“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
"Honor and Shame
From No condition rise
Do well thy part
Therein all the honor lies."
-Alexander Pope.
A life has value, only if it adds value to the life of others. I believe that God has given us the privilege of this education, splendid family values and with it opportunities to lead, all for only one higher purpose and that is to better the lot of others, who do not have this opportunity. Further, bringing about enduring change through benevolent and transformational leadership in the public space is infinitely more complex and rewarding than doing so in the private sector. Consider just a few puissant facts:
- More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished-799 million of them are from the developing world.
- Of the 6.2 billion people in today's world, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day.
- The amount of money that the richest 1 percent of the world's people make each year equals what the poorest 57 percent make.
What's chilling are not the figures by themselves but the fact that by and large they don't shock us anymore. I believe my life would have meaning if I manage to contribute to creating an expanding economic pie which is more inclusive.
In my previous life and work, as the head of a large city government I tried doing so using unusual tools- by courting foreign investments which brought growth, jobs and competition and by implementing innovative e-government solutions, which led to large scale disintermediation of government itself from the day to day lives of people. We got unprecedented success, and became the home to one of Asia's fastest growing investment clusters, which is today globally lauded. But then that was just a first step. We have but one wild, precious life- where the value of the unspoken, the intangible and the unenforceable, has to be much more valuable than that of the spoken, the tangible and the enforceable. So why not go forth and just change the world?
— Srivatsa Krishna