minimum. The wealth derived from the city's burgeoning trade and
light industries was not shared with those at the bottom of the social order. And virtually
nobody—not the refugees pouring in from mainland China, nor the expats, nor even the Hong
Kong Chinese—thought of the place as home. In place of a sense of civic identity, there was
simply the overwhelming desire to get rich and get out.

Enter Sir Crawford Murray MacLehose. Arriving in 1971 as Hong Kong's 25th governor, this
patrician Scot at once set about transforming the city from colonial embarrassment to imperial
jewel—indeed, government expenditure grew by over 50% during his first two years in office.
Sir Murray greatly improved government accountability through a system of elected District
Boards and consultative committees. By recognizing Cantonese as an official language, he
ended a longstanding colonial injustice. He expanded a public-housing program to
accommodate some 40% of the populace, set in motion huge infrastructure schemes (including
construction of the Mass Transit Railway) and announced the provision of free primary
education. He also set up the Independent Commission Against Corruption—prompting a police
rebellion but eventually ending a decades-old system of graft. Finally, by expanding community
and arts facilities (and instigating territory-wide campaigns against everything from litter to
violent crime) he created a new sense of social cohesion and belonging: Hong Kong people no
longer felt like transients but citizens. Many hidebound colonial officials objected to these
changes or did not think they were worth the trouble: Sir Murray pressed on regardless and
gave Hong Kong the modern shape we recognize today. With new homes, prospects and
representatives, the people of Hong Kong were able to do the rest.
General Douglas MacArthur
Victorious in battle, he went from soldier to statesman, and created a new Japan from the
ashes of war
By Jim Frederick

The task of reconstructing Europe after World War II was divvied up among the handful of
victorious nations. But in the Pacific, the job of rebuilding Japan fell, effectively, to a single
man: U.S. General Douglas MacArthur. And for five-and-a-half years, the Supreme Commander
for the Allied Powers ruled from his office at the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Building in central
Tokyo with an imperiousness to make emperors blush as he sought to transform Japan from a
theocratic military dictatorship into a liberal capitalist democracy. It was an exercise without
precedent and, more than half a century later, it remains the most successful postwar
reconstruction in history. Despite formidable flaws, MacArthur was a compassionate conqueror,
a wise administrator and, more than anyone, the man responsible for setting Japan down the
path toward becoming the free, fair and prosperous economic superpower it is today.

As Japanese leaders signed the instruments of surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo
Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, the task before MacArthur was enormous. Approximately 3 million
Japanese had died, countless more were injured, and an estimated 9 million were homeless.
Even before atomic bombs leveled Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Allied firebombing had reduced
dozens of Japanese cities to rubble. But filled with a missionary, even messianic, zeal,
MacArthur aimed not just to restore the country's infrastructure and industry but to perform a
full-scale overhaul of its social, political and moral fabric. Within months of taking command,
he had loosened restraints on political expression, bolstered labor's right to organize,
dismantled state-run monopolies, liberalized school curriculums, extended the vote to women,
and directed the American team that, in six epic days, forged Japan's pacifist constitution—
which has yet to be amended.

MacArthur's reign was not without its faults. Vain, arrogant and stubborn, he brought a
neocolonialist's sense of superiority to his efforts. And because MacArthur felt he needed
Hirohito to confer legitimacy on the U.S. occupation of Japan, he protected the Emperor from
any investigation of his role in the nation's assault on the rest of Asia. Still, MacArthur
transformed a belligerent nation into a responsible member of the international community.
For that, Japan—and the world—owes a great debt to a victorious warrior who also triumphed
in peace.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Pakistan, the nation the Quaid-i-Azam founded, needs him and his values more than ever
By Mohsin Hamid

My earliest memory of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's Quaid-i-Azam, or Great Leader, is from
my childhood. The electricity had gone because of load shedding, and I was doing my
homework despite my grandmother's insistence that this was bad for my eyes. My textbook was
part of the curriculum assigned to all primary-school students in Pakistan, and it described
Jinnah as a young boy, himself reading a book by candlelight at his home in Karachi, a hundred
years earlier. I had heard of Jinnah before, of course; his name was ubiquitous in Pakistan, a
country otherwise unsure of its heroes. But it was the small miracle contained in the notion
that he—a character in a book—and I—a reader in real life—were doing precisely the same thing
that struck me most, and has stayed with me ever since.

In Pakistan, Jinnah is venerated because his struggles on behalf of the Muslims of India resulted
in the establishment of the country. But Jinnah's true claim to greatness as an Asian leader is
more universal: he sought to protect the rights of minorities through constitutional law.

Jinnah was a secular, Westernized, British-trained barrister; himself a Muslim, he married a

Parsi, spoke mainly in English and wore European clothes. In 1920, he left Mahatma Gandhi's
Indian National Congress, of which he had been a member for two decades, not because of his
own faith but because he believed Gandhi's use of Hindu symbolism would encourage religious
zealotry in politics. As Asia emerged from colonization, among the most vexing problems facing
the continent's nascent nation states was that of their large minority populations. Jinnah's
preferred solution was a legal one: constitutional measures ranging from electoral safeguards
to guaranteed representation in state institutions. It was only when his attempts to achieve
these measures failed that he began to campaign for a separate state for the Muslims of the
subcontinent.

Six decades later, Pakistan has drifted far from Jinnah's vision of a secular
democracy. President Pervez Musharraf, who invokes Jinnah's values in
speeches, has little patience for democracy. The religious opposition
parties reject as un-Pakistani the concept of secularism. And the
inhabitants of smaller provinces like Baluchistan find themselves lacking
the protection for minorities that Jinnah made his life's mission. If one
believes in the rule of law, mistrusts religious zealotry and opposes
tyrannies constructed in the name of majorities, one should find it easy to
see oneself in Jinnah and to empathize with his struggle. Much of Asia
Apr. 22, 1946 could learn from his example, none more so than those of us who belong to
Table of Contents the state he founded.
Large Cover
Mohsin Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, will be published next spring
Lee Kuan Yew
Smart, tough, pragmatic—an enduring symbol of Asia itself
By Simon Elegant

The first time I met Lee Kuan Yew I was under strict orders not to open my mouth. It was 1987,
I was a wire-service reporter, and Singapore's patriarch was in the middle of one of his periodic
campaigns to show the Western press who was the boss in his city. When my father, also a
journalist, secured an interview with Lee for a book he was writing and asked if I could tag
along, Lee's people eventually agreed—but only on condition that I not utter a single word. At
one point during the interview, Lee launched into a withering criticism of arrogant Western
journalists who imposed their values on others. I opened my mouth to say something, but one
stern look of warning from Lee was enough to make me snap my jaws shut.

Lee is famous for his formidable personality and unshakeable faith in his own convictions.
Combine those qualities with a burning intelligence, a cold-eyed pragmatism and an
unrelenting focus on his goals and you have some sense of the man who almost single-handedly
transformed a sleepy tropical port into one of the world's most economically vibrant city-
states. Yet that achievement, extraordinary as it is, is not what makes Lee unique. Today, at
83, after some 50 years of public life, Lee can securely count himself as the one and only Asian
who has played witness, sculptor and adviser to all the great historical shifts Asia has
undergone over the decades: the rise of nationalism; the end of the cold war; the growth of
prosperity; and the emergence of China as a new global power. It is all this that makes Lee not
just an elder statesman and a voice for Asia, but an enduring symbol of the region's pragmatism
and resilience.

Like most people, Lee was profoundly shaped by his early experiences—and the Cambridge-
educated lawyer cut his teeth as a politician in a very rough school indeed. Amid the turmoil of
independence from Britain in the 1950s, Lee faced down and ultimately defeated a deeply
entrenched communist movement at a time when the red banners of Marxism seemed to be
advancing inexorably throughout Asia. When he found himself Prime Minister in 1965, Lee
applied the same tough approach to governing the tiny new nation. Although he called himself
a socialist until the early 1970s, his actions were purely capitalist, forging Singapore's export-
led economy by courting foreign investment and never wavering in his focus on three things:
long-term planning, meritocracy and zero tolerance for corruption. The results have been
dazzling: Singapore's GDP per capita exploded from a few hundred dollars in 1965 to around
$29,500 today, just a few notches below its former colonial master Britain.

Last year, I had the opportunity to meet Lee again—this time for an
extensive interview during which I was allowed to speak. I found him
mellower than at our first meeting nearly two decades ago. He even
choked up at one point as he talked about the death of a close friend. But
the steely, uncompromising core that will always be bedrock Lee still rose
to the surface. Asked about what his critics call a low tolerance for dissent
in the city he virtually created, Lee wouldn't give an inch: "I'm not guided
by what Human Rights Watch says. I am not interested in ratings by
Freedom House or whatever. At the end of the day, is Singapore society
better or worse off? That's the test." That test, even Lee's fiercest
detractors would concede, Lee has passed spectacularly.
Akira Kurosawa
A master filmmaker with an eye for darkness and complexity
By Richard Corliss

In 1951, when knowledge of Japanese for many people was still limited to "sayonara" and "hara-
kiri," a movie from the country won top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and two more
Japanese words entered the common language: Kurosawa and Rashomon.

For nearly a half-century, Akira Kurosawa reigned supreme as the emperor of Japanese, indeed
Asian, cinema. He was also a prime mover in explaining his country to a world in which Japan's
wartime cruelty was still very much a fresh memory. Rashomon, in which four people (one of
them a ghost) tell conflicting versions of an encounter between a married couple and an
outlaw, counseled against making snap judgments about any individuals (or, for that matter,
nationalities). A philosophical debate in the guise of a melodrama, the film argued that
everyone has their motives—some venal, some fearful, all complex. And behind them was one
cardinal sin: what Kurosawa called "the pathetic self-defense of the ego."

While films by other Japanese masters, like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, emphasized the
quiet, quotidian aspects of life, Kurosawa's had a greater vigor, a faster pulse and a shorter
fuse, embodied by his wonderfully feral star, Toshiro Mifune. They were also the first by a
major director to aestheticize the subject of violence—witness the trotting dog with a severed
hand in its mouth in Yojimbo, or the deadly arrows that turn Mifune into a human piñata in
Throne of Blood. The West took appreciative note of Kurosawa's potent mix of machismo and
storytelling, giving him three Oscars (one for lifetime achievement) and remaking four of his
films—Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress (which George Lucas
said was an inspiration for Star Wars). That was a fitting tribute to the Tokyo boy who grew up
avidly watching American Westerns, and who, on a film set, would proudly sport the sunglasses
and the cloth hat that were given to him by sagebrush director John Ford.

Japanese audiences, on the other hand, considered Kurosawa's work entirely too Western.
Studios grew tired of financing his big-budget spectacles, and Kurosawa's career may well have
ended in the '70s if Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg had not stepped in to
sponsor Kagemusha and Dreams. Granted, the great director, who died at the age of 88 in
1998, might have considered making himself more understandable to audiences in his own
country, but to Kurosawa life and action were nothing if not complex.
 ASIA KEPKA FOR TIME
THE SAGE: Sen rejoices in debate and dissent
Amartya Sen
A philosopher and economist who preaches tolerance to a divided world
By Lord Meghnad Desai

In his most recent book Identity and Violence, amartya Sen describes himself as: an Asian, an
Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an
economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and
democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, a Hindu
with a nonreligious lifestyle, a non-Brahmin, and a nonbeliever in an afterlife.

Amartya Sen, previously the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and now a professor of
economics and philosophy at Harvard, is also the first Indian, indeed Asian, to win the Nobel
Prize in economics. Yet what makes him unique is none of these things. Sen is special because
he is the first economist-philosopher whose work has consciously touched the lives of millions
of the poorest people in the world. His Poverty and Famines has changed the way famines are
understood and cured. His idea is simple: people die during famines not because there is no
food available but because they do not have the incomes to buy the food. Create incomes for
the starving and the food will appear in the shops. His most widely read book Development as
Freedom shows why development alone will guarantee economic and social freedoms as well as
political and civil liberties. We are either all free, or none of us are.

Sen, at the age of 73, has now turned his fertile mind to the most urgent problem of the post-
9/11 world: intolerance. He has celebrated public debates and dissent as vital to a democratic
life in The Argumentative Indian. Now he has extended the argument globally. In tackling
terrorism, we are in real danger of demonizing certain identities—being a Muslim, for
example—which diminishes the person so labeled as well as those doing the labeling. Sen
argues that the notion of a clash between civilizations is the disease rather than the diagnosis
of our current troubles. He has deployed his erudition to show why neither the West nor the
East has a monopoly on wisdom or tolerance, but are symbiotically interdependent. In Identity
and Violence, he shows how while Giordano Bruno was being burned at the stake by the
Inquisition in the 16th century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar held multifaith symposiums at his
court. He has also pointed out that words such as algebra and algorithm have Arabic origins,
and that the classics of Greek philosophy were preserved for Europe by Islamic scholars.
Amartya Sen is not just an Indian or Asian, not just an economist or philosopher. He is a truly
global man, cosmopolitan in his sympathies, and universal in his concern for all.

