Profile | Why Asia must reject the Western economic model, and Amazon’s ‘broken system’ – a sustainability leader speaks
- Chandran Nair, founder of Hong Kong think tank the Global Institute For Tomorrow, opened the first environmental consulting firms in a number of Asian countries
- He tells Kate Whitehead Asia needs to think for itself when it comes to sustainability issues and not rely on Western consultants who know little of the continent
My parents were migrants from India and went to Kuala Lumpur by boat. It was a 10-day journey and some people died of cholera, malaria and bad air circulation on the way. I was born in KL, the seventh of eight children – four boys and four girls, all born within 12 years.
We lived in a village community of migrant Indians living together with Malays and Chinese. My dad worked as a clerk for the electricity board and my mother had the hardest job, she looked after us kids.
We were not wealthy, and we children shared a bedroom – four brothers on one bed and the four sisters on the other. We had very little and helped each other, we didn’t waste food and did what we were told, we were disciplined.
In our Hindu household I said prayers in Sanskrit which I didn’t understand, I went to a missionary school where they told me God was a white bloke called Jesus Christ and I was alright with that. I said the Lord’s prayer and wasn’t conflicted. We had a mosque next door to our house and so Islam is very close to me because five times a day I’d listen to the call to prayer.
Six billion Asians living like Americans and Europeans is impossible – there is not enough to go around
The Muslim call to prayer for me is the most spiritual call and so when I see Muslims, I see them as brothers and sisters. In the evenings, we’d go and eat char siu bao and noodles. I learned to eat with chopsticks from the age of three.
Olympic dreams
Two of my neighbours were ex-Malaysian hockey Olympians and we looked up to them. One of them gave me a stick when I was 10. Every day from 4pm to 7pm, 10 of us kids played hockey on a stony patch of grass near our home. That was the highlight of my day, I was obsessed with hockey.