World as Family: Vishakha N. Desai, Pico Iyer, and Kevin Rudd
VIEW EVENT DETAILSA Journey of Multi-Rooted Belongings
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Join us for the book launch of World as Family, by Asia Society President Emerita Vishakha N. Desai. She will be joined in conversation with the writer Pico Iyer and current Asia Society President and CEO Kevin Rudd.
World as Family argues for the kind of openness that can thrive in the scruffiness of reality, rather than push for artificial clarity. It is open to all points of compass, privileging fluidity that emerges from intertwined diversity over sharp divisions. As hard as it is to achieve one’s center or balance in the midst of the unprecedented and interconnected challenges we face as a global community, it is also necessary to find the personal balance while we swim the flow of collective currents.
From the author: “World as Family is written as much for the young people who are ‘global natives’ as for people like me who have come to the idea of global belonging over a lifetime of traversing long distances in time and space, physically, conceptually, culturally, and emotionally. A personal chronicle, it’s an effort to reclaim global as a kind of palimpsest that allows for the layers of the local, national, and transnational to coexist and comingle. As messy and mixed up as they may be sometimes, the layers are altered by being close to other layers. The proximity may blur the edges of the layers, but the uniqueness of each part can be felt palpably. This book is a chronicle of a life lived in the comingled realities of the personal and the collective, the local and the global, in the hope of creating a new sense of worldly belonging needed for the survival of our humankind.”
Vishakha N. Desai is a noted scholar of South Asian Art and history, Dr. Desai is well known for her leadership in presenting contemporary Asian art to American audiences and in developing innovative approaches to the relationship between culture and foreign policy in India, China and other Asian countries. Dr. Vishakha N. Desai currently serves as Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to President Lee C. Bollinger of Columbia University; Department Chair of the Committee on Global Thought, and is Senior Research Scholar in Global Studies at its School of International and Public Affairs. Prior to joining Columbia University, Dr. Desai held a variety of positions at the Asia Society From 1990 to 2012, initially as the Director of the Asia Society Museum and for the last eight years as President and CEO.
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957. Since 1982 he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road, and The Art of Stillness. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, as well as liner and program notes, a screenplay for Miramax and a libretto. At the same time he has been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far. Since 1992 Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.
The Hon. Kevin Rudd AC became president and CEO of Asia Society in January 2021 and has been president of the Asia Society Policy Institute since January 2015. He served as 26th Prime Minister of Australia (2007 to 2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010 to 2012). He is Chair of the Board of the International Peace Institute in New York, and Chair of Sanitation and Water for All – a global partnership of government and non-governmental organizations dedicated to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 6. He is a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House and the Paulson Institute, and a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization’s Group of Eminent Persons.
Presented in partnership with OneShared.World.