Meghnad Desai, a member of Britain's House of Lords, is a professor emeritus at the London
School of Economics
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
His voice was a conduit to heaven
By Aryn Baker

Look in many a music store and you'll find Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan filed under "world music." At
the best of times, it's an uncomfortable label—inextricably associated with trendy advertising
soundtracks and middle-class dinner parties, and crassly combining genres as diverse as Berber
Amazigh and Mexican huapango under the same marketing conceit. But shortly before his
death, Khan was becoming one of the very few so-called world-music artists to transcend this
pigeonhole: growing numbers of international listeners were appreciating his art as
extraordinary music, period.

Who can say what further bridges he might have built between East and West had he lived
longer? On Khan's death in 1997, Westerners were just starting to grasp this musical treasure
that Pakistan had given the world—but in South Asia women wailed and men wept as if a god
had removed himself from the earth. And in a way one had, because Khan had made the rich
religious poetry of the Sufi tradition even more magical, bringing words and music together in
an ecstatic celebration of the divine. To listen to him was to hear the harmony of the spheres.

On the temporal plane, Khan took qawwali—the name given to Sufi devotional songs—to new
audiences. Peter Gabriel tapped his vocal gravitas for the soundtrack of The Last Temptation
of Christ, and Khan collaborated with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder on the soundtrack for Tim
Robbins' Dead Man Walking. His urgent, crescendoing lament during the prison-riot scene of
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers raised eyebrows among qawwali purists (Khan himself
admitted that he was disturbed by the film's violence), but it lent a harrowing pathos that
became a condemnation of the very acts it accompanied.

Believing that passion transcended words, Khan rarely sang in English, preferring to use his
native Punjabi and Urdu, or the Farsi of the Sufi poets. But it was passion that killed him in the
end. A lover of food, music and constant touring, Khan never heeded his doctor's warnings to
diet or slow down; he would sing for hours at a time, palms upraised as if channeling energy
from his audience. And so his heart gave out at age 48, depriving humanity of one of its
greatest voices. World music? The label is hardly adequate. File, instead, under "genius."
Maxine Hong Kingston
She overturned traditional notions of what it meant to be a Chinese woman
By Xu Xi

When The Woman Warrior appeared in the U.S. in 1976, it sent an electrifying buzz across the
Pacific. I was a young, aspiring novelist in Hong Kong then, and what I felt was: Finally. A book
by someone more or less like me. About time.

Though billed as a memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston's first book was, in fact, a novel about being
more or less Chinese in the world. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and became a
literary classic. But in Asia, the initial reception to Kingston was muted—even negative. The
most damning criticism from some Asian critics could be summed up as, "How dare an
inauthentic Chinese write this!" The book wasn't even available in Hong Kong—probably because
no one thought it would sell—so I acquired a pirated copy from Taipei. Reading it changed my
life. Kingston inspired me to persist as a writer, despite a Hong Kong society that dismissed
such endeavors (especially those of a "maybe-Chinese" writing in English). I kept writing and
continue to do so. When I finally met Kingston years later, I thanked her for gifting me my
writer's life.

As well as being praised for her rich literary oeuvre, Kingston must also be noted for her vision
of the kind of borderless world we could create if we try—a timely message now that we are all
more or less world citizens, regardless of our origins. In The Woman Warrior, she writes: "When
you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to
childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with
stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" Many
Chinese—not just Chinese Americans—would do well to ask themselves the same questions
these days.

But more than that, if you substitute the word "Chinese" with "human" in Kingston's passage,
you have a question to pose the whole world. Kingston's is a moral vision, one to guide not only
writers, but all who challenge tradition, history and old-fashioned notions of identity.

Xu Xi is the author of six books, including The Unwalled City and Overleaf Hong Kong, and
divides her time between New York City, Hong Kong and New Zealand
Hayao Miyazaki
In an era of high-tech wizardry, the animé auteur makes magic the old way
By Tim Morrison

For more than 20 years, the Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki has been crafting
films more lusciously illustrated and rapturously imaginative than almost anything else on the
silver screen—full of spirits, walking castles, flying machines, cat buses and owl-raccoons called
totoros (which only children can see). A fearsomely hands-on artist who does everything from
scriptwriting to storyboard sketching to correcting many of the final frames of his movies by
hand, Miyazaki is Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg and Orson Welles combined, with a dash of
Claude Monet in his sumptuous landscapes and more than a smidgen of Roald Dahl in his sly,
sophisticated understanding of children.

Miyazaki was not the founding father of Japanese animation. Its first master was Osamu
Tezuka, creator of iconic characters like Astro Boy; it was Tezuka who pioneered the "big eyes"
style of Japanese illustration and inspired every spiky-haired hero who ever took up arms
against a giant robot. But more than that of any other director, Miyazaki's name and that of his
animation house Studio Ghibli have become synonymous with Japanese animation. "He's a
wonderfully creative storyteller who has somehow found a way to tell the stories that he
wants, and that puts him in an incredibly small bracket of writer-directors worldwide," says
Jonathan Clements, co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia. "All the smaller in that his works are
also blockbuster successes." Princess Mononoke, an ecological fable set in Japan's distant past,
was the country's top-grossing movie until Titanic eclipsed it in 1997; Miyazaki reclaimed the
title in 2001 with the Oscar-winning Spirited Away—the tale of a 10-year-old's quest to deliver
her parents from a spell that has turned them into pigs. Like many of Miyazaki's films it's a
rumination on the importance of self-reliance, selflessness and the challenge of growing up.
This thematic richness is key, says Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki: "Our films are the
result of serious and earnest consideration of what kind of films should be made for children."

What makes Miyazaki's movies all the more remarkable is that in an era when each computer-
animated feature from the likes of Pixar and Disney is more kinetic than the last—Cars! Toys!
Fish!—he continues to handcraft a world of Zen-like stillness and beauty: water dripping on
mossy rocks, or a train gliding over the sea in twilight. The dramatic punch is delivered not
with a showstopping musical number or high-tech wizardry but with simple, stunning imagery
that still takes your breath away.
Kenzo Tange
From Hiroshima to Tokyo, he defined the look of Japan
By Jim Frederick

During World War II, American firebombing reduced some 40% of Japan's total urban area to
rubble. From this horrifying destruction came a historic burst of reconstruction. It was an
extraordinary opportunity for a young, enterprising architect to apply his vision to a newly
blank slate, to define the literal shape of postwar Japan. His name was Kenzo Tange.

Born in 1913 to a poor family in Osaka and educated at the University of Tokyo, Tange's first
major commission was the Peace Memorial Park at Hiroshima's ground zero in 1949. His
concrete museum, cenotaph and gigantic public square managed to be both mournful and
modern, elegiac yet elegant. Over the next half-century, Tange continued to give physical
expression to Japan's recovery, his curriculum vitae nothing less than a checklist of the nation's
most iconic buildings. Each was executed in his coldly beautiful, international, ruthlessly
current style. Among them: the National Gymnasium Complex for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics
(hailed in his citation for the coveted Pritzker Prize as "among the most beautiful structures
built in the 20th century"); the master plan for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka; 1991's
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building; and 1996's Fuji TV Building, with its silver globe
suspended high above Tokyo Bay.

Before he died in 2005, Tange had also earned respect as a teacher, mentoring such
heavyweights as Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki. What does modern Japan look like today? It
looks the way Tange decided it should.
Farrokh Bulsara
As Freddie Mercury, he showed the world just how hard a Parsi boy could rock
By Liam Fitzpatrick

Hardly anyone thinks of Farrokh Bulsara as an Asian. To the world he was the rock star Freddie
Mercury, lead singer of Queen, with features and an accent that were ethnically vague but
probably British, if one had to guess. (Indeed, he was listed as one of the 100 Greatest Britons
in a 2002 BBC poll.) There is a statue of him in Montreux, Switzerland, but none in the Eastern
hemisphere. The truth, however, is that Bulsara was the son of two Indians from Gujarat and
was a member of the small religious community of Parsis, or Zoroastrians. Though born on the
Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar, where his father Bomi worked as a High Court cashier, Bulsara
was educated at boarding schools in Bombay. He learned piano at St. Peter's School in
Panchgani, a short distance from the city, and among his formative musical influences was the
great Bollywood singer Lata Mangeshkar.

When you know this about Bulsara, the characteristics of his music make sense. The baroque
flourishes of a song like Bohemian Rhapsody, the complex time signatures, the flamboyant
stage costumes, the high camp and effortless incorporation of musical styles from jazz to
gospel to 1950s rock 'n' roll: if the best Bollywood directors and screenwriters could conceive of
a rock band it would be something like Queen, and its frontman would be a mustachioed,
spandex-clad peacock like Bulsara. His worldwide commercial success, however, exceeded
anything to come out of a Bombay studio lot. Queen have sold over 150 million albums, and
according to the Guinness Book of Records are the most successful album act in U.K. history,
their recordings spending a cumulatively longer time in the album charts than the Beatles'. In a
2002 Guinness poll, Bohemian Rhapsody—which topped the U.K. singles charts in both 1975 and
1991—was voted Britain's favorite single of all time. In 2003, Bulsara—who died in 1991 at age
45—was rated second only to Mariah Carey in MTV's 22 Greatest Voices in Music.

Bulsara duplicated in popular music what other Indians—such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram
Seth—have done in literature: taking the colonizer's art form and representing it in a manner
richer and more dazzling than many Anglophones thought possible. But in his case, the empire
wasn't merely writing back—it was singing its heart out in arenas all over the world in a voice
that spanned nearly four octaves. Put on Queen's Greatest Hits at any party, anywhere, and
there will be a song to bring a smile to the face of almost anyone, of any age. No other Asian
musician or pop-cultural figure has enjoyed the same universal appeal: that Bulsara was able to
achieve this as an openly gay man from India is further testament to his gift. It's time to
recognize him as the great Asian artist that he was, and to bring his memory home.
Nam June Paik
His avant-garde installations launched an entirely new school of art
By Richard Lacayo

We will never know which cave dweller was the first to discover that mineral pastes and
charcoal could be smeared on a rock wall to make a painting. But we do know who first
recognized that television could be made into art. And we don't mean the art of making
television programs. We mean art created from TV sets, TV tubes, TV cabinets and TV signals.
The founding father of video art, which by now ranks as one of the museum world's serious
growth sectors, was the Korean-born provocateur Nam June Paik.

In the early 1960s, while studying music at a series of universities in Germany, Paik became
involved with the international art movement Fluxus, a loose affiliation of anarchic talents that
included Yoko Ono and the avant-garde composer John Cage. Taking the anti-art aesthetic of
Dadaism as their inspiration, they were devoted to various kinds of madcap public performance
(once, in the middle of performing his own Etude for Pianoforte, Paik suddenly leapt into the
audience where Cage was sitting and scissored off the composer's necktie) and to found
materials—the artist's term for whatever happens to be at hand. Paik's breakthrough came
when he realized that television—with signals flowing everywhere and receivers in almost every
home—was a universal found material. As he once explained: "I knew there was something to
be done in television and nobody else was doing it, so I said why not make it my job?"

So, in 1963, he set to work dismantling 13 old black-and-white TV sets and figuring out ways to
distort their pictures with magnets, microphones and other means. He displayed the results
that year in a gallery in Wuppertal, Germany. It was the world's first exhibition of video art.
When Sony produced the first portable video camera in 1965, Paik was also the first to make
art with that, using scenes he filmed of a papal visit to New York.

Paik, who died in January at age 73, thought humor was a natural ingredient of art. Works like
Video Fish—52 working monitors, each covered by an aquarium stocked with fish—are
deliberately comic. After moving to New York in 1964 he also began his long collaboration with
Charlotte Moorman, a gifted cellist and a very good sport who colluded in Paik's forays into
what you might call soft-core classical, including his Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only, in
which she shed her clothing while playing Bach's C Major Sonata. Paik took his art seriously. But
he produced it with a smile.
Han Suyin
In voicing her Eurasian identity, she defined a people
By Liam Fitzpatrick

There was a time when being Eurasian could get you killed. I don't remember this myself
because I was only 2, but my mother tells the story of how, in 1967, we were nearly lynched by
Maoists amid riots in Hong Kong. I was the provocation, being—in the eyes of the mob—the
detestable spawn of her traitorous union with a Westerner. We fled for our lives to the cries of
"Bastard!" and "Whore!"

