You have a crucial role in ensuring the coherence and effectiveness of the United Nations’s message, as well as dealing with the press. Is there one image, one aspect that you would like to see publicized more about the United Nations?

I hear so many negative stereotypes about the United Nations that are simply ill-founded. Just to take the first four that come to mind, the first would be the stereotype of the United Nations as a talking shop, that a lot of speeches are made here but nothing gets done. It is true that a lot of speeches are made here, especially during the General Assembly, but as Winston Churchill put it, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” Would you not rather have the representatives of 189 countries boring each other to death, if necessary, on the General Assembly floor, instead of boring holes into each other on the battlefield? And indeed a great deal does get done but that does not get talked about.

There is the stereotype about the United Nations being a paper factory, and true, many UN documents are produced every year. But we worked out that every single UN document on every single subject in every one of the six languages, if added up over the course of an entire calendar year, would consume less paper than the New York Times uses to print one single Sunday edition. So people just do not see this in perspective, and of course these documents often represent the state of the world’s thinking about the key issues of our times.

Then you have the stereotype of the bloated bureaucracy, which is a favorite one in Washington. I sometimes ruefully concede that I am becoming a bit of a bloated bureaucrat myself, but for the bureaucracy as a whole, we are actually 25 percent leaner than we were in the 1980s, and if you add every single UN official in every single UN agency, including the specialized agencies, you get 51,000 people, which is fewer than they employ in Disneyworld. I like to think that we are not a Mickey Mouse operation.

And finally, the myth about cost: the United Nations is actually an amazingly inexpensive organization for what it does. The US taxpayer pays just over a dollar per US citizen for the US share of the UN regular budget every year. So we are not really talking about vast sums of money, it is a dollar that most Americans would not miss. In fact I was in Switzerland earlier this year, and I discovered that our entire human rights budget around the world is actually less money than they spend to maintain the Zurich opera house.

Dispelling these myths and correcting the facts is something I would like to see more of. Beyond that, I would say there is a lot the United Nations does that people just do not know about so I would certainly plead for much more awareness.

What do you believe the future of the United Nations holds, and how do you believe these myths are going to be corrected or accentuated? Do you feel the future will be much different, or will the United Nations continue to operate as it has in the past?

First of all, as Kofi Annan often likes to say, the world is full of problems without passports. Problems across international frontiers, including drug control, refugees, security crises, the environment, climate change, money laundering, and now terrorism, are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve on its own. This range of problems needs solutions without visas. There are truly global problems, and to deal with them the United Nations is the one indispensable global institution in our globalizing world.

We have seen with September 11 the horrors of terrorism, and the United Nations stands fully behind the efforts led by the United States to root out terrorism around the world. But the fact is also that if that horror taught us anything, it has to be that the cliché of a global village is true. A fire that starts in a dusty tent in one corner of this global village can melt the steel girds of skyscrapers on the opposite side. We are all in this together. I hope at least we will come to the realization that we need the United Nations to help tackle these problems and to make sure that the world as a whole can make collective progress in the name of our common humanity.

One of the first agreements that was passed in the United Nations was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and you said in 1998 that “paradoxical as it may seem, it is the universal idea of human rights that can in fact make the world safe for diversity.” The debate between universality and diversity requires that we find a common ground to work with. Do you feel that we can establish more common ground in the future?

I think that moving toward universality through stressing individual national aspirations can work. In the case of human rights I have argued that you need to simultaneously affirm universal principles and indigenize human rights. You have to help convince each country that human rights are relevant, in its own national situation, and it is through that process we end up getting every country on board. As a writer, I believe it is vital that literature help express national identity, however varied, fragmented, or evolving it may be in each country. At the same time, literature should cross national boundaries so that through this process of interaction and exchange, the freedom of expression of all cultures, and not just any one dominant culture, you can really preserve diversity and universality at the same time. That is what I believe in all areas of life, and in the Indian context I define myself as somebody who is firmly committed to upholding Indian pluralism. And I would like to see pluralism around the world as well. That is precisely what the United Nations exists to guarantee. We are not here to impose any one view of the world on everybody, but we are trying to get all these different views of the world to pull together for the common benefit of all, because so many of the problems we are dealing with affect everyone.