At 34, Worldy-Wise and on His Way Up
India-born Zakaria, possibly a future foreign-born Secretary of State in the footsteps of Kissinger, brzezinski
Excerpts from NYTimes
In 1993, at the age of 28, he became the youngest managing editor of Foreign Affairs, taking over the No. 2 spot at the nation's premier foreign policy journal. Six years later, he is spinning comfortably in the innermost orbits of America's foreign policy establishment. He has published a
book on the United States' origins as a global power, is at work on another about "democracy everywhere, past, present, future," and is a columnist for Newsweek.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's chief foreign policy adviser, calls him "intelligent about just about every area of the world."
But there is an obstacle. Zakaria is still a citizen of his native India, though now in the final stages of becoming a naturalized American -- a move that he sees as inevitable but also central to his acceptance inside a campaign, and certainly a White House. And although he is following in
the footsteps of two other immigrant-diplomats, Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, he does not come out of a European tradition.
"I don't think anyone ever imagined that in the next decade or so there could be a national security adviser from India," said Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (publisher of Foreign Affairs) and a former columnist for The New York Times. "This is in the
realm of possibility." ( Zakaria smiled, carefully, at Gelb's pronouncement. "Les has a certain set of ambitions for me," he said.)
"I also think I grew up in an India that's vanishing," he said. "The secular, somewhat Anglicized India of the 1960's and 1970's is giving way to a much more authentic, Indian India. But it's not an India I feel that comfortable in."
Zakaria grew up on Malabar Hill, Bombay's Bel Air, in a big house, Rylestone, where his parents held Urdu poetry readings and had plenty of space for him to play cricket out back. His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was deputy leader of the ruling Congress Party under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His mother, Fatma Zakaria, was the Sunday editor of the The
Times of India.
Zakaria received a classical English education at the Cathedral School, where 800 Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims "would gather together and sort of lustily sing 'Nearer My God to Thee.' "
After receiving a doctorate in political science from Harvard in 1993, Zakaria was quickly hired by James Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs, plunging into life at the council on East 68th Street.
"You can't penetrate English culture -- you can admire it," he said. "Whereas in America, there's absolutely no sense
of that." |
