The Beggar who came from the Cold

The visit of President Obama is filled with uniqueness and this inimitability suits the stated purpose of the visit.
Nowadays it is a fashion in the business circle to measure the effectiveness and performance of a newly appointed CEO on the basis of a report card based on the first hundred days in the office. The CEO also makes sure that in the first 100 days he visits to inspire the subsidiaries in the countries which are generating or have the potential of delivering higher returns, India often featuring in the top 10 of this list

The president may be allowed some concessions for not having to make it in the first 100 days, but surely did he visit China and India in the same year and stopped short of visiting Pakistan in spite of coming so near.

Also President Obama may be the first and presumably the last non-white president of the U.S. to visit India as America impedes their experiment with “change”.

This is the first time a President of America came calling to India on a purely business mission and landed in Mumbai, bypassing the state honour at Delhi.
What ever was left of “strategic” policies with the South Block was shifted to a secondary visit after the main mission was accomplished.

On the first day of the meeting while some symbolic private deals worth around $10 billion were struck by private ventures, while in Mumbai you have to play along with Ambanis, the press and media went ballistic on the mere modalities of non issues like President never uttering the sinful word, Pakistan, and how India will benefit from this visit.

The American administration has made no false claims about this visit as being purely a mission to save the greatest nation of the world albeit the fact that our expectations are simply creations of our own fecundity.

But a careful look will emphasis on the point, what really America has to offer besides "running" shoes and "bottled aerated" water and an operating system which crashes more often than its running period?

There is not much of technology that America can offer in the field of agriculture, industrial technology, healthcare and communications - either India has the self expertise or they have better partners in Europe to choose from.

Today is a far cry from the fifties and sixties where Indian Prime Ministers went to U.S. with begging bowls asking for food to feed the ever growing hunger of people, fed over enthusiastically on doses of socialism and what India got in return was rotten, rejected lots of PL240 wheat, which was meant for cattle feed in U.S.

The only thing that America can offer is military technology, where it has got real expertise, cultivated through decades and tested at all battlefields in the world , which had been their own creation for testing their developments.

This is where the President is needed to do a hard sell with India, as India has a strategic reliance on Russia, France and to some extent even Israel on these issues.

Nowadays military deals are predominantly done by politicians and thrust upon the armed forces, with a result that to some extent we have seen our intelligence and military capabilities compromised.

This visit of President Obama is no exception, except for the fact that Americans, in a way they do the best, has taken their best leaf out of the marketing expertise from Harvard or MIT and succeeded in camouflaging the whole visit with a "partnership" or "collaborative" overtone.

We, in India, stand to gain nothing out of this visit, not even money that can buy you a candy. America has come with a begging bowl but with a mentality, of a misplaced notion, as the most powerful nation of the world.

This is clearly reflected in the tone and tenor of the president and while we may jump around, with our never ending colonial mentality, relishing on his intellect and charisma and wanting our politicians to be wearing pinstriped suits and speaking cultivated Harvard "English", but at the end of the day for a farmer dying of hunger neither the town hall meetings or the business meets gives them any hope of survival.

This is typical of America as it is typical of India to be subservient to any visitor, even to Pakistan, under the guise of our heritage of treating our guests as God.
Over the last six decades India was looked down upon by the U.S. state administration, so much so that Henry Kissinger did not think twice before calling Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a “bitch”. There is a growing rhetoric that we must forget the past and move ahead, but this rhetoric will remain rhetoric, till the major political parties can forget about the incidents of 1984, 1998 and 2002 and move ahead. Selective amnesia can be disconcerting.

While the Tea Party may object to what they see as an abject wastage of money spent in this visit of President Obama to India, we Indians hardly see the amount of capital that will be carried away by the Air Force One leaving us doing what best we can - sucking our thumbs.
November may be too early or in this context even Mumbai, but this visit of the President Obama can be aptly termed as "The Beggar who came from the Cold", to borrow from John Le’ Carre, and if that may restore any pride in our already famished hearts.