The Belgian-Chinese novelist Han Suyin, born Elisabeth Chow in China's Henan province in 1917,
was painfully familiar with this kind of race hatred. But far from hindering her, the prejudice
she experienced as a child inspired a blend of defiance and pride that she expressed in her
1952 novel A Many-Splendoured Thing: "We must carry ourselves with colossal assurance and
say, 'Look at us, the Eurasians! ... The meeting of both cultures, the fusion of all that can
become a world civilization.'" It was an epoch-shifting outburst. Prior to reading Han, Eurasians
tended to identify, somewhat apologetically, with either our Asian or European sides. But her
writings opened up an infinitely richer middle ground that belonged to us alone.

Han was never consistent, and her life and corpus (nine novels, 10 autobiographical works,
seven volumes of history) are full of contradictions. A militant anti-imperialist, she married a
British special-branch officer at the height of the Malaya Emergency. Slighted by the Chinese,
she named herself after the Han, China's dominant ethnic group, and became an apologist for
Mao. Despite what she called an "inescapable passion" for China, she spent much of her life in
Singapore and India and now resides, at age 89, in Switzerland. But, in the end, Eurasians
forgive her idiosyncrasies, because in giving us our identity she gave us everything. "Only I had
the courage ... to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians," Han wrote of her early
struggle. Today, in a time of globalization, Eurasians are envied for a look and a biculturalism
that have become bankable commodities. We gaze upon a very different world, and it was Han
Suyin who led us here.
Gong Li
Her on-screen charisma gave the world an icon of Chinese resolve
By Richard Corliss

It's not nearly her best movie, or her toughest role, but the 1994 Qin dynasty epic The Great
Conqueror's Concubine has a scene that beautifully sums up Gong Li's screen power. She is
bathing in a large wooden vat with the lovely Rosamund Kwan, who screams as a large rat
swims toward her. In a flash, Gong Li grabs the rodent and tosses it unceremoniously out of the
tub.

Many a movie rat, of the human male variety, has tried to strike fear onto Gong Li's imperious
face. Some have defeated her; none have cowed her. She represents, for many moviegoers,
indomitable China: the stalwart image of 1.3 billion people, beamed around the world. In
seven Zhang Yimou films—beginning with Red Sorghum, made in 1987 when she was just 21—
she overthrew the stereotype of the meek and compliant Chinese female for a new type: the
insolent, independent woman. That glare, that stare—it says she will not be broken, and if you
try, it's you who will end up in pieces. Assertive and alluring, she has given Chinese cinema guts
and, without half trying, sex appeal.

Moviegoers watched in awe as she stood up to her husbands in Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red
Lantern (1991). They did so again as she defied the Chinese bureaucracy in The Story of Qiu Ju
(1992)—which unlike the previous two was set in contemporary times and echoed the travails of
China's rural poor in its depiction of a wife forced to travel to the city to seek justice for her
husband. The film To Live (1994) made its point even more forcefully, directly satirizing China's
communist revolution. Unsurprisingly, mainland audiences missed some of the Gong-Zhang
films; the censors either banned them or cut them. But China knew it had a strong symbol, and
an irresistible export.

For ages, though, Gong Li refused to export herself. Unlike Shu Qi and Ziyi Zhang, she made no
films in the West—until last year, when she got the plum role of the scheming Hatsumomo in
Memoirs of a Geisha. She then played a sort of earth-mother drug dealer in Miami Vice, and a
nurturer of the young Lecter in Hannibal Rising, to be released next year. But the best news is
that, after a decade apart, she's reunited with Zhang Yimou for his new action epic, Curse of
the Golden Flower, opening next month. Two great spirits of Chinese cinema are one again: his
vision, her stare.
Seiji Ozawa
A serendipitous sports injury led a Japanese boy to become a maestro
By Jamie James

The future of Western classical music in Japan took a decisive turn in 1950, when 15-year-old
Seiji Ozawa sprained his finger in a rugby game. As Ozawa was unable to play the piano, his
music teacher, Hideo Saito, took him to a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. He
came away burning with the desire to be the maestro eliciting those celestial sounds from an
orchestra. Nine years later, Ozawa won first prize at an international conducting competition
in France, which earned him an invitation to conduct at Tanglewood, the summer home of the
legendary Boston Symphony Orchestra. By 1973, Ozawa was its music director, a post he held
for an astonishing 29 years.

The shock of hair and the elegant, elastic swirl of limbs have made Ozawa a classical-music
icon worldwide. Yet it is in Japan that he has made his strongest mark, almost single-handedly
raising the country's music to an international standard. "In Japan there were two levels of
musicmaking. Half the concerts were all-Japanese orchestras and performers, which had the
same small audiences at every performance," he told TIME. "The other half were by
international artists, which charged 10 times as much and they were always full ... I found that
very sad."

Ozawa's response, in 1992, was to found the Saito Kinen Orchestra. Named after his music
teacher, it is now an orchestra of international standing. In 2002, the maestro took charge of
the Vienna State Opera, following in the footsteps of legends like Herbert von Karajan.
Thinking boldly as ever, he then set about creating a world-class opera company in Japan. In
2005, he conducted the Tokyo Opera Nomori's debut—Richard Strauss's difficult Elektra. In
other words, while many Asian performers have achieved stardom in the West, none have
labored more passionately to make classical music a global two-way street.

Jamie James is the author of The Java Man and The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and
the Natural Order of the Universe
Salman Rushdie
The literary magician conjured up a new, postcolonial landscape
By Pico Iyer

Fifty-nine years ago, India claimed its independence from Britain. But another 36 years would
pass before it would find a voice to announce its new identity. Then, in 1983, a novel called
Midnight's Children exploded out of nowhere, to upset the placid applecart of English
literature, play merry havoc with the English language and create something more full of
invention and clairvoyance than anything Empire could imagine.

Salman Rushdie's second novel was a call to free spirits everywhere to remake the world with
imagination. It took the magical realism coined in South America and gave it a wicked satirical
thrust. It took the mythic exuberance of Günter Grass, the narrative innovations of Laurence
Sterne and James Joyce, and filled them with South Asian energy and polymorphousness. It
even sang into being a new, gleefully mongrel world in which East and West were so all over
one another that the action clearly lay in the spaces between them. A small boy's coming of
age in a new country became a story of how colonized could trump colonizer with something
raucous, larger than life and triumphant.

Like any revolution, Rushdie's assault on the old divisions (of high and low, old and new, East
and West) was messy and sometimes excessive. And like many of those who remake history,
Rushdie lost control of his own inventions at times. Seemingly spellbound by his own brilliance
and celebrity, he sometimes began to parody himself, sometimes gave too much vent to a
capacity for vengefulness. He followed Midnight's Children with a scabrous attack on Pakistan,
Shame, and then with a vivid satire on Islam, in The Satanic Verses. When the Ayatullah
Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, or death sentence, on the Islamic-born infidel in 1989, the voice
of modern Asian profusion became a one-man campaign for freedom of speech,
internationalism and the rights of the imagination in the face of tribal prejudice.

But whatever you thought of him, it was hard to deny that Rushdie had not merely opened a
new chapter for the novel—he had opened up a new universe by changing the way we tell
stories and see the world around us. Go into a fusion restaurant in San Francisco, listen to a DJ
sampling oldies in a London dance club, visit any place in Asia where old colonial buildings are
flooded with shiny new handicraft shops, and you are in the world brought into life—and
divined—by Salman Rushdie. Some writers from former British colonies (Derek Walcott, Michael
Ondaatje) have shed tropical light on the dusty monuments of English literature; still others
(V.S. Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro, English-raised, though Japanese-born) have pushed the
classical novel into new exile territory. But the post-classical novel, the eruption of 21st
century literary masala mixing, was set off by an Indian-born, English-speaking, overseas-based
Muslim who came into the world, with characteristic prescience, at the very moment when
India claimed its independence 59 years ago.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of Abandon, a novel, and Sun After Dark, a set of essays.
Li Ka-shing
The richest man in Asia built a global empire out of an ailing British conglomerate
By Stephen Vines

The Hong Kong newspapers call him chiu yan (Superman), but at first glance the only thing Li
Ka-shing has in common with Clark Kent is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. This hardly bothers
his legions of admirers. To them, this modest 78-year-old is the most successful Chinese
businessman of his generation. Today, Li's fortune totals more than $18 billion. But less than 30
years ago, he was just a face in a crowd of aggressive Hong Kong businessmen trying to push
past the entrenched foreign Taipans and their Shanghainese counterparts who ruled the roost
in what was then a British colony. Born in the Chinese city of Chiu Chow, the son of a teacher,
Li started by founding a Hong Kong plastics firm. He burst onto the public stage in 1979, when
he made a deal giving him control of the ailing British-owned conglomerate Hutchison
Whampoa. Li quickly used his new platform to build on Hutchison's ports, property and retailing
assets, expanding into telecommunications, energy and beyond. As Li's empire grew so did a
band of faithful followers who mobbed banks that handed out application forms for new issues
of shares offered by his companies. Li made money for Hong Kong's small investors and they
loved him, not just for that but also because he was seen as one of them—a little guy who had
beaten the big guys at their own game.

As Li's power and influence grew it became clear that his real talent lay not just in having an
uncanny eye for opportunities but also in knowing when to sell. He has long traded his property
assets in Hong Kong, predicting the market's peaks and troughs with seeming clairvoyance, and
he has applied his skills to other assets, too. In 1999, he sold the British-based Orange
telephone network to Germany's Mannesmann for a $14.6 billion profit; within a year, the tech
bubble burst and the value of such assets plummeted. Skeptics wondered why Li took control of
Canada's Husky Oil in 1991 and suffered years of poor returns, but the company is now one of
the jewels in the Li portfolio.

In recent years, Li's trading finesse has drawn criticism from shareholders
annoyed at the spinning off of assets, such as telecom companies, in a way
that lines his pockets more than their own. There are also rumblings of
discontent over the lack of transparency in Li's dealings. He recently
helped finance a deal by a close associate, investment banker Francis
Leung, to buy the assets of PCCW, the telecom firm controlled by his son
Richard Li. At the time of the proposed sale, the younger Li maintained
that his father was not involved in this politically sensitive deal, but later
it came to light that he loaned Leung most of the cash for his deposit on
Feb. 23, 2004 the purchase.
Table of Contents
Still, those who do business with Li know that when he gives his word, he keeps it. And lately
he has further burnished his reputation by becoming perhaps Asia's most prominent
philanthropist, showing the way in a region where tycoons have been relatively slow to shift
from getting to giving. In August, he said he would give a sizeable portion of his wealth to his
charitable foundation. In Chinese society, dazzling success is revered while envy exerts a far
weaker pull on the imagination. That's why Li, the quintessentially successful businessman,
remains a hero to so many.

Stephen Vines, a journalist and television presenter, is the author of Hong Kong: China's New
Colony
 COURTESY OF SONY CORPORATION
BROTHERS IN ARMS: Morita, left, and Ibuka in 1961
Akio Morita & Masaru Ibuka
Friends and partners for 40 years, they made Sony an icon of Japan's rebirth
By Michael Elliott

In 1944, a young officer in the Japanese Imperial Navy met a civilian radio engineer, 13 years
his senior, on a task force to develop a heat-seeking missile. Within two years, World War II
had ended, Japan was trying to rebuild its industrial base, and the two men were working
together tinkering with radios and other electrical gadgets in a small Tokyo office. Akio Morita,
the naval officer, and Masaru Ibuka, the engineer, would stay partners and friends for more
than 40 years, along the way building Sony, one of the iconic brands of the Japanese economic
miracle.

Japan, of course, has had not one economic miracle but two—the first came after the Meiji
Restoration, when a feudal society modernized itself so quickly that within two generations,
the Japanese navy was able to rout the Russian one. But the scale of Japan's economic recovery
after 1945 boggles the mind even more. At the end of the war the economy was, quite literally,
in ashes; within 17 years of heady growth at the rate now seen in China, The Economist
magazine was able to say, "Apostles of conventional wisdom from the entire world should be
coming to Japan to study just how to emulate it."

