What if… why not? — A diplomat’s memoir that speaks in human tones

Some books arrive as titles on a reading list. Others arrive as conversations—shared over months, between meetings, receptions, and the quiet, unscripted pauses that diplomacy occasionally allows.

What if… Why Not? by H.E. Ambassador Mohamed Maliki—Morocco’s Ambassador to India and the Dean of the Arab Diplomatic Corps in New Delhi—belongs to the second category. Ambassador Maliki is a friend, and since my arrival in Delhi I have learned much from his wisdom and experience. Even our table-tennis games—where he always seemed to have “one more move” than I anticipated—carried a lesson: strategy matters, but so does composure.

I remember listening to him speak about this book while he was still shaping it—testing ideas, polishing a memory here, withholding a detail there with a smile that suggested, “One day you will read it.” That anticipation stayed with me. The moment the book was announced, I purchased it immediately (before a signed copy could even reach me), and I finished it in three days—rare for an ambassador’s schedule, but inevitable for a book that keeps pulling you forward.


Retail descriptions rightly frame the book as more than a conventional diplomatic recollection. It moves through “funs and pitfalls” as well as “stressful and emotional moments,” shifting settings from Pakistan to Cameroon and from formal negotiations to “quiet, personal moments that often matter most.”

What makes these episodes compelling is not the passport-stamp geography, but the emotional realism. The reader is invited into the human texture behind protocol: decisions made with incomplete information, resilience demanded without ceremony, and the private costs that public roles rarely acknowledge.

This is also consistent with how Ambassador Maliki recently framed diplomacy in a public conversation: not as headlines, but as “human values behind global relations,” including the “unseen pressures of diplomatic service,” and the centrality of dialogue in an increasingly fractured world.

Among the chapters that stayed with me most are those where Ambassador Maliki writes about the bonds of family—parents and children—and the quiet architecture of support that holds a diplomatic life together.

Most striking is the attention he gives to the often-unspoken role of the spouse in a diplomat’s career. One retailer’s description captures this emphasis directly: the book is not only about diplomacy and lessons learned, but also about “family, friendship, resilience, and the often-unseen role of spouses in a diplomat’s life.”

This is not a sentimental aside. It is, in many ways, an overdue acknowledgment of an entire dimension of public service: that an ambassador’s performance is never the product of an individual alone. The demands of representation—constant readiness, emotional self-control, and the pressure to be “present” in multiple places at once—inevitably spill into the personal sphere. The book brings that truth to the page with dignity.

Another memorable chapter is the one on the late Ratan Tata. Ambassador Maliki had mentioned this relationship to me in our conversations—but always in a way that preserved suspense. “One day you will get the book,” he would say, “and you will know.”

What the chapter reveals is not simply proximity to a renowned figure. It is the anatomy of a genuine connection—how mutual respect becomes trust, and how trust becomes closeness over time. And then comes the moment of loss: how deeply he was affected when the news of Tata’s passing arrived. It is written with restraint, but it carries weight—the kind that does not require dramatization.

There is a temptation, in books by diplomats, either to idealize the profession or to reduce it to anecdotes. What if… Why Not? avoids both.

Instead, it offers first-hand experience from a refined and seasoned diplomat—wisdom shaped not in theory, but in lived reality. It helps the reader understand the complex position of an ambassador: the simultaneous demands of state representation and personal endurance; the necessity of discretion alongside the need for human warmth; the professional triumphs that often arrive with private sacrifices.

In that sense, Ambassador Maliki’s book is not only a memoir—it is a bridge. For young diplomats, it is a quiet guide. For the general reader, it is an invitation to appreciate what the title suggests: that behind every formal “why,” there is sometimes a courageous “why not?”

And perhaps that is the best way to describe the book’s spirit—its confidence in possibility, tempered by experience, and anchored in humanity.

The writer is Ambassador of the Sultanate of Oman to India