Fareed Zakaria: education and experience

Today, in my class a student made a presentation on Fareed Zakaria. Although I have known about him for a while, I don’t know much about him. The student said, that she totally idolizes Zakaria and one day hopes to be what he is. She specifically quoted him from his article, The Power of Personality which appeared in NewsWeek on Dec 24, 2007.

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American. I was the outsider, growing up 8,000 miles away from the centers of power, being shaped by forces over which my country had no control.

When I hear confident claims about liberty and democracy in the Third World, I always think about rural India, where I spent a great deal of time when I was young, and wonder what those peasants struggling to survive would make of the abstractions of the American Enterprise Institute. When I read commentators fulminating about women wearing the burqa—which I don’t much like either—I think about one of my aunts, who has always worn one, and of the many complex reasons she keeps it on, none of which involves approval of misogyny or support for suicide bombers. When I talk to people in a foreign country, no matter how strange, they are always, at some level, familiar to me.

I couldn’t do my job well without the expertise. But any insights I have are thoroughly informed by the perspective and judgment that I’ve gained from being first a foreigner, then a foreign student, then an aspiring immigrant and now an American. My biography has helped me put my book learning in context, made for a richer interaction with foreigners and helped me see the world from many angles. So I understand what Obama means when he talks about his life and its lessons.

These words got me thinking about the importance of both education and experience. I truly agree when he says that our experience puts our education in perspective. Because if we discount our experience, then probably we will be building an insular world.