Emulation—which has been attempted by many—has proved easier said than done, at least in
part because few other nations have been able to develop corporations whose branded goods
have a reputation for quality with the facility of the Japanese. The company Morita and Ibuka
built was key to that process. Their genius did not just consist of identifying consumer goods
that were perfectly pitched for the time and place—in postwar Japan, tape recorders; then
transistor radios and color TVs; then, in the 1980s, the Walkman—but of recognizing the
benefits of thinking on a global scale. From the 1950s on, Morita spent much of his time in the
U.S. In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company to have its stock listed on the New York
Stock Exchange, and a year later the first Japanese flag to fly in New York City since before the
war appeared over Sony's midtown showrooms.
 At the heart of Sony's long years of success was the relationship between
its two founders—Ibuka the engineering fiddler, taking gadgets apart on the
floor of his office to see how they worked; Morita the sleek manager, scion
of an old sake-brewing family, friend of the great and good on three
continents. The men had very different styles, but they complemented
each other. "In good times and bad, we were always together," the wife of
an ailing Morita said on his behalf at Ibuka's funeral in 1998. Not everything
they touched turned to gold; not every investment was a wise one. And in
the past 10 years, their firm has stumbled, missing out on developing
May. 10, 1971 products like the Palm personal digital assistants or the iPod whose
Table of Contents attributes would once have screamed "Sony." More recently, the company
Large Cover was forced to make an expensive recall of laptop batteries, some of which
caught fire. But Ibuka and Morita built an Asian company synonymous globally with quality and
style. To all who followed—in Japan, in Southeast Asia and increasingly in China—the standard
was set by two men who forged a lifelong friendship in the cruel crucible of war.
Stan Shih
The engineer who turned Taiwan into a PC-manufacturing powerhouse
By Paul S. Otellini

Thirty years ago, computer manufacturing was an arcane business involving a handful of
companies building a small number of large and expensive machines a year, mostly using
components made in-house. Stan Shih, a mild-mannered Taiwanese electrical engineer working
on gadgets such as desktop calculators, saw a better way. Among the first to recognize the
potential of microprocessors (those tiny computer chips that today are the brains of billions of
products from cars to cell phones), Shih saw how marrying cheap chips with efficient
manufacturing could spread computing power to the masses. It was the right idea—so right that
Shih ended up creating a globally recognized brand of personal computers (Acer), kindling a
booming high-tech industry in Taiwan (where many of the components in the world's electronic
devices are now made), and inspiring a generation of Taiwanese entrepreneurs.

At Acer, Shih took a radically different approach to PC making. By focusing on supply-chain

optimization and cultivating a vibrant ecosystem of tightly clustered component suppliers, Acer
was able to introduce new technology faster and at lower prices than competitors. As early as
1986, for example, then-little-known Acer released the world's second PC based on Intel's 386
microprocessor, just one month after industry giant Compaq.

Thanks in no small part to Shih's pioneering example, the integrated-supply-chain model is now
the hallmark of PC contract manufacturing worldwide. In other words, he's a big reason why
your PC costs $1,000, not $10,000. Under his stewardship, Acer grew into a top-five PC brand.
But Shih's innovations didn't stop there. Rather than competing head-on with low-cost Chinese
manufacturers, he gradually moved Acer up the value chain to focus more on design and
innovation. Acer—which once did contract manufacturing for the likes of IBM, Dell and
Compaq—is now itself the customer to mainland contract manufacturers that have emulated
Acer's earlier business model. Instead of merely manufacturing cheap capacitors, radios and
the like, Taiwan's PC industry grew far more ambitious under Shih's mentorship. With ever more
countries entering the global information economy, his legacy of innovation-driven business will
continue to power economic growth and inspire the next generation of Asian entrepreneurs.

Paul S. Otellini is president and CEO of Intel Corp.

Jerry Yang
How a student from Taiwan brought Yahoo! to the world
By Sabeer Bhatia

In 1995, I became fascinated with the new websites popping up during the early days of the
Internet. One of them was http://akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo. Created by two Stanford
students, Dave Filo and an expat Taiwanese named Jerry Yang, the site was a directory of
other websites, organized as a list of useful topics. It was meant for the students' friends, but
everyone was hungry at that time for a guide that helped make sense of this chaotic new
medium, so Yahoo! quickly became essential for all Web users. Soon we heard that America
Online was interested in acquiring Yahoo! for a small sum that would seem quaint today. Yang
(who was born in Taipei but moved to San Jose at age 10 with his widowed mother) rejected
AOL's offer. Instead, he took a venture-capital investment and followed his dream.

It was a bold step, but Yahoo! was already on its way to becoming the next great Internet
company after Netscape. Unlike Netscape, however, Yahoo! was not a software company. It
was a media company. Access was free. Advertising paid the bills. I was inspired by this. With
partner Jack Smith, I started my own Internet company, Hotmail—a free, Web-based, ad-
supported e-mail system that quickly became the world's largest e-mail service provider. In
1997, Microsoft purchased Hotmail for $400 million.

Many doubted the Internet could be a useful vehicle for commerce. But Yang and his fellow
Yahoos ignored the naysayers and built the world's most-trafficked website, which today has
annual revenues of roughly $6 billion. Thank you, Jerry, for showing us the way.

Entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia co-founded Hotmail in 1995. His newest venture is BlogEverywhere
Momofuku Ando
A late bloomer invented the instant noodles that fueled the Asian Miracle
By Hannah Beech

Someone had to feed Asia's economic miracle. All those construction workers with 10 minutes
between shifts and those salarymen hunched over their desks at midnight needed something
cheap, something filling and, most of all, something fast. In 1958, Momofuku Ando, an
unassuming entrepreneur living in Osaka, created the instant noodle—and a continent has been
feasting on his invention ever since.

Ando's instant noodles debuted in a Japan still reeling from World War II. Chikin Ramen, as the
deep-fried pasta was first called, was viewed as a luxurious novelty item, akin to astronaut ice
cream or pre-swirled PB&J. Who would choose a slab of dehydrated noodles over the then-
cheaper fresh stuff? The answer was many millions of time-pressed individuals. As Japan
sprinted into the high-tech age, instant, it turned out, was just the right speed. In 2005, 85.7
billion packs of instant noodles were slurped down worldwide.

Last year, Ando resigned as chairman of Nissin Food Products Co., the firm he founded. He was
a mere 95 years old upon his retirement. Having invented Chikin Ramen at age 48 and the cup
noodle at 61, Ando admits he was a late bloomer. Before he began experimenting with a vat of
oil and oodles of noodles in the 1950s, Ando had dabbled unsuccessfully in business ventures
ranging from salt to prefab houses. Then came two years in jail for tax evasion. Invention may
not normally spring from an ex-con's backyard laboratory, but postwar Japan was a forgiving—
and hungry—place. Companies implicated in wartime activity were reborn as purveyors of sleek
electronic gadgets, while even the Emperor in whose name millions of soldiers had perished
was given a makeover.

Ando was born in 1910 in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony. He returned as a small child to
Japan after his parents died. The country he arrived in was an imperial power, busily fashioning
the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere out of a weakened continent. By the time Ando
cooked up his backyard noodles, both he and the nation had endured humiliation. His instant-
noodle recipe included not only flour, palm oil and MSG, but—metaphorically, at least—a
sprinkling of hope, too. After all, it is that midnight bowl of noodles that so many count on to
keep going a little longer, a little later, in pursuit of the Asian dream.
Narayana Murthy
From a Bombay bedsit, he launched an economic revolution
By Alex Perry

When Narayana Murthy and six friends threw $250 each into a pot and set up a software firm in
Bangalore in 1981, they had ambition, sure. According to Murthy's account of that first meeting
in his bedsit in a Bombay slum, some of his partners wanted to build a company with a
reputation for efficiency, some for innovation, and some for profits. After seven hours of
discussion, they decided their company, Infosys, would uphold a standard of all-around
excellence. What they did not envision was that they would also transform the way the entire
world does business.

When he retired as executive chairman of Infosys this year, Murthy was worth $1.3 billion. But
far more significant than his personal returns, his wildly successful company had laid the
groundwork for the business process—outsourcing—that defines globalization in action. Infosys
showed that, with modern communication networks, it was possible for well-educated, low-
cost Indian laborers to take on some of the office grunt work, such as software programming,
needed by the West's corporations. The result: enormous cost savings for companies across
Europe and the U.S. and unheard-of employment opportunities in the developing world.
Infosys, along with hundreds of imitators in Bangalore, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Bombay,
made India a crucible for globalization, helping to lift the impoverished country out of the dark
ages. India's outsourcing sector today generates annual revenues of $36 billion, up from $150
million in 1991.

But Murthy, 60, is now ready for a second career: he wants to ease the inequities exacerbated
by the process he helped to start. Globalization has been a boon for many, with millionaires
being minted at a record pace around the world. Yet below this élite, the picture changes.
Sucking in overseas jobs has not eased India's poverty as might be expected, not least because
only one million Indians—in a nation of 1.1 billion—are employed by the outsourcing sector.
And, for all its progress, India is still not home to a vast new middle class—only 58 million
Indians earn more than $4,400 a year. "The disposable income of rural people has actually
dipped," notes Murthy. "They're saying: 'Is this globalization? Is this all we're going to get?'" He
hopes to encourage policies such as the buildup of manufacturing in rural areas to ensure that
globalization works for all. "I don't know whether people will listen to me or not," says Murthy.
Given his record, it might profit them to do so.
Hanae Mori, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake & Rei Kawakubo
Four dazzling Japanese designers inspired the cloistered world of high fashion to look East
By Akira Miura

In 1965, the year Toyota introduced its humble Corona sedan in the U.S. and started Japan's
hostile takeover of global auto markets, a subtler sort of invasion began in New York. There, a
Japanese fashion designer named Hanae Mori presented her first collection. Her designs, which
blended traditional Western forms with Japanese aesthetics, were a critical and commercial
sensation; major department stores snapped up Mori's creations, and it wasn't long before
"Madame Butterfly," as she came to be known, owned boutiques in New York and Paris and
became the first Asian to join the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, France's prestigious
fashion union.

Mori, 80, is the grand dame of a clutch of Japanese designers who have since made waves of
their own. Over the last 30 years, Mori, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto each
left indelible impressions on international style with their groundbreaking work, proving that
Asia could be a wellspring of inspiration, not just a base for textile mills and clothing factories.
In his debut at the 1973 Paris Autumn/Winter Collection, Miyake stunned the fashion business
with designs that were functional yet futuristic. His emphasis on creating a garment from a
single piece of fabric earned him the nickname "Cloth Sculptor," but he ultimately leveraged
his influence far beyond the boutique. Today, the Issey Miyake brand extends to luggage, home
furnishings, even bicycles. Then there is Yamamoto, who revolutionized avant-garde clothing in
the late 1970s when he unveiled a collection of elegant women's fashions based on men's
garments. Though he was aggressively courted by Paris fashion houses, Yamamoto stayed in
Tokyo, where today he mentors his daughter, Limi, a young designer who regularly takes part
in the Tokyo Collection.

Still influencing creators around the world is Rei Kawakubo, the reclusive founder of Comme
des Garçons, which grew into a global chain in the 1980s. With co-conspirator Yamamoto,
Kawakubo burst onto the Paris fashion scene in 1981 with her "rag look." These often austere
garments, sometimes lacking a sleeve or other component, seemed almost antifashion back
then, but their impact was so widespread that many designers are now classified as "before" or
"after" Comme des Garçons. In her show at Paris Fashion Week this year, Kawakubo's models
appeared in outfits festooned with oddly shaped fragments of cloth and plastic, including some
shaped like the rising sun of the Japanese flag. This rebelliousness is the essence of her
character. "The other day I had an opportunity to review the bulk of my past work," she told
me recently, "and there is much I would happily discard." In an industry where reinvention and
change is the only constant, that very un-Japanese dissatisfaction with the status quo has been
an indispensable trait for all four of Japan's great fashion iconoclasts.

Akira Miura is editor at large of the Japan edition of Women's Wear Daily
Muhammad Yunus
A Nobel laureate banker envisions an end to poverty
By Ishaan Tharoor

In 1974, famine gripped Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands died and millions became
destitute. "Villagers had to borrow from loan sharks on terrible conditions," says Muhammad
Yunus, "and some even became slave labor for the money lenders." For Yunus, who had just
returned to Bangladesh as an economics professor after completing his Ph.D. in the U.S., it was
wrenching to discover how meaningless his academic achievements were in the midst of all this
suffering. Hoping to cure his own sense of helplessness, he wandered the muddy lanes of a
village next to his university, searching for ways to help. Little did he know that this nervous
exploration would plant the seeds of an economic miracle still blooming decades later.

Yunus compiled a list of the village's 42 most impoverished and went about repaying each of
their debts for a paltry total of $27. While banks would never lend money to these often
illiterate and undocumented peasants, Yunus simply asked that they work hard and repay him
"when they could." He recalls: "It was a big shock that just a little money could make people so
happy. With the money they could become free."

This is the operating ethos of the Grameen Bank, which Yunus founded in 1983 and which has
since extended microloans to 6.6 million people in Bangladesh, most of them women.
"Conventional banks look for the rich," says Yunus. "We look for the absolutely poor." As Yunus
sees it, credit is a human right, enabling a person "to unwrap that gift of one's self and find out
who he is." Yet the concept he pioneered has proved to be much more than kind-hearted
charity: 99% of Grameen's borrowers repay their debts—despite the fact that they borrow
without providing collateral—and the bank makes a modest profit.

