You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service.

This is Hard Talk with me, Zainab Bedawi.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program, and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zainab Bedawi.

He began life as an Armenian refugee in Lebanon. He spent his early years in an orphanage just outside Beirut.

And then at the age of eight, he had to leave it. And so he lived rough on the streets.

Fleeing the start of the civil war in Lebanon, he made his way to the United Kingdom in 1972 and went on to become a world-class music conductor.

My guest today is Vartan Malkonian.

What does his life story tell us about human nature and the common challenges we face today?

Sir Vartan Melconian, welcome to Hard Talk.

Did you ever believe that a street slug, as you used to be described,

living in the slums of Beirut on the streets,

would then become knighted by Prince Charles

and become a world-class conductor.

You know, when you live in the sewers, in the city sewers,

when raw sewage is running by your barefoot,

you have little choice but to enter the realm of incredible imagination. And in that dark

sewers, you would imagine I sat with queens and kings and had counsel with them and have received

the enormous amount of accolades in that world of imagination. But when it came to the truth, when later in my life,

when the good providence allowed me to climb the marble staircase of aristocratic England,

I was well prepared. I knew it all. I've seen it all. You see slums and the streets can teach you something that people who have lived in a privileged background cannot learn.

So there you were. Your parents had gone to Lebanon from Armenia to escape the mass killings of the, what was described as the genocide by the Turks,

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