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Chandran Nair is a Malaysian businessman and scholar. He is the founder of The Global Institute for Tomorrow, an independent think-tank based in Hong Kong. [1] He is also Project Director for The Other Hundred, an international photography competition and photo-book project. [2] [3]
Nair was born in Malaysia, the seventh of eight children. His parents were immigrants to Malaysia from India, and not well off, with all the children sharing a room. He studied chemical engineering in the UK, where he then worked for a few years. At 28, he joined the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, building sanitation and water systems by day on a stipend and playing the saxophone in his free time in a band. [4] He later earned a master's degree in environmental engineering from Bangkok.
Nair is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council for Sustainability [5] and has argued at numerous forums including the WEF, APEC [6] and OECD [7] about the need for radical reform of the current economic model and strict limits on consumption. [8] Nair was previously Chairman of Environmental Resources Management (ERM), building the company to be the leading environmental consultancy in Asia Pacific. He left in March 2004. [9]
Nair is a frequent contributor to various media outlets including The Financial Times, [10] The Guardian, [11] The Huffington Post, [12] The New York Times. [13] and South China Morning Post. [14] He is the author of Consumptionomics: Asia's role in reshaping capitalism and saving the planet, named one of the top ten books of 2011 by The Globalist. [15] In 2018 he published The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy, and Society. [16]
On August 26, 2021, Nair wrote an op-ed in Time magazine accusing Nicole Kidman of using her "White Privilege" to avoid being quarantined when arriving in Hong Kong to film the Amazon Prime Video series Expats . Hong Kong's Commerce and Economic Development Bureau (CEDB) responded in a press statement that Kidman received a quarantine exemption for the purpose of performing designated professional work and necessary operation of Hong Kong's economy, [17] and a CEDB permanent secretary wrote a letter to the editor of Time stating that Nair's claim was "not only just misplaced but absurd". [18] [19]
Chandran Nair's article "Quarantine, What Quarantine? Nicole Kidman, Expats and White Privilege" (posted on August 26) regarding a recent decision to provide a quarantine exemption to personnel involved in the production of a TV series contains assertions that are groundless and speculative.