Inspired by his success, many others have embraced Yunus' concept. From the U.S. to Uganda,
over 100 million people are now enrolled in various microcredit schemes. Prominent global
figures otherwise at each other's throats, such as Paul Wolfowitz, head of the World Bank, and
Hugo Chávez, the leftist President of Venezuela, have all praised Yunus' achievement. And, on
Oct. 13, Yunus received the most extraordinary endorsement yet, becoming the first
businessman ever to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. As the news broke, his entire country
celebrated. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia heralded him as "the pride of Bangladesh," while
thousands flocked to Grameen's headquarters in the suburbs of Dhaka to congratulate their
hero.

For Yunus—whose father struggled to support 10 children as the owner of a tiny ornaments shop
in the city of Chittagong—the Nobel is an almost unimaginable accomplishment. But his
ambitions are far bolder than this. Yunus insists it's possible to eradicate global poverty within
two generations, with microcredit uplifting countless millions. "At the rate we're heading, we'll
halve total poverty by 2015," he says. "We'll create a poverty museum in 2030."
 HYUNDAI HEAVY INDUSTRIES
HANDS ON: Chung, left, oversees work on a massive
propeller in a Hyundai shipyard

Chung Ju Yung
His iron will and just-do-it spirit propelled South Korea's industrial rise
By Michael Schuman Chung Ju Yung, founder of South Korea's Hyundai group of companies,
proved a lot of people wrong. In the 1960s, he built Korea's first cross-country expressway,
which the World Bank said wasn't economically viable. He exported the first Korean-made car
to the U.S. while the industry laughed. He built Korea's first oil tanker, though competitors
scoffed. But Chung prevailed. One of Asia's great industrialists, he played a leading role in
lifting South Korea from a poverty-stricken mess to the world's 11th largest economy. The
companies he created include the world's biggest shipbuilder, one of its hottest carmakers and
one of its leading computer-chip makers. "Don't you know," Chung asked a skeptical financier in
the early 1970s, "that the person who thinks a job is possible is the one who is going to get it
done?"

Chung, who died in 2001, was proud of his rise from a rice-farming family to corporate
chieftain. During construction of Hyundai's first oil tanker, he'd rally workers through 15-hour
days with heady promises, saying: "You'll have a TV and a refrigerator in five years and a car in
15." But his success was also due to his close ties with Park Chung Hee, Korea's nation-building
dictator. As Chung got older, he became imperious and his relentless determination to expand
Hyundai proved its undoing. Buried under debt and wracked by scandal, the group was broken
up in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Yet even after this reversal, the scale of
Chung's achievement remains undeniable. He raised the hopes of a nation ravaged by war and
poverty, and embodied its drive. "Conviction creates indomitable efforts," he once wrote. "This
is the key to miracles."
Victor & William Fung
Hong Kong's masters of global manufacturing
By Michael Schuman

That pair of jeans you recently bought has a multinational pedigree: the zipper was probably
made in Japan, the fabric came from Hong Kong, the thread from China, and all the pieces
were assembled at a Vietnamese factory. It's cheaper to make many types of goods by sourcing
parts from around the world. And for that discovery, much of the thanks goes to Victor and
William Fung, the two low-key brothers at the helm of Hong Kong-based supply-chain-
management firm Li & Fung. They are the great middlemen of modern trade, orchestrating the
production of everyday goods for giant retailers like Victoria's Secret, Kohl's and KB Toys. The
Fungs helped invent what William, 57, calls "borderless manufacturing."

It all began in the early '70s when the Fung brothers returned to Hong Kong from the U.S. and
joined the family trading firm their grandfather founded in 1906. Thirty years ago, Hong Kong
was a manufacturing center for clothes, shoes, wigs and the like. But as costs rose, competitors
sprouted in South Korea and Taiwan. After Deng Xiaoping opened up China, Hong Kong factories
moved across the border to tap cheap labor. The Fungs realized that improvements in
transportation and information technology meant manufacturing no longer had to be based in
one country. Why not get the best component, the best service, the best product, at the best
price—from anywhere? The challenge, says William, was "to learn how to deal with not one
manufacturing sector, but two or three or five."

The Fungs began organizing production on a global scale. Today, they have 72 offices in 41
countries, and this year, Li & Fung will move some 2.4 billion shirts, toys and other consumer
goods. Remarkably, the price of such products has gone down, in real terms, over the past 20
years. That's because borderless manufacturing has reduced costs, thereby allowing the world's
consumers to buy more. This, in turn, has created greater prosperity and job opportunities for
millions of people. The Fungs are humble men, but Victor, 61, will allow himself to say that
they "created a whole new paradigm." Their achievement may not be glamorous—or, indeed,
highly visible—but their impact on global manufacturing has been staggering.
 PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY JAMES PORTO.
MIYAMOTO: MAKOTO ISHIDA FOR TIME
GAME MASTER: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto created
some of our greatest videogame heroes
Shigeru Miyamoto
The video-game guru who made it O.K. to play
By Will Wright

Ask video-game producers which individual has had the most creative impact on this
burgeoning art form, and the name you will hear over and over again is Shigeru Miyamoto.
Chief game designer for Nintendo, Miyamoto has been called the Walt Disney of electronic
gaming. Nintendo grew to become one of the major players in the gaming industry primarily
because of a multitude of designs born in the mind of Miyamoto-san. Starting with his first hit,
Donkey Kong, and continuing through his megafranchises Super Mario Bros. and Legend of
Zelda, Miyamoto, 53, has repeatedly proved himself a master of his craft. Along the way, he
has not only created some of our most beloved entertainment experiences, he has also built a
modern mythology that captures the joy and wonder of exploring these playful micro-worlds.

Miyamoto's body of work is remarkable because he has always remained focused on what
actually matters in a game: the player's experience. Other designers may obsess about testing
the limits of the hardware; Miyamoto specializes in testing the limits of imagination. His
insistence upon simplicity and his appeal to our inner child recognize that play is an important
part of being human. It's how we learn. By understanding the nature of play—the activities that
we all enjoyed as children but are later taught to eschew as adults—Miyamoto is able to create
engrossing games that rekindle very old and yet very satisfying learning experiences in a fresh
way.

As the industry grows and matures, it is challenging to remain innovative while attracting new
players to the fold. Miyamoto's response: change the rules. Nintendo's groundbreaking new
game machines—the handheld, dual-screen Nintendo DS and the soon-to-be-released Nintendo
Wii, which features a motion-sensing remote control—offer unconventional game play without
being complex and intimidating. It's a brilliant approach. Miyamoto remains the industry's pied
piper, drawing yet another generation into his world for a little fun.
Game designer Will Wright created The Sims, the best-selling PC game of all time
Lakshmi Mittal
His boldness and spectacular wealth reflect India's growing financial might
By Alex Perry

Maybe it's a sign that our obsession with real estate is getting out of control when a man leaps
into the public consciousness by purchasing an enormous house. But that's exactly what
happened to Indian-born Lakshmi Mittal when, in 2004, he bought 18/19 Kensington Palace
Gardens in London from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone. Mittal, 56, paid $128 million for
the 6,400-square-meter, 12-bedroom mansion, a world-record sales price for a house at the
time. Overnight, the publicity transformed Mittal from little-known industrialist to a symbol of
India's emergence as a global economic power.

Yet what really cements Mittal's status as the point man for India Inc. and as a hero to his
countrymen isn't how he spends his money—but how he makes it. More than a decade ago,
Mittal broke away from his father's Calcutta-based steel business and began building an
international giant. Since 2001, Mittal Steel has acquired or invested in 11 steel producers in
countries as far afield as Algeria, Ukraine and Romania. In 2005, as commodity prices and steel
demand soared, so too did Mittal's fortune—by an astounding $19 billion. Almost overnight, he
was worth an estimated $25 billion, making him the world's third-richest man.

Other newly minted Indian tycoons, flush with cash from profitable domestic businesses, are
likewise leveraging into overseas acquisitions. But it's Mittal who is leading the charge. Earlier
this year, he rammed through a $33.5 billion hostile takeover of Arcelor, Europe's top steel
producer, to create Arcelor Mittal, reinforcing his company's position as the world's largest
steel company with 10% of the global market and some 330,000 employees. This invasion by an
Eastern upstart horrified Europe's old guard; French Finance Minister Thierry Breton grumbled
Arcelor should have "European character." But Indian businessmen from Hyderabad to Hong
Kong proudly pointed to Mittal's success as a mark of their maturing commercial prowess. To a
nation that 150 years ago was run not by its own government but by a European business—the
British East India Company—Mittal is the Indian who is beating the West at its own game. And
he's got the mansion to prove it.
 PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ATUL KASBEKAR
LITTLE MASTER: Despite the nickname, Tendulkar is
cricket's biggest talent
Sachin Tendulkar
The greatest living exponent of his craft
By Simon Robinson

Cricket's greatest ever player, Sir Donald Bradman, was watching a 1996 World Cup match on
television when he first saw Sachin Tendulkar bat. The Indian player's technique seemed
strangely familiar. Though his stance and his movements were compact and efficient, he hit
the ball hard and his shots were ruthlessly effective. The Australian called his wife into the
living room of their suburban Adelaide home. "Who does this remind you of?" asked Bradman,
then 87. The answer was obvious. "I never saw myself play," Bradman said later. "But I feel that
this player is playing much the same [way] I used to play."

Being labeled the next Bradman has never been an easy honor. But perhaps no batsman has
worn the tag with so much grace—and so deserved it—as Tendulkar. West Indian captain Brian
Lara, the only contemporary of Tendulkar's to consistently threaten his position as the batsman
of the age, told the Times of India last month that the Indian was the greatest he had ever
seen. "You know genius when you see it," said Lara. "And let me tell you, Sachin is pure genius."

When he's in form, which is often, Tendulkar can rout the world's best bowlers with ease. Just
ask Australian leg-spinning great Shane Warne, who once joked that he had nightmares about
bowling to Tendulkar. India's "Little Master" has scored a record 75 centuries in test and one-
day internationals and helped revolutionize the speed at which runs are made. But statistics
only hint at Tendulkar's greatness. It's the way he scores all those runs that is the most thrilling
thing about his game. Tendulkar waits for the bowler's delivery like a martial arts black belt
ready to parry an opponent—moving quickly into position, flashing his bat to guide the ball
where he will. It's a rare combination of textbook classicism and the inventive violence of
modern one-day cricket.

Tendulkar isn't perfect, of course. Critics have long argued that he seems to play for the record
books first and his team second—rarely rescuing his comrades when they're in trouble in the
way other batting greats such as Lara or Australia's Steve Waugh have done. In the past couple
of years, Tendulkar also seems to have lost some of the aggression and daring that made
Bradman sit up in front of the TV. In January, he was booed off his home ground after scoring
just one run off 21 balls. Perhaps the years and the injuries are catching up.

But his success to date means that Tendulkar could leave the field tomorrow without any
diminution of circumstances. The middle-class boy from Bombay gets paid millions of dollars to
appear in television commercials and on billboards selling everything from luxury cars to credit
cards, soft drinks to shoes. Reserved and modest, he also appears to carry his fame—and the
expectations of a billion people—quite well. A few years ago, Australian player Matthew
Hayden wrote that Tendulkar was like a god in India. Tendulkar responded with typical
humility. "I do not think anyone can become God," he said. "I am a normal person who plays
cricket." And yet sometimes, when Tendulkar has the measure of every ball and is smacking
them cleanly through panicking fielders, it's hard not to see the divine spark at work.
 WANG JINGYING / XINHUA
GOLD RUSH: Li's Olympic fame helped him build a
sporting-goods empire

Li Ning
China's legendary gymnast has combined sporting agility with commercial muscle
By Hannah Beech

No one knew what to expect when China arrived at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Furious at
Taiwan's inclusion in the Olympic brotherhood, the People's Republic had, except for a couple
of Winter Olympics appearances, boycotted the global gathering for nearly 30 years—and did so
again in 1980 to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It had also failed to win a single
medal at its last Summer Olympics appearance, in Helsinki in 1952. So when the Chinese team
finally turned up in California, it was an entirely unknown quantity. That would soon change,
thanks to one of the most remarkable sporting talents the country has produced: Li Ning. Of
the tens of thousands of pliable youths forcibly inducted into the Chinese sports system in the
1960s, Li was one of the handful to possess genuine, world-beating talent. Seemingly out of
nowhere, the Chinese gymnast went on to capture three golds, two silvers and a bronze in Los
Angeles. In doing so he became, more than anyone else, the face of an emergent China shaking
off three decades of sporting isolation.

