KHAN OF HARVARD:
‘A Warm, Happy Place’
KHAN OF HARVARD:
‘Warm, Happy Place’
MOMING back to school, with a year of travel behind me, I’m Odriven by a desire to know more. This is a warm and happy place when it is your last year and you know what you want.”
The speaker was a dark, engaging senior known to his Harvard classmates as “K” and professors as “Mr. Khan.” His given name is Karim. The “year of travel” he alluded to with characteristic understatement was a year in which he had postponed his college career to take over his duties as the fourth Aga Khan (Honorable Chief) and Imam (Spiritual Leader) of 20 million members of a worldwide religious sect called the Ismaili. The sect, a community of merchants more well-to-do than their 400 million fellow Moslems, this year may contribute $100 million to the sweat-shirted young man above. He will turn back most of this as loans and welfare projects, following a system set up by his grandfather, the fabulous Aga Khan III who died last year.
Though all this makes Prince Karim one of the world’s richest businessmen, it wouldn’t necessarily make him a big man at Harvard. He has become one, however, because of his brains (he is an A student), his brawn (he is outside left on the varsity soccer team) and his quiet ability to make friends (“I am not precisely timid-friendship is inevitable for me.”).
Deadly serious about his high role, modest about his wealth (“What I really inherited were all the mosques and burial grounds”), Prince Karim has not only won over his classmates, who call him a “good guy” but has handied his ticklish public relations with rare taste. Of girls (his grandfather had four wives, his father two) he maintains a rigid silence except for saying, “I thank God for women.”
KARIM studies in Leverett House room.
At right is print he bought for $20.
“Now everything else must be pashed out of mind. I may be raining out but I don’t know it. After a coffee break around midnight I can go back to my room and hit the books till 2.”
Witt soccer teammates “K” listens to chalk talk before varsity game.
“I can’t imagine myself without athletics. We push, shove, laugh, cry aut for a goal and everyone knows a sense of life. We are there to win. After all that you think better.”
With Mme. Beguel, his grandfather’s secretary, he goes over affairs of state at a Cambridge hotel.
“We get messages from anywhere – Bombay to Zanzibar to Zurich, People all over send me regular reports. But I met make the final decision.”
Unrecognized straphanger, Aga Khan IV takes the subway from Harvard station into Boston..
“It’s one of those rare times when I can be like everyone else. In Paris I wouldn’t dare step into the Metro. Here nobody stares at me”.
With his English press aide, Michael Curtis, be walks to classes in the Harvard Yard.
“I lived here as a freshman. There was always something going on … the way the light hits the trees in the fall, the sound of doors slamming in the early morning, the look of a professor moving in a world where he wrestles with problems”.
Before mailboxes (note name on student directory above) he happily opens morning post.
“Mail can send my mood up or down. When letters say things are working well, that the efforts of the community are going ahead, my day is made”.