When Ahmed Asim was a boy his career path had already been laid out before him

“My job is to make people feel at home, literally, since this has been my home for the past 30 years,” says Ahmed Asim, room director of the St. Regis Vommuli hotel in the Maldives.

Between his generation and that of his parents, his country has turned from a gathering of specks in the Indian Ocean to one of the world’s best known and most desired escapes.

Yet for Asim, the notion of escape is virtually nonexistent, if not laughable.

“For me, this only provides an initiation to the outside world as they are coming to us in planeloads.”

His entree into this world came early, he says. When he was at primary school, property owners invited him and his classmates to tour the resort islands, where human endeavor tries to emulate natural beauty in creating paradise on Earth — sometimes with unintended results.

“Wow! was my reaction,” Asim recalls, casting an incredulous look. “Then I told myself: ‘Someday I’m going to work here.’ ”

The wide-eyed child has given way to a soft-spoken man with a confident air, and in the meantime he has gained a diploma in hospitality and worked as a trainee butler and then as a butler for many years in a number of hotels, some of them luxury ones. He joined the St. Regis at Vommuli as room director in October, when preparations were being made for the hotel’s grand opening.

“Between 50 and 60 percent of our 300-strong staff are Maldivians,” Asim says. “Quite a few of us, including me, are in management.”

Spending the bulk of his time in air-conditioned rooms or traveling in buggies from villa to villa, Asim’s life is a world apart from that of his parents, who have seven children including him.

“Like most Maldivian families of their generation, my father made a living out of fishing while my mother did household chores. The sea around here is probably the calmest on Earth. I’ve never heard of anyone who died out fishing in the sea. But still, the sun and the wind can be unforgiving; that’s why few young people are involved in fishing today.”

His father usually left home about 5:30 am and fished for tuna all day before returning in the evening, he says.

“Ours was a small boat. There were also bigger boats on which one can go out fishing in the sea longer, for example two weeks. But

I told myself: ‘Someday I’m going to work here.’” Ahmed Asim, room director of the St. Regis Vommuli hotel in the Maldives

whatever you go out in, a small or big one, fishing in the Maldives has to be by pole instead of by net. We do angling all the time. The fish nets are reserved only for the capture of baitfish — fish used as bait when angling.

“Our government has been very aggressive when it comes to environmental protection. That’s why we still have what we had 20 or 30 years ago.”

Asked whether angling is a financially viable way of fishing, Asim says that on a good day a good angler can catch up to 2,000 tuna. The fish tend to appear in groups, and when you really think about it, that kind of catch suggests the fish must virtually be jumping onto the hook, if not directly into the boat.

These days, fishing has greatly decreased compared with 20 years ago. Asim’s parents stopped fishing