In his 19-year athletic career, Li would garner 106 medals and China's sporting reputation
would only grow more dazzling. But his ability to represent a newer, more confident nation was
not confined to the pommel horse and the rings. When he retired in 1988, Li did not—as might
be expected of Chinese sportsmen of his stature—become coach to the next generation of
superstar gymnasts. Instead, in 1990, he started a sporting-goods business named after
himself—an act of trumpet blowing that was virtually taboo in an era when individual athletic
reputations were still second to national glory. But the Li Ning Company has flourished. By the
end of this year, it will have 4,100 stores operating in China, trailing only giants Nike and
Adidas in the domestic market. Now Li has his eyes set on the worldwide market for affordable
shoes, and has signed basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal as a pitchman. The company also
hopes to use marketing opportunities afforded by the Beijing Games in 2008 to celebrate its
own relentless progress. And why not? Li's business career shows that in the new China
corporate mettle can have just as much luster as Olympic gold.
Jahangir Khan
Sport has no greater conqueror
By Zebunnisa Hamid

How should we measure success in sport—by the number of commercial endorsements an

athlete has signed? By the size of fees earned or TV audiences generated? How about the
longest sequence of unbroken victories? If we take the latter as our prime criterion, then
Jahangir Khan might just be the most successful sporting figure in history. In the five years to
1986, the Pakistani squash player was unbeaten in over 550 matches. Before the decade was
out, he had taken six World Open trophies. From 1982 to 1991, he won 10 British Open titles in
a row. If winning is everything, then Khan is the greatest. Period.

As part of a great squash dynasty (his father, brother and cousin were all international
players), Khan had the game in his genes. In 1979, at the tender age of 15, he had already won
the World Amateur title. But his brother, Torsam Khan, died of a heart attack that same year
while playing in the Australian Open; with the loss of his mentor and hero, Khan nearly gave up
the game. Two years later, however, he honored Torsam's memory by defeating the Australian
squash legend Geoff Hunt to become, at 17, the youngest-ever winner of the World Open. His
strategy, then and later, was eerily reminiscent of a matador's—to wear down his opponent's
physical and mental reserves, bit by bit, before delivering the sudden coup de grace—usually a
lethal drop shot from the very back of the court.

It was the New Zealand player Ross Norman who finally ended Khan's unbroken run, defeating
the stunned Pakistani in the 1986 World Open final. But Khan's aura has not been diminished: as
the new century dawned, he would be named Pakistan's Sportsman of the Millennium, and
today he reigns supreme over the sport as the president of the World Squash Federation. In
retrospect, Khan's total dominance of the game seems to have been determined at birth when
his parents named him Jahangir, which translates as "conqueror." No athlete in any sport has
done more to deserve that billing.

Zebunnisa Hamid is a writer and journalism lecturer in Lahore

Bruce Lee
Sometimes we need to forget the film star and remember the athlete
By Liam Fitzpatrick

People talk about Bruce Lee's films, or his charisma or his untimely death. They laud his
sartorial flair. They trade rumors on the Internet that he was a heavy user of hashish. Trawl the
bars and teahouses of Kowloon and eventually you'll meet men and women who claim to have
known him, or worked with him, or schooled with him. But the one thing nobody seems to
mention is his sheer athleticism. Like Muhammad Ali, Lee defied attempts to separate his
dazzling public persona from his sporting brilliance. But he had considerably less time to
devote to his sport than the great boxer did. Lee had movies to make, scripts to consider,
starlets to flirt with and producers to call.

Had Lee not become a movie star, however, he would still have been a legend. It's just that his
celebrity would have been confined to the world of kung fu, which then, as now, is largely
hidden from public view. It is not an Olympic sport and kung fu tournaments are hardly ever
televised. Instead, kung fu seems to inhabit an exotic parallel universe of flying monks,
tattooed toughs and almost mystical feats of endurance.

Lee sprung from this cultish world—and having mastered all there was to master went on to
invent his own version of kung fu, known as jeet kune do (way of the intercepting fist). This
style of fighting drew on several martial arts traditions—even Western boxing—and outraged
purists. But Lee didn't care. He danced upon the parapets of orthodoxy, laughing at those
below who were too slow to share his vision of a multi-disciplinary approach to fighting. Today,
of course, multi-disciplinary (or "extreme") fighting—in which capoeira champion is pitted
against muay thai master, and judo exponent goes head to head against karate veteran—is
martial arts' hottest ticket. Lee's own fighting embodied this spirit almost 40 years ago. Has any
athlete ever been more ahead of his game?
 PRASHANT PANJIAR / LIVEWIRE IMAGES FOR TIME
"THE KID": Efren Reyes' ability made him unstoppable; his
character made him beloved
Efren Reyes
Pool isn't merely a beer-hall amusement—it's a path to the top
By Bob Guerrero

Crime, entertainment or professional sport are the more traditional paths followed by those
seeking an escape from poverty. Thankfully for the Philippines and the game of pool, Efren
Reyes opted for the third of these routes. It might not have been the case—growing up dirt
poor in Angeles City, Pampanga, presents a man with countless ways to go awry. But Reyes
possessed so miraculous a talent that nothing, ultimately, could deviate him from his true
calling.

At the age of nine, Reyes began hustling for pesos at a pool hall owned by his uncle. Forty-two
years later, he would collect the richest prize the game had ever seen—$500,000 in the
International Pool Tour World 8 Ball Championship in Reno, Nevada, which Reyes won in
September. Connecting those two events is a career trajectory that moves in only one
direction: up. Reyes has won almost every major title, leveraging a repertoire of creative shots
that is as legendary as his genial temperament. Humble, soft-spoken and flashing a toothless
smile, he is beloved even by his rivals: in a poll during the last World Pool Championship, over
half of the competitors named him as their favorite player. But he is especially idolized by
impoverished Filipinos, to whom he is still Bata, or "the kid," and the embodiment of their
aspirations. They know, too, that he has shared his winnings with needy friends and relatives.

These qualities have earned Reyes the kind of adulation normally reserved for film stars. He
has even featured in advertising campaigns by the likes of McDonald's and San Miguel beer. But
if there's one thing the man has been advertising since the day he first picked up a cue, it's
this: the odds-defying ability of a poor Pinoy to parlay hard work, skill and guile into fame,
fortune and respect.
Bob Guerrero, a TV sports commentator in the Philippines, has reported on many of Reyes' most
important games
Tenzing Norgay & Sir Edmund Hillary
Courage and comradeship took them to the greatest heights
By George Band

A few more whacks of the ice ax, the last weary steps, and they were on top of the world. On
May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, on the summit of Mt. Everest, embraced and
thumped each other on the back until they were almost breathless. Then Hillary took the iconic
photograph of Tenzing holding his ice ax aloft with the flags of the United Nations, Britain,
Nepal and India. Tenzing looked down to the east, to the Kharta and Kama Valleys, where he
was born and spent the first years of his life herding yaks with his father. He could see the
monasteries, the rivers and the forests of his youth.

Tenzing had every reason to have his head turned by the godlike adulation he received after
the climb.

But his innate strength of character, and his flashing smile, pulled him through. He then
devoted years to teaching at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, before
dying in 1986 at 74—a good age for a sherpa. Hillary, the New Zealand beekeeper and
university dropout, went on to grace the New Zealand $5 bill, and he became an unlikely but
ideal diplomat as his nation's High Commissioner to India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan. But
perhaps the achievement that has given him the greatest satisfaction is his work in creating
and running his Himalayan Trust, which by building schools and hospitals, and training
teachers, has helped to improve the lives of his friends the sherpas in their remote homeland in
northeast Nepal.

Nowadays, people ask me if I was a member of the Hillary expedition. They forget the brilliant
leadership of John Hunt, whose military training and climbing experience equipped him
admirably for planning such a major expedition. And they forget the first assault pair, Charles
Evans and Tom Bourdillon, who had reached Everest's South Summit three days before the
triumph. They paved the way for Hillary and Tenzing's ultimate success; the conquest of
Everest was truly a great team effort.

The youngest member of the 1953 Everest expedition, George Band wrote Everest: 50 Years on
Top of the World
Rudy Hartono
His spellbinding victories showed a nation that anything was possible
By Jason Tedjasukmana

Believe it or not, there was a time when mention of Indonesia conjured up images of something
other than pollution or terrorism. That time was coterminous with the career of badminton star
Rudy Hartono—a dazzling eight-year spell from 1968 to 1976, during which Indonesia would be
freely associated with agility and brio, not brown haze and bombs. Granted, badminton does
not have the massive followings of soccer or cricket. But to its devoted fans there is no sound
sweeter than the swish of a goosefeather shuttlecock. Just ask the Indonesians, who arguably
are the most fanatical followers of all.

Before the Chinese-Indonesian Hartono, born Nio Hap Liang, took the badminton world by
storm, only one other Indonesian, Tan Joe Hok, had won the coveted All England title—the
game's equivalent to Wimbledon. The search was quickly on for another homegrown champion
and in Surabaya, the industrial capital of East Java, the young Hartono was being groomed for
glory. He trained on concrete at a nearby railway station during the day, and under kerosene
lamps at night, under the watchful eye of his father—a player of average ability who channeled
frustrated ambitions through his son. "Back then, athletes became successful because of their
parents," explains Hartono, now 57 and living in Jakarta, where he works for an oil company.
"There was no organization or club, much less sponsorship."

While competing in municipal tournaments, the teenage Hartono caught the eye of national
scouts. From that moment on, his rise was the stuff of legend. In 1967, he was part of the
Indonesian squad that won the Thomas Cup. The following year, aged 19, he struck out on his
own. With the whole country watching back home, Hartono defeated Malaysia's Tan Aik Huang
to bring the All England title back to Indonesia. It galvanized the nation. "I remember listening
to the match on the radio when I was growing up in Central Java," recalls Clara Joewono, a
director at Jakarta's Centre for Strategic and International Studies. "After he won, all the kids
in Pekalongan exploded on to the streets with their rackets."

Hartono's playing style, characterized by its ferocious power, earned him another seven All
England titles, six of them consecutively. More than that, to a country now riven by religious
strife, separatism and economic woes, he was, for eight glorious years, a symbol of unity and
pride—badminton's boy king, through whom Indonesia ruled the world.
Sadaharu Oh
Half Japanese by birth, all Japanese on the diamond
By Bryan Walsh

Here's a snapshot from the life of Sadaharu Oh. It's 1957 and Oh is pitching in the final game of
Japan's all-important Koshien high-school championship. Blood drips from the 17-year-old's
hand as he grips the baseball. Blisters have developed from weeks of relentless practice, until
Oh can barely hold the ball without pain. He plays anyway and wins—to the wonder not merely
of 60,000 spectators, but a whole nation listening on the radio. Later that summer, Oh's team
is selected to represent Tokyo in the National Athletic Games. Oh is not allowed to join them.
As the son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, he is considered not Japanese enough.

The great irony is that there has never been a more Japanese baseball player. In 22 years with
the Yomiuri Giants, Japan's most beloved team, Oh recorded a .301 lifetime batting average
and 868 career home runs—the most any baseball player has hit in any league anywhere in the
world. But it wasn't the numbers that made Oh an embodiment of the national spirit. It was the
way he achieved them. Oh trained like a samurai, learning aikido for balance and practicing
sword slices to perfect his swing. When he signed autographs, he added the word doryoku, or
effort, the quality that enabled him to lead his team to nine straight titles between 1964 and
1973. Oh's father died during the 1985 season, but the Giant didn't even miss an inning.

When Oh retired and became a manager, that stubborn workhorse quality became
counterproductive. Doryoku alone wasn't going to save him from poor strategizing. The great
man needed to leaven his tried-and-tested approaches with a dash of the new—and when he
learned to do so the magic returned. As manager of the national team, Oh helped Japan
achieve its stunning victory in the 2006 inaugural World Baseball Classic. It was a feat that
depended in equal parts on Oh's insistence on grit and hard work as on the smooth and elegant
style of current major league players like Ichiro Suzuki. The fusion of the two approaches—the
traditional and the new—was almost a metaphor for a revived Japan, confident once more of
its place in the world. And this time around, there were no doubts as to whether Oh was
Japanese enough.
Mou Zuoyun
He went through hoops to help China take its place in the world
By Brook Larmer

His name might as well be Zelig. Nearly every time China has opened up to the world over the
past century, Mou Zuoyun has been there, nudging the door open even further with the only
tool he possesses: basketball. Born in 1913 near Tianjin, Mou developed his love of the game—
and his fascination with the West—playing on courts run by American missionaries. In 1936, the
agile 1.82-m youngster joined China's first full delegation to the Olympic Games, marching into
the Berlin stadium under the gaze of Adolf Hitler. Mou then married into sports royalty—his
father-in-law was the Nationalist sports minister—and traveled to America to study at
Springfield College, Massachusetts, where basketball had been invented more than half a
century earlier when the school was known as the YMCA international training center. So
formative was the experience that, even today, one of the sprightly 93-year-old's most
treasured possessions is the trove of coaching manuals he brought back from America.

