Parallel centuries of leadership

IN 1926, two boys were born. The first arrived on May 8 in London, a child who would later collect fossils, roam around his father’s university campus, and never doubt that the natural world was his home. The second arrived seven weeks later on June 30 in Lahore, a boy who learned commerce at his brothers’ side, grew up in the Walled City with friends who would scatter during the Partition era, but with whom he stayed in touch for the rest of his life.

The first boy was David Attenborough; the second Syed Babar Ali. The world recently marked Attenborough’s 100th birthday with deserved celebrations. Soon, the man born seven weeks after Attenborough will also turn 100. The world does not know that their lives have run in parallel.

I write this not as a distant observer. When I was establishing the Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD-Pakistan) in 1994, with Dr Parvez Hassan as its chair, Syed Babar Ali opened his doors at the newly created Lums campus without hesitation, offering not just a venue but his conviction that leadership development was as important as any other form of conservation. In 2001, he opened his arms and his home when I brought 250 LEAD trainees from more than 80 countries to Pakistan for what was, to my knowledge, the largest leadership development initiative the country had seen.

That was not hospitality. That was a statement of faith in leadership, in young people, in Pakistan’s capacity to stand at the centre of global environmental conversations. I have followed Attenborough’s work for as long. Watching the centenary tributes arrive from London last week, I finally saw what I should have seen years ago: these two men were not merely contemporaries. They were mirror images, working from opposite ends of the earth towards the same horizon.

What distinguishes David Attenborough and Syed Babar Ali from others is not ambition but patience.

The clearest expression of who they are is not what they did, but what they chose not to do. In June 1972, the nations of the world gathered in Stockholm for the first global conference on the human environment. In June 1992, it gathered in Rio for the Earth Summit, the largest gathering of heads of state in history. Both conferences produced declarations of sweeping ambition. Neither Attenborough nor Babar Ali attended even one. They were not absent through oversight. They were elsewhere, pioneering.

In 1972, Babar Ali was founding WWF-Pakistan, bringing conservation from international principle to the ground level of Pakistan’s communities, mountains, and forests. While diplomats declared that such organisations should exist, he was building one.

In 1992, he was founding the Ali Institute of Education, training the teachers who would teach the children who would eventually care about the planet those conferences were trying to save. Attenborough, that same year, was standing alone on Antarctic ice, making Life in the Freezer, watched by more people than attended both summits combined and remembered by even more 30 years later.

Both understood that conservation without commerce is charity, and charity does not scale. Babar Ali proved through his own enterprises that conscience and profit reinforce each other. Attenborough proved it by moving markets: after Blue Planet, sustainable investment funds swelled in what analysts called the ‘Attenborough Effect’.

Beyond conservation, Babar Ali turned industrial profit into human possibility, building hospitals, funding scholarships specifically for women who could not otherwise finish their degrees, and proving through his own enterprises that conscience and commerce are not opposites. He built Lums without government land or funding, served as WWF’s international president from 1996 to 1999, succeeding Prince Philip, and crossed the India-Pakistan frontier to maintain friendships when others thought the attempt naïve. He co-chaired a peace dialogue with India’s former foreign secretary Muchkund Dubey for over a decade and in 2022 shared a stage at Harvard with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen to speak of shared inheritance rather than division. His conviction is simple: “One and one don’t make two, but 11. If we are together, we can be much greater than two.” Attenborough, through cameras trained on the snow leopards of the Karakoram and the tigers of Ranthambore, showed the world that natural life in the subcontinent transcends political boundaries. Different instruments, for the same argument.

What moves me most about both men is not what they built. It is who they built it for. Neither is content to be the last of his kind. Babar Ali’s universities, scholarships and fellowships are laboratories for other people’s futures, and his willingness to open Lums to young professionals in 1994 and to welcome 250 LEAD trainees in 2001 was his theory of leadership made flesh: invest in people, trust the young, and the work will outlast you.

Lums has now seen over 20,000 students who lead Pakistan’s institutions graduate. Attenborough co-launched the Earthshot Prize with Prince William to give the next generation the resources his generation never had and told world leaders at COP26: “In my lifetime I have witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.”

What has distinguished both men is not ambition but patience. Neither has sought the headlines or the platform. Both have understood that the loudest voices in any room are rarely the most consequential. They have worked quietly, built deeply, and trusted that the results would speak long after the applause had faded.

Syed Babar Ali will turn 100, inshallah, on June 30. He is among the most consequential Pakistanis of the 20th century, a pioneering industrialist, conservation builder, educationist, philanthropist and diplomat of friendship. He and Attenborough were born in the same year, have served the same cause, missed the same conferences for the same reasons, and have devoted their parallel centuries to the same conviction: that the world is changed by those who invest in the people who will bring the change.

The writer is an environmentalist and was founding executive director of LEAD Pakistan from 1994 to 2019.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2026

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