'A courageous life on the front line of global need.' Damien Lewis
Acclaimed humanitarian Mukesh Kapila has lived eye-to-eye with the very worst conditions human beings can endure.
He has faced cataclysmic natural disasters – lakes in Cameroon vomiting clouds of toxic gas and the devastating Indian Ocean Tsunami - as well as global medical emergencies and disease pandemics - the AIDS crisis in Malawi and Ebola in Sierra Leone.
Witnessing the savageries of war and protracted conflict - airlifting aid to the besieged civilians of Sarajevo under sniper fire and working with the victims of civil war in Bangladesh - at times Mukesh had to ‘dine with the devil’, in an effort to bring hope to some of the world’s most vulnerable.
Kapila has also borne witness to the very worst evil that mankind is capable of: Genocide. A direct descendent from survivors of the genocidal violence of the Indian Partition, in 1947, Mukesh was first on the scene after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Having plumbed the depths of human savagery and evil, he vowed then: “not on my watch”.
But in 2004, as head of the UN in Sudan, he was obliged to confront the first genocide of the twenty-first century, becoming the high-level whistleblower who exposed that nation’s government for masterminding the mass-murder of their own citizens, in Darfur.
No Stranger To Kindness asks the question: when faced with a tide of evil, what gives human beings the strength to keep going and to extend the balm of human kindness, despite everything?
While focusing on the individual acts of compassion that Mukesh has encountered throughout his long and challenging career, No Stranger to Kindness also takes the reader to the upper echelons of the world’s foremost humanitarian institutions - the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, The Red Cross Red Crescent - only to conclude that it is not the institutions that matter, but the people behind them.
An uplifting and optimistic counterpoint to Mukesh's own first book, Against a Tide of Evil, No Stranger to Kindness chronicles a life driven by the simple human desire to help. It shows how acts of kindness – often between complete strangers - can change the world, even in the gravest of circumstances.
Praise for Mukesh Kapila:
'Mukesh Kapila sounded the clarion call and stood firm in the face of the ultimate crime: genocide. Read his story.' Mia Farrow
Mukesh Kapila CBE is Professor of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Manchester. He is also Chair of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Chair of Manchester Global Foundation, Adjunct Professor at the International Centre for Humanitarian Affairs Nairobi, Associate Fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Special Representative of the Aegis Trust for the prevention of crimes against humanity, and Special Adviser to Syria Relief. Professor Kapila has extensive experience in the policy and practice of international development, humanitarian affairs, human rights and diplomacy.
