Chandran Nair: School Days, South China Morning Post
Chandran Nair spoke to David Phair about his school days in this story for the South China Morning Post.

By David Phair

Chandran Nair says he hopes the Global Institute For Tomorrow, which he founded, can help find the middle ground in global debates with robust analysis and arguments.
SCMP photo by Dickson Lee

My mum was a housewife and my dad a clerk and we weren’t well off. We lived in a house with a corrugated iron roof with eight kids squeezed into one bedroom I went to a missionary school in Kuala Lumpur run by the Salesian Order and it was intimidating. I thought there was a certain perversion in their constantly punishing children.

If you really misbehaved, you’d be tortured and by that I mean being made to stay out in the sun for three hours on bended knees with your hands held out in front of you. My family was nominally Hindu but we weren’t religious. Next door was a mosque and there was a Chinese temple down the street. The neighbourhood was a microcosm of Malaysia. Every morning we’d say the Lord’s Prayer at school and we didn’t question it.

Every day I’d hear the call to prayer at the mosque and even now I think it’s one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

What I learned from those days was a sense of discipline. The school regime was very harsh. I certainly don’t remember anything good about the teaching. I never understood in school the teachers’ lack of patience, their inability to articulate why things had to be done in a certain way. I see that in governments around the world today.

I didn’t enjoy studying – it was an ordeal because it was about rote learning and passing exams. It caused me great confusion because I couldn’t rote learn although I was an inquisitive kid.

The ages of 13 to 17 were geared to passing my A-levels and it was traumatic because I knew my success depended on doing well enough to go to university. And in order to go to a local university for a token sum I had to do exceptionally well, but unfortunately I didn’t.

Ironically, I still did well enough to be accepted by several universities in Britain funded by a bank loan gained on the strength of my elder sister acting as a guarantor. So I went on a plane for the first time and arrived in England and I remember my first reaction: I saw a white man digging up the road. I’d grown up in Malaysia under British rule and I’d never seen that.

That period of my life represented a turning point for me. In Malaysia I’d grown up with a particular sense that the British were the bosses – the managers, the teachers – but in Britain, the British were of all classes, like that road-digger, and I felt comfortable with that.

After graduating, I landed a job in London and spent three years with a large engineering firm and helped a brother through school. By then it was the early 1980s and I decided to do voluntary work in Swaziland after three close encounters with British nationalists.

I worked on a water and sanitation project and became involved with a band, which was important because I learned management skills from doing that. I even sneaked into South Africa illegally because the African National Congress asked us to do a gig in Soweto.

Later, I built up the ERM environmental consultancy in Asia from one small office in Hong Kong to 12 countries. I’ve subsequently gone on to found the Global Institute For Tomorrow. It’s about finding a voice for Asia and channel better quality ideas from both the east and the west into the global debate and to shake Asians into acting for themselves.

My hope is that we can find the middle ground with robust analysis and arguments. Extreme postulation, I believe, is intransigent and intellectually lazy. After all, you only have to look at the clash between Christianity and Islam to conclude that it’s the laziness of extremism.