The abstractions of freedom

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Davos, Jan 26: the CEO of Monsanto, Jurgen Hambrecht, the CEO of BASF, and Hans Joachim-Krober, the CEO of Metro.

From the Nestle breakfast I went back to the hotel to catch the end of Kamal Nath’s breakfast with key Indian CEOs and Michael Dell, Arun Sarin and Watanabe.

There were just about 12 of us being briefed by Kamal on his stand on the WTO and I think Rahul Bajaj made a pertinent point when he said that he was being confronted by some global CEOs who were of the opinion that India was a stumbling block in progress on the WTO and that there would be a lot of finger-pointing.

Enough food for thought for Kamal, I guess.

Sunil Mittal and I again made our trudge to the Congress Centre where I attended the two finest sessions in Davos yet. In the first, ‘Is freedom overrated?’, the panelists included Cheng Siwei, vice-chairman of the standing committee, National People’s Congress of China; Shimon Peres, deputy prime minister of Israel; and Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard. The only weak spot was some very biased and poor chairing by Laura Tyson who believes in view imposition rather than fair discussion.

It is clear that China is in denial about basic human rights and what freedom actually is. What is strange is that the western world believes all of humanity is connected through the net: a fallacy that did get corrected finally. But the best of the lot was easily Shimon Peres who, even at this age, possesses amazing mental agility, which shone through all the way.

I then attended the ‘Wisdom of the Youth’ session which had Queen Rania of Jordan and Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the United Kingdom. The best thing about this session was the articulation with which each of the panelists spoke.

There were also six youngsters on stage who had been selected as part of a British Council initiative and what was amazing is that the Forum actually saw the commitment towards creating a Global Education Fund and an international Pledging Conference is on the way. In response to a comment from me, Gordon Brown gushed about India and how he believed that India was leading the way in terms of education.

Thank God, Gordon didn’t meet Arjun Singh.