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The best of the best?
We made a list, we checked it twice. Then we made another list and we checked it three times ... you try it!
- By Mick O'Reilly, Deputy Managing Editor
- Published: 01:18 September 30, 2008
Bart Simpson or Mickey Mouse? Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair? Saddam Hussain or Anwar Sadat? How exactly do you come up with a list of the 30 newsmakers that defined the last 30 years? That's exactly the dilemma faced by Gulf News editors when we sat down to plan the commemorative poster, wrapping today's edition.
We wanted it to be special, a keepsake, something to treasure. We believe it certainly is, and graphic artist Ramachandra Babu has surpassed our expectations with his delicately drawn work of the 30 newsmakers that have shaped this corner of the world through three decades of change, brought to you through the pages of Gulf News.
Never would we have imaged the Herculean task it turned out to be, trying to whittle down the list of prominent people.
Somehow, I will never look at my colleague, Mohammed AlMezel, in quite the same light as he argued vociferously for Michael Jackson's inclusion.
"Michael Jackson's the greatest pop singer of all time," AlMezel argued as he adjusted his ghutra. I can't seem to shake the image of the Deputy Managing Editor in his dishdasha, moonwalking across the newsroom to the gloved-one's Thriller!
Get 10 editors together to come with a list of 30 names and it grows to 64 instead!
"Yanni, Fidel Castro, of course," argues my Editor-in-Chief, Abdul Hamid Ahmad. "Khalas, he's been in power for 50 years, the last great communist of the cause."
"Not quite," counters Editor-at-Large Francis Matthew. "And he's more of a man of the 60s, not the past three decades, which is what this list is all about."
For the record, Castro is out. But Abdul Hamid scored one back with his insistence on the inclusion of Professor Robert Winston.
Who? Chances are that someone you know, or their children, is walking around the UAE today because of Professor Winston's ground-breaking research: He's the leading developer of in-vitro fertilisation.
"We tried not to use just inspirational people, but rather figures who changed or altered the world as we know it forever - which is why a number of sportsmen were eliminated," Matthew explained. "It has been three decades of change for everyone and we tried to capture change by listing figures who were agents of change, or who's technical, social or political innovations brought change to all our lives."
Let's just say that to keep the list to 30 people, we had to be pretty judicious.
Psst! We also cheated, just a little, but don't tell any one. We counted Dolly, the cloned sheep, and her creator, Keith Campbell, as one. (Somehow, there's rather an ironic sense to that, don't you think, counting creator and clone as one?)
And we included J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter as one. Together, the pair inspired a whole new generation of children to pick up books and enjoy the written word - a tremendous achievement in itself, given the proliferation of computer games and the pre-occupation with television.
Perhaps the greatest single advance in the past three decades has been the advent of computing and its place in most workplaces and homes.
You can thank Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia for inventing e-mail thereby eliminating snail mail to the realm of bill collectors and banks, and banishing stamp collectors by way of the dodo bird.
They did make the final list; so too did Larry Page and Sergey Brin, inventors of Google. Thanks to them, we all know everything. Come to think of it - why didn't we just google for the 30 top newsmakers and save ourselves a lot of grief? Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Bill Gates made the list - not bad for a high-school dropout who went on to find Microsoft, giving us Windows and Office. Steve Jobs, however, the man in the black sweater who gave us iMacs, iPhones, iPods and iBooks, didn't make the cut. (Moral of the story: I guess it's only fun until someone loses an 'i'.)
There are, of course, figures that have to be included on any list.
Nelson Mandela
Saddam Hussain
Mikhail Gorbachev
John Paul II
Yasser Arafat
Oprah Winfrey
Shoo?
"Oprah Winfrey popularised television," chimed in Anupa Kurian, our Readers Editor. "She's very wealthy, everybody knows her, every one watches her."
Needless to say, Kurian lost the battle over America's real first lady.
But if change is a criteria, she seemed to have a sure hit by nominating Barack Obama, who has made a political career thus far on a message of "a time for change."
Or so you'd think, right?
Wrong!
"Barack Obama hasn't done anything yet," rebuffed Matthew. "His time has yet to come and this is a list of the past 30 years. Now, what about Professor Sherwood Roland?"
The eye brows went up, collectively, inquisitively.
"The chap who found the ozone hole and global warming," Matthew declared.
Err, 'cuse me. If this is a list of 30 things that have changed in the last 30 years, you could certainly pencil in global warming and, maybe, mark down the ozone hole. But this is a list of people who made a difference, and Sherwood Roland didn't quite cut it. Another one bites the dust.
Speaking of dust, how about something from Dubai, as in the Burj Dubai. Adrian Smith, its architect, briefly was considered, but discounted rather quickly. His building might stand tall, but in the ranking of standing tall over the past 30 years, he didn't make it.
