What was engaging about Jayakumar is that he has been working in development in India for more than 30 years, and he is not despondent or cynical despite the sometimes overwhelming magnitude of the task!
He maintains his passion and has earned the reputation in India of disturbing the status quo and asking the tough questions of his government and the powerful in order to help the poor. Perhaps that's why we get along so well!
The other major event last week was the announcement by the federal government of a change in policy on climate change. This is such a fraught issue for all nations to grapple with.
There are still a few climate change skeptics - and we are learning so much about the science that there is raft of changing theories - but overwhelmingly it is clear that there is a looming catastrophe for future generations to deal with, unless we take decisive and strong action now.
It really has become a moral challenge for leaders to deal with - will they be able to face their children and grandchildren and say, yes, we were warned, and yes, we did all that was possible to prevent the planet's climate spiralling into dangerous warming?
There are legitimate concerns from businesses worried about how it will affect their costs in the shot term and longer term viability. About how coal mining communities will fare. And it is true that there should be assistance to ensure the painful costs of adjustment to a low-carbon economy are kept as low as possible.
But this dilemma has also been the product of generations of western industrialisation - something we all benefit from - and one where the market has failed.
The real cost of polluting the atmosphere with carbon, and the costs of cleaning it up, were never included in the price of electricity, or mining, or smelting, or transport, or even farming.
And there is scaremongering that bringing in a proper accounting for the carbon pollution is going to cripple the economy. But the work done by Professor Ross Garnaut only found a tiny decrease in economic growth to 2050 - not one that is catastrophic or going backwards at all! The CSIRO, Australia's main scientific research body, found jobs would actually be created by a shift to a low-carbon economy.
So when Jayakumar, a warm man who is passionate about bringing real development improvements to thousands of villages in his country, heard about Australia at least raising the possibility of stronger targets, he was encouraged. You see, for countries like India which still has 700 million poor people and almost half of her children still suffering nutritional deficiencies, development remains their priority, and putting a clamp on that to help solve a problem created by the richer west is down the order of their priorities.
The most promising thing that happened last week was the Rudd government's decision to raise the ceiling target range for cutting emissions from 5-15 per cent to 5-25 per cent. What we now need is to raise the floor from 5 per cent to at least 15 per cent. Even so the change may well reopen a door to the possibility that a global deal might be struck at Copenhagen.
That is something that the world's poor, who stand to fare the worst from a warming planet, and our children would cheer about.
