24 October,2010 07:22 AM IST | | Anuvab Pal
Mr Barack Obama, sometime President, mostly rock star, voted by most magazines as the only politician women across ages, nations and demographics would unanimously sleep with, will be in Mumbai in a couple of weeks. Not to provide that opportunity but to smoothen a somewhat terse relationship his Presidency has had with us. And to do so, he will come to the town that fires our economic boom to see how and where it all happens. And perhaps give us a great speech about how we dealt with terrorism and -- actually, it doesn't matter what his speech will be about -- it's an Obama speech -- it will be great -- no one will listen to a thing he'll say -- there will be something about two great democracies- about facing terror together -- something about hope -- but mainly we'll, like the world, be mesmerized.
There will be a standing ovation -- captains of industry, unable to control how inspired they'll get, will be in tears like schoolchildren,u00a0 some wives will pass out, perhaps the Chief Minister will immediately encourage universities to teach Obama's book to fill the gap he created by dropping Rohinton Mistry. Abe Lincoln once said, "There are some great men who have this voice, this elegant composure -- it doesn't matter if they have the qualification to lead a country -- they should be given one". Obama's qualified and has one.
Of course, it's troubled times. And the heroic voice, the movie star enigma, if the Republican Tea Party movement is an indicator, is not enough to excuse the stagnant economy, the endless Afghan war, foreclosures, a 10 percent unemployment rate. Of course, it's another story that an angry anti-Obama right wing populist movement loses some of its menace by calling itself the group that drinks tea.
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If one is mad about Obama's policies and forms little opposition groups to voice and protest how they feel (as has been done across Middle America), perhaps they need a name that's more Al Pacino and less Alice in Wonderland. Still, this mid-term elections in November, which Mr Obama will rush back to after being done with us, will decide how unhappy America is with the man everyone thought could solve everything, and whether tea partying is really the way to vote this man out of office.
Till such time though, we have his somewhat divided attention, but more importantly, him. It's the capital city for a couple of days, and Mumbai for one.
It's been four years since George W Bush, a President who loved us, but whom the world didn't, got off Air Force One in Delhi and said "Namaste". It was a different world then, the US economy was making so much money that people were donating entire fortunes to diseases or conflicts or things no one had heard of.
Ajmal Kasab wasn't a household name and the I-Pad wasn't invented. As an aside, when the American Poetry Association received a donation of 440 million in 2007 from some soaring hedge fund, someone said, "Finally, a totally new kind of person ufffda loaded poet".
Today, a more charismatic and perhaps better man makes his way back, but the world around him, especially the state of his nation, is not as comfortable and by extension, he can't be. Outsourcing is often, to middle-class America, directly taken to mean people are fired and replaced by a Bangalore version of themselves, which one assumes requires the President to sometimes voice it as a concern. And allows our media to immediately label him anti-outsourcing or anti-India growth or as one extreme headline read, "Obama and India. In Bed Or Not?"
All of this of course makes the Obama machinery worried about how every little thing will be interpreted. A visit to CST might be off because we'd be unable to give him a "proper" security blanket. The fact that CST has any security at all, proper or improper, is of course news to us.
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A visit to the Golden Temple is off the agenda because he'd have to wear a head scarf which might make him appear Islamic to a large swath of Fox News watching middle-America that already apparently has issues with his close associations with Islam.
As a CNN reporter said recently, "Anything on his head is a no no back home". Before one gets angry as to why these people might confuse Sikhism and Islam, please forgive them by knowing that some of these people also don't believe Darwin or Evolution make sense. They insist on schools teaching Intelligent Design whose main premise is that God made the world, yes, all of it, including the oceans and the eco systems and forests and Taiwan and Shiney Ahuja, in seven days.
So that's the world we live in, in which a Harvard lawyer, master orator and The President Of The United States, en route to one of the fastest growing economies in the world, has to, in 2010, balance people that think he's related to Osama, or that Bangalore is some place out to destroy Ohio's peace and quiet or people who think reading a book might injure you and come out of it all, saying that intelligent progressive free ideas will make it -- all we need is the audacity of hope.
Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.
