Ban Ki-moon autobiography “Resolved: Uniting Nations in a Divided World” released

• Book titled ‘Resolved: Uniting Nations in a Divided World’ is an autobiography of the Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
• It consists of life experiences and challenges that the author faced in his life & elaborates his tenure in the United Nations (UN).
• It is published by HarperCollins India, Ban goes on to describe how he became a “man of peace” from a “child of war”.

Ban Ki-moon (born 13 June 1944)

• He is a South Korean politician and diplomat who served as the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 2007 to December 2016.

• Before becoming the Secretary-General, Ban was a career diplomat in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the United Nations.

• He entered diplomatic service the year he graduated from university, accepting his first post in New Delhi, India.

• Ban was the foreign minister of South Korea from January 2004 to November 2006. In February 2006, he began to campaign for the office of Secretary-General. Ban was initially considered to be a long shot for the office. As foreign minister of South Korea, however, he was able to travel to all the countries on the United Nations Security Council, a maneuver that turned him into the campaign's front runner.

• On 13 October 2006, he was elected to be the eighth Secretary-General by the United Nations General Assembly.

• On 1 January 2007, he succeeded Kofi Annan.

• As Secretary-General, he was responsible for several major reforms on peacekeeping and UN employment practices around the world. Diplomatically, Ban has taken particularly strong views on global warming, pressing the issue repeatedly with U.S. President George W. Bush, and on the Darfur conflict, where he helped persuade Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to allow peacekeeping troops to enter Sudan.

• Ban was named the world's 32nd most powerful person by the Forbes list of The World's Most Powerful People in 2013, the highest among South Koreans.

• In 2014, he was named the third most powerful South Korean after Lee Kun-hee and Lee Jae-yong.

• In 2016, Foreign Policy named Ban one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for his achievement of helping the Paris Agreement to be ratified and enforced less than a year after it was adopted.

Ban Ki moon and India

• Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s first diplomatic posting was in India and he developed such a special connection that even 50 years later, he tells the Indian people that half of his ""heart belongs in their country"".
• On his days in India, he writes: ""India was my first diplomatic posting, and Soon-taek (wife) and I arrived in Delhi in October 1972. I served there for almost three years, first as vice consul of the Korean Consulate General, and once a full diplomatic relationship was established between Korea and India in December 1973, I served as second secretary of the Korean Embassy.""
• He says his work in India was challenging but fascinating to a young diplomat.
• In the book, Ban also hails India for ""raising the bar"" and providing the United Nations’ first all-female Formed Police Unit (FPU) for service in 2007 in Liberia, which was then beginning to recover from a violent two-decade power struggle.
• In the book, Ban also talks about his election to the top UN post in 2006, in which India's Shashi Tharoor was also a contender."