Mou rose to even greater public prominence after the communists' 1949 takeover, when those
manuals and their American tactics became taboo, and Chinese coaches could be persecuted
for deviating even slightly from the accepted coaching methods. Nimbly adjusting to the new
reality, Mou became an influential force in the formation of Chairman Mao's massive sports
system. (As head of the so-called "big ball" sports—football, basketball and volleyball—Mou
issued a decree calling for the recruitment of all girls who might grow taller than 1.8 m and all
boys over 2 m.) His American connections made him an object of persecution during the
Cultural Revolution, but Mou—like his country—emerged stronger. Rehabilitated as a sports
leader, he not only helped spearhead China's return to the Olympic fold after a three-decade
absence but also, in 1985, chaperoned the Chinese basketball team on its first U.S. tour. In so
doing, he introduced a nation of cloistered hoopsters to the likes of Michael Jordan—and set in
motion a process that would result in the export of 2.26-m Yao Ming to the National Basketball
Association. Building that kind of bridge is a fitting legacy for a man who has fought his entire
life not for an ideology but for a simple idea: that sports should help propel China into the
world.

Brook Larmer is the author of Operation Yao Ming, published by Penguin/Gotham Books
 JOE RAEDLE / GETTY IMAGES
HIS HOLINESS: The Dalai Lama's compassion reminds us of
our better selves

The Dalai Lama

Tibet's spiritual leader is otherworldly, yet deeply engaged in this world. With remarkable
subtlety, he teaches patience, humility and compassion
By Deepak Chopra

It's the fate of great spiritual leaders to be both lighthouses and lightning rods. No one has
endured this double act more gracefully than the Dalai Lama. As a lighthouse he represents
Buddhism for most of the world outside Asia. Welcomed everywhere but in his own homeland,
revered beyond the narrow limits of sectarianism, his visits bring out throngs of people. What
they crave is his presence and his peacefulness. He travels the globe to remind us of our better
selves. Yet the presence of the Dalai Lama is also immediate and worldly. He's the lightning rod
for Tibet, and a symbol of its subjugation under Beijing's rule. As long as that injustice persists,
the Dalai Lama will remain peaceful and poignant at the same time.

Over the centuries, Buddhism has spread more quietly than any other faith
or philosophy. In that quietist tradition, the current Dalai Lama stands
firm. Buddha said, "Whoever sees me sees the teaching, and whoever sees
the teaching sees me." Whenever I have the privilege of sitting with the
Dalai Lama, I feel that I am, indeed, seeing the teaching—and that it sees
me. Benign as His Holiness is, one senses detachment, which isn't the same
as indifference. This is a detachment born of immense patience. It's rooted
in a deep belief in the power of consciousness. No one I've ever met is so
involved in the material world without actually believing in it. He is also
Apr. 20, 1959 insidious, if you can use that word about such an innocent man. If you ask
Table of Contents his opinion, he invariably murmurs, "Ah, I'd rather listen to you." Instantly
Large Cover you feel a bit of your own egotism fall away, and, despite yourself, the
presence of humility is felt deep inside.

So I salute the Dalai Lama as a great spiritual seducer. We will never know how much he has
changed the world—and us—because we never see it coming until the change has already
occurred. He is a time bomb of compassion, and that is the source of his greatness.
Deepak Chopra, who writes and lectures widely on spirituality, is writing a book on the Buddha
Youk Chhang
A relentless investigator of Cambodia's killing fields seeks justice, not revenge
By Philip Short

For more than a decade, Youk Chhang has been Cambodia's conscience. If today there is a real
possibility of bringing at least some of the former Khmer Rouge leaders before the
international tribunal that will begin hearings next year, he, more than anyone, is responsible.

Youk's Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private organization financed mainly by foreign

grants, has amassed more than 600,000 pages of documents detailing the workings of the
Khmer Rouge regime that from April 1975 to January 1979 transformed Cambodia into a slave
state. The Center's holdings in the capital Phnom Penh include minutes of Cambodian
Communist Party leadership meetings chaired by the movement's ultra-radical chief Pol Pot;
confidential reports describing conditions in the countryside where more than a million people
died of starvation or related illness; and the confessions under torture of thousands of prisoners
killed by Pol Pot's secret police. Without these documents, a trial would be almost impossible.
Today the most damning items are kept in armor-plated, fireproof cabinets, guarded day and
night.

An affable, engaging 45-year-old, Youk has the demeanor of a soft-spoken diplomat rather than
a man investigating mass murder. Yet his quest for justice has been as much a personal odyssey
as an abstract search for historical truth. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was marched
off, like millions of others, to do forced labor in the countryside. His brother-in-law and two
nieces died. Then his sister was accused of stealing rice. "She denied it," he remembers, "but
the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her. To prove his accusation, he took a knife and
slashed her belly open. Her stomach was empty. She died a slow and horrible death."

Years later, Youk tracked down the man who had killed her. He had grown old and pathetically
poor. Youk has decided that revenge is not the answer. "Nothing can resurrect what we've lost,"
he says. "Violence won't erase the horrible memories. It could never ease the pain of
Cambodia's past." Youk believes the trial, to which he has devoted so many years, will help
Cambodia find closure. Without accountability, he argues, the country will remain
dysfunctional and unable to advance, no matter how much foreign aid is poured in. "Cambodia
is like broken glass," he says. "Without justice, we cannot put the pieces together."

Philip Short, a former correspondent with the BBC, is the author of Pol Pot: The History of a
Nightmare and Mao: A Life
Guan Yi & Malik Peiris
Their scientific research on deadly diseases makes all of us safer
By Karl Taro Greenfeld

In the dank spring of 2003, when Hong Kong was besieged by pestilence, it seemed unlikely
that anyone of significance or global import could be based in the plagued city. Early in my
research for a book about Hong Kong, China and the SARS outbreak, I met with Malik Peiris and
Guan Yi, respectively professor and associate professor of microbiology at the University of
Hong Kong. The two men were co-heads of Pandemic Preparedness in Asia, a group that
monitors influenza around the region; both were friendly, concerned, uncynical and each, in
his own way, devoted to Hong Kong in a manner that seemed quaintly anachronistic. Peiris was
the more soft-spoken of the two, his Sri Lankan-by-way-of-Oxford accent so droningly
dispatched that it occasionally caused me to lean in to hear him. Guan spoke faster, his
choppy, Chinese-inflected English making him hard to understand. When I was struggling to
comprehend some element of virology, they would draw me little diagrams to illustrate their
point.

They were so patient with me that I initially came away with the wrong impression of them. It
took a while to understand just how significant these men were, not locally but globally. I was
in the habit of assuming that important research in science and medicine was done elsewhere,
in the gold-standard laboratories of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta or the Pasteur Institute in Paris. But here? In Hong Kong? How could our dying city host
groundbreaking research? And if Peiris and Guan were truly great, important men, why would
they be so generous with their time?

I'm embarrassed to admit it now, but I traveled around the world, speaking with virologists,
epidemiologists and public-health officials in Geneva, Rotterdam, New York, Atlanta and
Beijing before I finally figured out that the true heroes in the fight against SARS were right in
Hong Kong, where I lived and worked. Peiris and his team were the first to identify the agent
that causes SARS. Guan, through his network of contacts in southern China, was the first to
label the wild-animal markets of Guangzhou as a byway through which the virus came to infect
humans. He had spent months in those markets himself, drawing blood and swabbing for feces
in order to map out the early epidemiology of the virus. His research would compel Chinese
authorities to shut down the markets, possibly a key step in preventing subsequent outbreaks.

It had taken mankind centuries to figure out how yellow fever was spread; in the 1980s we had
progressed to the point that it had taken only two years to determine what caused AIDS. Peiris
and Guan had done similar research, in the face of an onrushing epidemic—as their colleagues
were literally lying stricken in neighboring hospital wards—in a matter of weeks. Both men
would continue their heroic work as Hong Kong became the likely epicenter for another
emerging disease: avian influenza. Guan and his team would sequence more than 250 strains of
the bird-flu virus H5N1, providing the first accurate genetic roadmap of how it is mutating—and
where it might strike next.

"There are only four questions you need to ask about a virus," Guan once told me. "What is it?
What does it do? Where does it come from? And how do you kill it?" Malik Peiris, Guan Yi and
their colleagues have made answering those questions their life. For that, we may owe them
our lives.

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the former editor of TIME Asia and the author of China Syndrome: The
True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic
Thich Nhat Hanh
This Buddhist monk helped end the suffering of the Vietnam War
By Pankaj Mishra

On June 11, 1963, a Buddhist monk called Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in a Saigon
street in protest against the repressive, U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. Pictures of the
monk in serene meditation as flames devoured his body became the first of the images of the
long Vietnam War to trouble the world's conscience. Over the next few years more than 30
other monks gave up their lives in similar protests against a senseless and brutal war.

So great and prolonged was the suffering in Indochina in those years that the Buddhist attempt
to alleviate it may seem a distant memory. But Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and
teacher whose philosophy of "engaged Buddhism" inspired these efforts, is still with us. One of
the most important religious thinkers and activists of our time, Nhat Hanh understood, from his
own experience, why popular secular ideologies and movements—nationalism, fascism,
communism and colonialism—unleashed the unprecedented violence of the 20th century. His
education began early. Few battlefields were as bloody as Vietnam, where France and then the
U.S. fought nationalists and communists for more than three decades. Though part of a quietist
tradition, Nhat Hanh couldn't help being drawn into the conflicts around him. He could see how
urgent it was to assert the buddhistic importance of compassion in a culture growing
increasingly violent. War, he believed, could be ended only by extinguishing the emotions—
fear, anger, contempt, vengefulness—that fueled it.

In 1965, after yet another Buddhist self-immolation, Nhat Hanh wrote to the American civil-
rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. that "the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the
death of the oppressors, but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They
are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination, which lie within
the heart of man." Nhat Hanh led King, and, by extension, American public sentiment, to
oppose the fighting in Vietnam. During the late 1960s, while living in the U.S. in exile, Nhat
Hanh became one of the icons of the antiwar movement. His essays were published in such
leading periodicals as the New York Review of Books, and his poems were sung, like songs of
protest, to guitar accompaniment at college campuses. It's no exaggeration to say that Nhat
Hanh helped force Washington's eventual withdrawal from Vietnam.

Nhat Hanh, now 80 years old and living in a monastery in France, has played an important role
in the transmission of an Asian spiritual tradition to the modern, largely secular West. "Do not,"
he has written, "be bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems
of thought are guiding means, not absolute truth." As political leaders from the U.S. to Iran
loudly ask their people to join new ideological battles, threatening to make this century even
more violent than the last, we would all do well to heed the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Pankaj Mishra's latest book is Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan,
Tibet, and Beyond
Eugenia Apostol & Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc
The Philippine press was terrified of covering a dictator's regime—until this duo came along
By Sheila Coronel

Eugenia Apostol was editing a women's magazine in 1983 when the popular opposition figure
Benigno Aquino Jr. was gunned down on the tarmac of Manila's airport. Most Filipinos blamed
the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda for the killing. Two million people showed
up for Aquino's funeral, but the event was ignored by the media. The following day, the top
headline of a leading Manila daily was: TWO KILLED BY LIGHTNING.

Apostol fumed. Within days she was printing a tabloid version of her glossy Mr. & Ms. called Mr.
& Ms. Special Edition. It had 16 pages of photographs showing Aquino's body, the multitudes
that came to view it, and the massive funeral parade that wound through the streets of Manila
for almost 12 hours. The first run was some half a million copies, yet it could not satisfy
demand. In the coming months, as momentum built for the People Power revolution that would
topple Marcos three years later, Apostol turned the tabloid into a weekly endeavor, putting it
out from a raggedy office that, for security reasons, didn't even have the publication's name on
the door.

The obvious choice as editor of Mr. & Ms. Special Edition was Apostol's friend Letty Jimenez-
Magsanoc, the feisty former boss of a leading Sunday magazine. Two years earlier, Magsanoc
had written a tongue-in-cheek story on Marcos' third inauguration as President. Marcos had
sought to fend off criticism of his rule by staging a faux election. His "victory" was celebrated in
a sumptuous, if surreal, ceremony, in which a choir sang Handel's Messiah. Magsanoc led off
with a line from Handel: "And he shall reign forever and ever." Marcos thought that
blasphemous and got her fired.

Apostol, now 81, and Magsanoc, in her mid-60s, were not firebrands in their younger days. Both
were veterans of the lipstick beat, writing for the lifestyle sections of newspapers. But the
assassination of Aquino, which sparked People Power, galvanized Apostol and Magsanoc to
break the local media's complicit silence surrounding Marcos' oppressive rule. In late 1985 they
phased out Mr. & Ms. Special Edition and launched the Philippine Daily Inquirer, trailblazing a
brand of hard-hitting, mischievous, in-your-face reporting that tested the limits of a dictator's
tolerance and helped Filipinos win their freedom. "In three months," says Apostol, "the Inquirer
had not only helped to oust Marcos, it was also making money." Today, the Inquirer is the
country's largest newspaper and, while sometimes criticized for sensationalism, it has been
unflinching in its coverage of government and the Philippines' uneasy transition to democracy.

