At first, all the attencion went to my head. I began to think of myself as a Merlin who could wave his wand over a country, causing it suddenly to light up, industries sprouting like flowers. Then I became disillusioned. I questioned my own motives and those of all the people I worked with. It seemed that the glorified title or a PhD did little to help a person understand the plight of a leper living beside a cesspool in Jacarta, and I doubted that a knack for manipulating statistics enabled a person to see into the future. The better I came to know those who made the decisions that shape the world, the more sceptical I became about their abilities and their goals. Looking at the faces around the meeting room tables, I found myself struggling very hard to restrain my anger.