Former US President Barack Obama unleashes the West's worst stereotypical picture of India as a country with "all-too-pervasive" violence and politics revolving around "religion, clan, and caste" in his latest memoir and yet in the same breath talks about Sonia Gandhi, a "mother of European descent", emerging as the most powerful politician who is able to appoint Manmohan Singh from a minority as prime minister.

"Across the country, millions continued to live in squalor, trapped in sunbaked villages or labyrinthine slums, even as the titans of Indian industry enjoyed lifestyles that the rajas and moguls of old would have envied," he writes in his new memoir, "A Promised Land".