Though Marcos is gone, the Philippine press is once again under the gun. After Iraq, the
Philippines is the most dangerous country for reporters—at least 13 have been killed in the past
two years. A spate of lawsuits, including libel cases filed against 43 journalists by the husband
of embattled President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is casting a chill on the media. But Filipino
reporters remain defiant, inspired by the example of Eugenia Apostol and Letty Jimenez-
Magsanoc—two women who set the template for courageous journalism for a nation still very
much in need of it.

Sheila Coronel heads Columbia University's Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism
Kang Chol Hwan
A survivor of a prison camp exposes the horrors of Kim Jong Il's regime
By Bill Powell

This is what Kang Chol Hwan remembers from when he was 10 years old: "The key was to take
advantage of the fall, when fruits and vegetables could still be found, to consume—like bears in
hibernation—enough to get through the winter. That's the most important thing I learned ...
There was no other way to survive." At 10, Kang and his family had already spent a year in
Yodok, a North Korean labor camp, sent there because his grandfather, a manager at a state-
owned agency, had been accused of disloyalty to the regime of the late dictator Kim Il Sung,
father of current strongman Kim Jong Il. Kang's task was to help bury those who died, usually of
hunger or untreated ailments. The work was grim, but, he later recalled, it offered a "very
practical advantage: the burial team could strip the corpse of its clothes and either reuse them
or barter them." Kang would not be released till he was 19.

In 1992, Kang escaped into China and made his way to South Korea. Two years later he wrote a
book about Yodok. The Aquariums of Pyongyang was historic because it was the first account of
the North's gulag system by someone who had survived it. "One day Kim [Jong Il] and the
regime and all that goes with it—the repression, the hunger, the prison camps—will collapse,"
says Kang, now a 38-year-old journalist in Seoul. His triumph was to lay bare the horror of that
regime. As the world weighs how to deal with the North's nuclear ambitions, Kang's insight has
never been more chillingly pertinent.
Judith Mackay
Her work in tobacco control helps save countless lives
By Liam Fitzpatrick

Dr. Judith Longstaff Mackay is a witty and loquacious Englishwoman, who works as a tobacco-
control advocate and senior policy adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO) out of her
house in a bucolic Hong Kong suburb. Visitors are shown to a living room that, with its working
fireplace and comfortable armchairs, seems to spring from the platonic ideal of a family home.
As she pours you a glass of iced water it seems ludicrous to think that a leaked tobacco-
industry document once named her as one of the three most dangerous people in the world.
Even more absurdly, she has been described by a U.S. smokers' rights group as "a gibbering
Satan." Mackay loves this sort of thing. She keeps a list of all the insults that smokers and
tobacco executives have leveled at her over the years.

The tobacco industry has got it wrong, of course. Mackay isn't merely one of the three most
dangerous people. She's probably the most dangerous. Just last week, financial-media tycoon
and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he will donate $125 million to five
tobacco-control groups. The lion's share is slated to go to the World Lung Foundation,
earmarked for programs in developing countries—over half of which are in Asia. As the
foundation's project coordinator, Mackay will determine how that money will be spent. "For
many Asian tobacco-control groups, this is the first time they will have had any significant
money," she says. Given what Mackay has achieved with negligible funding to date, it's
tantalizing to imagine what she will do now with real financial clout.

Her biggest triumph so far has been the 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,
drawn up between all 192 member states of the WHO and stipulating restrictions on tobacco
ads and public smoking. Mackay was instrumental in persuading states to sign it and in framing
its provisions. Prior to this, she spent years advising the governments of China, Hong Kong,
Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam on
tobacco-control policies and legislation. A gifted diplomat, she charms her way to the top,
exerting influence where it matters most. She's also unafraid of artful compromise. "If a health
minister tells me that he can't ban tobacco advertising on TV, then I'll ask them to ban it
between 4pm and 8pm, or whatever. They almost always agree." As cigarette firms know,
there is no more dangerous weapon in the fight to save smokers' lives than the quiet
persuasiveness of Judith Mackay.
Mechai Viravaidya
By preaching safe sex, Thailand's "Condom King" became a legend
By Dr. Helene Gayle

When I first met Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand's "Condom King," 15 years ago, it became clear
that he places a high value on action and impact, even if it means making some people
uncomfortable. Never afraid to challenge the status quo, he's a refreshing change in arenas too
often concerned about consensus and not rocking the boat. Mechai, a longtime Senator and
cabinet minister, has little patience for committee meetings—he's more at home leading a rural
Thai community in a condom-blowing contest, handing out kitsch souvenirs promoting safe sex,
or greeting guests at his Bangkok-based chain of restaurants, Cabbages and Condoms, where
free condoms take the place of after-dinner mints. His brash, quirky style makes people laugh
about sex—and has forced the topic of sexuality into the open.

At a time when most of us were afraid that the aids epidemic would explode in Thailand, with
its buoyant sex trade and problems of drug addiction, Mechai spearheaded an aggressive
national campaign to promote the use of condoms, and was pivotal in creating the vision that
dramatically slowed the spread of HIV in the country. Over the course of the 1990s Thailand
became the first country to see a drop in infection rates, setting a powerful example for other
nations battling the same threat.

The Condom King wore his crown even before he took on HIV and AIDS. His activism
revolutionized family planning in Thailand, helping to reduce its population growth from 3.2% a
year in the 1970s to 1.2% in the mid-'90s (now it's 0.7%). He was so successful at changing the
culture that, today, mechai, in Thai slang, means condom. Already a legend in two fields, it's
hard to guess what he'll do next. Whatever it is, I know I'll be inspired and, as always, in awe.

Dr. Helene Gayle is president and CEO of Care USA. She was previously director of the National
Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Ding Zilin
A grieving mother battles for the truth to be told about the Tiananmen massacre
By Perry Link

When Ding Zilin heard that her only son, Jiang Jielian, had been killed by government troops on
a Beijing street on the night of June 3, 1989, she immediately knew what every other
devastated parent knew that night: You are supposed to shut up about it. Your son was part of
a "counterrevolutionary riot." The stability of Communist Party rule was at stake. Your son is
dead but he, not those who killed him, was at fault. By speaking out, you risk further
punishment.

The suppression of the 1989 protests in Beijing caused hundreds of deaths and thousands of
injuries, but the families of those killed or hurt remained uniformly silent. Everyone knew that
there were other victims, but who would be the first to speak? A modern Chinese proverb says,
"The bird that sticks its neck out gets its head blown off." The government had begun its
strategy of intimidating people into silence while waiting, months and then years, for memory
to fade.

But during the 1990s Ding Zilin began to defy all this. She sought out other bereaved parents
and built a network called Tiananmen Mothers that, besides providing mutual support, calls for
the release of those still jailed for the 1989 protests and a public hearing on what happened.
Last year Ding produced a list of 186 people who were killed, and published (in Hong Kong) a
417-page book telling many of the stories of their grief-stricken families.

How could she dare to do this, or get away with it? It helped that she began with good political
credentials. A professor of philosophy at People's University in Beijing, originally a Party
training school, Ding was well within the system until her son's death jolted her out of it; the
government could not easily brand her a dissident. It helped, too, that she got early support
from other parents who had lost loved ones to the massacre, and that by the late 1990s the
Tiananmen Mothers were attracting some international attention. Yet the most important
factor, especially at first, was simple courage.

Ding, now 70, and her Tiananmen Mothers have been credited with bringing sorely needed
comfort to the families of the victims of 1989. But potentially their contribution to China could
be much broader. Many have noticed a "values crisis" in China today. Moneymaking has come to
dominate public life. Corruption, fraud and cynicism have spun out of control and honesty is
often viewed as a form of naiveté. China needs a voice that sinks a stake in the ground and
says: No. Truth matters. Responsibility matters. This society needs values. What better than a
mother's love?

Perry Link, professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, specializes in 20th century
Chinese literature
Meena
She fought—and died at the age of 30—for the rights of Afghan women
By Aryn Baker

Meena called the women of Afghanistan sleeping lions, pledging that one day they would awake
and roar. In 1977, at the age of 20, she launched the country's first movement for women's
rights, calling her group the Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
Its goals: the restoration of democracy, equality for men and women, social justice, and the
separation of religion from the affairs of the state. But in a country mired in tradition and
occupied by the Soviet Union, Meena's beliefs were threatening enough to get her assassinated.
Ten years after founding RAWA, she was kidnapped and killed; many Afghans held agents of the
local communist intelligence agency responsible.

Although she was only 30 when she died, Meena had already planted the seeds of an Afghan
women's rights movement based on the power of knowledge. She believed that if women were
able to read and write, that if they could communicate and learn about the world, they would
discover their own strength and could make a difference in their own society. After the Soviet
invasion in 1979 she established schools and orphanages for refugees pouring over the border
into Pakistan. Those schools offered opportunities never available previously to young Afghan
women. "Meena didn't just give me an education; she taught me that I had the right to live a
better life," says Sahar Saba, an early student at RAWA's first school in Quetta.

Today, for the first time in Afghan history, women have campaigned for, and won, seats in the
national parliament. One of these women is Gulhar Jalal, a childhood friend of Meena's and an
illiterate widow who now represents the province of Kunar. "I ran," she says, "because this was
Meena's dream."
King Bhumibol Adulyadej
Over 60 years, a beloved monarch has used his moral authority to guide Thailand through many
crises
By Robert Horn

As a single shot shattered the stillness of Bangkok's Borompimarn Palace on a steamy June
morning in 1946, the land some still called Siam changed forever. Twenty-year-old King Ananda
was dead. The manner of his passing—by accident, suicide or murder—endures as Thailand's
deepest mystery. The pistol smoke barely had time to clear before the mantle of kingship
passed to Ananda's 18-year-old brother, Bhumibol Adulyadej. Some, including a new magazine
in Asia named TIME, pondered whether the "gangling, spectacled" teenager could survive the
deadly intrigues of a fabled and faraway Oriental land.

The odds were against him. All across Southeast Asia, monarchies were being extinguished—
kings and princes stripped of power, driven into exile or executed. Yet young Bhumibol steadily
grew in stature, not least by launching over 3,000 royal projects to help the poor. Even as a
communist insurgency raged, he personally delivered relief to remote villages. Bhumibol also
quietly counseled and sometimes openly cajoled governments, always urging them to put
public interest first. Having sat on the throne for 60 years, he is the world's longest-reigning
monarch. His stewardship has been so masterful that in times of crisis Thais invariably turn to
one man: King Bhumibol. Indeed, on two occasions—October 1973 and May 1992—with Thailand
descending into chaos, the King, armed only with his moral authority, intervened to end
bloodshed.

Today, a group of generals has again seized power. They have pledged to give Thailand a fairer
and lasting democratic system. Once more, Thailand's people will look to King Bhumibol,
trusting him to ensure that the generals keep their promise.
Mother Teresa
The Saint of Calcutta spread love to the unwanted, the homeless and the abandoned
By Dominique Lapierre

My first sight of her was in her "Home of the Pure Heart" in Calcutta 25 years ago. She was on
her knees feeding with a plate of rice and a spoon a man who looked more like a cadaver than
a human being. Suddenly, she sensed my presence behind her. She turned around and abruptly
handed me her plate: "Go on feeding this man," she said, "and love him." Those words—and
actions—reflect Mother Teresa's message. To love those who have never been loved. To love
the unwanted, the homeless, the abandoned, as if each one were Jesus Christ himself. For
nearly 40 years, the Saint of Calcutta spread this message throughout India and the rest of the
world.

And yet, on her arrival in Calcutta in 1929 as a young Albanian nun of the Loreto missionary
order, her life had begun in a very different way.

For years, she taught history and geography in Loreto schools in Calcutta and elsewhere. But on
Sept. 10, 1946, she heard a call while on a train taking her for a retreat in Darjeeling at the
foot of the Himalayas. The inner voice told her to give up the comfort of her surroundings, and
to go and share the life of the inhabitants of the nearest slum. She wrote to the Vatican for
permission, and went to the bazaar to buy a cheap piece of white cotton cloth bordered with
blue. This humble sari was to become the uniform of the exceptional congregation she then set
up to serve the poorest of the poor, wherever they were: the homeless, the hungry, lepers,
unwanted babies, AIDS victims. In 1979, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in
recognition of this work.

Today, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity carry on her ideal of compassion to all suffering
human beings—with the same message I heard from her lips the very first day I met her in
Calcutta: "Love them."

Dominique Lapierre scripted a film about Mother Teresa, authored The City of Joy, and co-
wrote Freedom at Midnight, O Jerusalem and Is Paris Burning?