President Obama in India

Nasir Khan, January 30, 2015

Professor Badri Raina is a canny writer whose obervations go deeper than merely embellishing some news for entertaining the Indian crowds. This is evident in his present article.

Obama represents the power of US imperialism and he is the president of US. But people like Modi may have miscalculated that the guy is in his pocket as a Hindutva devotee who is living far away from his Mother Country whose glorious children are scattered worldwide! So much chutzpah for Indian-ness, without realising that a foreign head of state should be treated according to the usual protocol, without owning him or her!

Then there comes in our Indian-ness. ‘He is just one of us!’ ‘The two are just like our own!' Oh, really? Obama must have been honoured with such adulation, no doubt!

But naivete and stupidity have no anchorage or limit. If Obama and Michelle’s looks were the point of focus then they certainly look like some of our Indo-Pakistani people who are dark-skinned, 'low- caste' people such as Dalits, the Dravadian races or swarthy, flat-nosed old tribals whose miserable lives have not changed much in the last three thousand years.

 BHO has a long tongue and some knowledge as well. He was not ensnared by Modi’s antics. By the way, we don’t see such patronising attitude extended to other black African people as own lost children in the Dark Continent!

Badri has poured some water of sanity on the issue and not followed our leaders to ‘re-baptise’ Obama and his wife in the Vedic faith and embellish them in the saffron chaders and dhotis but first  rubbing some cow dung on their foreheads to complete the sacred initiation into the Hindufold!
——————-

Obama: he came, he saw, he gave advice

By Badri Raina , ZNet, January 29, 2015

 Obama spent three whole days in India. He was welcomed like one of our own, complete with huggy hugs and the intimacy of first naming, even if one-sided, the erudite Indian Chief Executive going even to the extent of telling him the meaning of his first name, Barack, which now we know means “the one who is blessed.” The 1894 triumph was mentioned—that  telling  moment when our Vivekananda took the Parliament of Religions at Chicago by storm and taught the world a thing or two about the pre-eminence of our Vedas. Coming as he does from the very same Chicago, Obama had had the wit to present to the visiting Indian Prime Minister a year or so ago  a compilation of the speeches made at that watershed event in Chicago a century and a quarter  back  where Vivekananda “proved” to the semitic world how the Vedas were the mother of all faiths, and how being Hindu meant being universal.

Just when the Obama visit was going so swimmingly, bathed in the  glow of the Vedas and sundry saffron accoutrement, imagine what this Obama fellow, during an address to India’s aspirating youth, proud of the Vedic  yore, even if by hearsay, but yearning for a Yankee future, chose to do: as if  poking  a finger in the  Hindutva eye, this Obama made bold to say how “Michelle and I have been strengthened by our Christian faith.” No ghar vapsi (i.e. return to the all-encompassing original faith) there, you might well say, Vivekananda or no Vivekananda. Was he also insinuating that it might be wrong to vandalise churches etc.? In other words, teaching us tolerance on our own tolerant soil. Fingers crossed. We need his technology.

Continues >>