"Tiger Woods," offered Deputy Managing Editor Robin Chatterjee. "The greatest golfer of all time."
Sure, worth inclusion, but his other suggestions of cricketers Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Shane Warne fell as quickly as England's starting order.
Also excluded was David Beckham, England's underachieving former football captain. Diego Maradona, however, is in. He found God on the pitch, after all, and even won a World Cup in 1986.
Michael Jordan didn't make it, nor did the world's only perfect gymnast, Nadia Comaneci. She might impress Olympic judges, but us lot at Gulf News are way more critical. Zeros all around.
Any list of 30 newsmakers has to include a fair number of politicians. They are leaders who, for better or worse, bring change that profoundly affects us all and the world in which we live.
President Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who poured his heart into the Camp David treaty, is excluded. Anwar Sadat, the first Arab leader to sign the peace deal with Israel is included, and so too is Menachem Begin, the Jewish state's right-wing leader who inked that deal. And for the record, we counted both Sadat and Begin as one. Having excluded Jimmy Carter, it seems appropriate to include Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the list. He did, after all, profoundly impact Carter's presidency and his influence is still being felt in the region to this day.
President George Bush makes the list for going to war to liberate Kuwait.
President George W. Bush also makes the list. Not a case of like father, like son, but rather for turning a war on terror into an invasion of Iraq. And we found Osama Bin Laden on every list of nominees, the Al Qaida leader has espoused terror to change the world.
Deng Xiaoping is included for beginning the reforms of hard-line Maoist Communism in China, culminating, one could argue, in last month's Olympic Games in Beijing.
And speaking of arguments, perhaps one of the longest in our musings came on the issue of whether or not to include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He did make the decision to lead the UK into Iraq in lockstep with US forces. Beyond that, is he a man of substance or style? We didn't include him, so I guess that infers the latter rather than the former.
President Bill Clinton was also a leader of swagger, not substance. He almost brokered a peace deal between Arafat and Barak - almost wasn't good enough for us.
Ronald Reagan, however, did make our list. It wasn't for his acting abilities, but for his refusal to accept that the Cold War could not be ended. Somehow, though, I think there are several hundred former air traffic controllers still living in the US who wouldn't include him on their lists of 30 newsmakers.
Benazir Bhutto made our list for her influence on Pakistan politics; Indira Gandhi also made our list. Two women leaders, two victims of political assassination.
Two other women of distinction garnered our attention. Mother Teresa of Calcutta (now Kolkata), a simple Albanian nun whose caring, selfless works in the slums and gutters made a world pay attention. Princess Diana of Wales, whose beauty, charm and coy on the red carpets of the world also made a world pay attention. How many lives, though, were changed by each? And lasting change?
If change is the main criteria, then those of us who have lived in the UAE for the past three decades will have been witness to change like no other. For those reasons, we included late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan and late Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, as two of the founding fathers of the country.
President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces and Ruler of Abu Dhabi, is included for leading the UAE as president.
His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, is also included for guiding Dubai and UAE into the global world.
Nothing has quite captured the change of the past three decades better than CNN. The brainchild of Ted Turner, the Atlanta-based broadcaster has defined late 20th and early-21st century history like no other. Who can forget the 1989 images of a lone student standing in front of a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square beamed around the world? CNN deserves to be on a list of things. Ted Turner, not so much, not even for his marriage to "Hanoi" Jane Fonda.
Rocket science this list is not. That's probably the reason why astrophysicist and thinker Stephen Hawking is excluded from the list. We might all claim to have read his seminal work A Brief History of Time, but in our brief history of 30 newsmakers, he's not quite up to snuff. Sorry.
We tipped our hat to the world of haute couture by including Yves Saint Laurent, the designer who brought high fashion for the masses and ready-to-wear designer labels a way of life.
We also passed on Andrew Lloyd Webber, who reinvented the stage show. And we passed on Bono, the Irish rocker who used the stage to show issues that few cared about. And the Rolling Stones, either individually as Keith, Charlie, Mick, Ron and Bill, or together as one, never stood a chance. Rolling Stones, as the saying goes, gathered no moss with us.
You could feel the tension palpably mount in the meeting as our various lists were pared down to the few remaining spots.
"If Irving Kristol isn't included, it's a pointless exercise," protested the Editor-at-Large.
Tensions rose.
Pulses raced.
The clock ticked.
"Who's Irving Kristol?" someone asked.
"The publisher and thinker who gave the world neo-conservatism," he answered.
"Oh, I see," came the response.
"No!"
Professor Mohammad Yunus, the academic who transformed millions of lives of the very poor with his concept of micro-credit couldn't buy his way onto our list.
Just goes to show, it doesn't matter if you're the best basketball player ever, a rock star or even a British Prime Minister, you're not quite good enough for our list of 30 newsmakers over the last 30 years.
You think it's easy? You try it!
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