Kannan Solayappan grew up in Chennai in Southern India and earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at a university in Bangalore. He then worked for 15 months in an Indian nylon factory as a graduate engineer. In the late 1980s, he saw the promise of computers and went to Australia to study computer science, graduating with a master’s in 1992. He then got married and came to work in the U.S. Starting as a software developer in the San Francisco Bay area, he moved to Minnesota in 1998 and has been a software consultant here for over 20 years now. In these years he has worked in most of the major companies in Minnesota, including IBM, Mayo Clinic, American Express, Cargill, 3M, United Health Care, Medtronic, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. He lives in Eagan with his wife, Vallikannu, who works as a banker in Wells Fargo.
Kannan was first drawn to world affairs in 1979 when he encountered Henry Kissinger’s book White House Years by way of excerpts in Time Magazine. He was especially fascinated by Kissinger’s placement of political events in the grand sweep of history. Kannan’s interests expanded over the years to include intellectual history, philosophy, and area studies, especially in Europe, India, and the Middle East. His perspective was also shaped by a wide array of life experiences, including as an international student, when he shared apartments with immigrants (possibly illegal!) from Muslim countries and worked as a kitchenhand, waiter, laborer, and market research interviewer to support himself. He has also spent time in Nigeria and Singapore. All of these experiences inform the pan-civilizational approach Kannan brings to politics and history in his book, Modernity, Civilizations and the Truth, and he looks forward to sharing his interests and views as a Great Decisions speaker.
