Acclaimed humanitarian Mukesh Kapila has lived eye-to-eye with the very worst conditions human beings can endure. He’s faced cataclysmic natural disasters – lakes in Cameroon vomiting clouds of toxic gas, and the devastating Indian Ocean Tsunami – as well as global medical emergencies and disease pandemics – the AIDS crisis in Malawi and Ebola in Sierra Leone.

He has witnessed first-hand the savageries of war and protracted conflict – while airlifting aid to the besieged civilians of Sarajevo under sniper fire, and working with the survivors of civil war in Bangladesh. At times he was obliged to ‘dine with the devil’, while striving to bring hope to some of the world’s most desperate and vulnerable people. He’s taken tea with the Taliban in Afghanistan while passionately arguing for women’s health, and shaken hands with North Korea’s dictators to shame them to get food to the starving.

Kapila has also borne witness to the very worst evil mankind is capable of: genocide. A direct descendent from survivors of the genocidal violence of Indian Partition in 1947, Kapila was first on the scene after the terrible Rwandan genocide in 1994. Having plumbed the depths of human savagery and evil, he vowed then: “not on my watch”.

But a decade later, as head of the United Nations in Sudan, he was forced to confront the first genocide of the twenty-first century, becoming the high-level whistleblower who exposed that nation’s government for masterminding the mass-murder of their own citizens, in Darfur.

No Stranger To Kindness asks the question: when faced with a tide of evil, what gives human beings the strength to keep going and to extend the balm of human kindness, despite everything?

While focusing on heart-warming individual works of compassion and healing that Kapila has encountered throughout his long and challenging career, No Stranger to Kindness also takes the reader deep into the workings of the world’s foremost humanitarian bodies in which he held high positions – the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the International Red Cross Red Crescent – to conclude that it is not the institutions that matter as much as the human hearts inside them.

An uplifting and optimistic counterblast to Kapila’s first book, Against a Tide of Evil, which documented his experience of genocide in Sudan, No Stranger to Kindness chronicles his wider life driven by the simple human desire to help. It shows how acts of kindness from one person to another – often between complete strangers – can change the world, even in the gravest of circumstances.