Which living person do you admire?

At a dinner party, I asked the question for fun. It led eventually to an intriguing list of names.

- Rohit Brijnath

For reasons unclear I recently interrupted a conversation at a dinner party at my home with an unplanned question. My guests seemed adequately absorbed with the chilli chicken, but it was my house and thus my random rules. Who do you admire, I asked? Pause. Chew. Think.

I inserted qualifications. No "my mother is my role model" bail-out answers. No "my-wife-is-No. 1", though a friend did magnificently and vainly attempt exactly that a few days later. No deflections by naming entire tribes, such as forest rangers, neighbourhood activists, nurses, firefighters, explorers, curers of disease, war correspondents and the usual noble gang.

No, I wanted a specific name. A public figure. Evidently I didn't make it clear that the person should be living because I got the Buddha and Deng Xiaoping. Fail, I quietly decided.

I widened my circle, I texted friends overseas with the question, interrogated colleagues, and almost all said, wait, let us think. A single name doesn't easily leap out. To go beyond the clichéd is to contemplate.

Why was I asking this, I can't quite say? It was fun and journalistic curiosity and also a passing glimpse of what people hold important. Who do we respect and what does it say about us? What virtues sing to us loudest? Which person represents the potential of the species? Where do we find hope?

This wasn't a contest, just a consideration. We don't have a weekly Top 10 People ranking chart pinned to our frontal lobes, yet we all value qualities. What we cherish also changes as we lurch through life, as hardship touches us and knowledge shapes us and parents age and nations bully and we see the world through an altered prism. Once, in admiration, I defended every immature John McEnroe outburst. Now I realise I was an idiot in my 20s.