The Bay of Bengal is one of the oldest conversation spaces in the world. Long before the
region was mapped into modern borders, monks, merchants, sailors, scholars and pilgrims moved
between the Gangetic plain, the Himalayan foothills, the Irrawaddy delta, the Chao Phraya
basin and the island of Lanka. They carried grain and cloth, but they also carried ideas —
grammar, astronomy, medicine, architecture, and a shared moral vocabulary. That circulation is
the deep infrastructure of South Asia, and it did not require a treaty.
My work begins from that observation. Formal diplomacy is essential, but it is slow, cautious
and periodically frozen by events. Underneath it runs a second layer — researchers comparing
notes, universities exchanging students, cultural institutions co-hosting exhibitions, veterans
and young riders crossing a land port together, families discovering that a festival they
thought was theirs alone is also observed four hundred kilometres away in another country.
This layer is what practitioners call Track-II, and it is where I have spent most of my
professional life.
I am not a diplomat and I do not speak for any government. What I do is more modest and, I
would argue, more durable: I convene. I bring together institutions that rarely share a table —
a university, a border authority, an armed forces contingent, a cultural confederation, a
state tourism department, a room full of nineteen-year-olds — and I design a shared undertaking
that gives them a reason to keep talking after the event ends. The convening is the method.
The relationships are the outcome.
Increasingly that work is anchored in the BIMSTEC
framework — the seven-country grouping around the Bay of Bengal that connects South and
Southeast Asia. BIMSTEC is often described as an under-used platform. I think that is exactly
what makes it interesting. Its agenda is technical and economic, which means it is comparatively
insulated from the political weather, and its people-to-people pillar is still being written.
There is room here for a generation to shape something.
