Former US President Barack Obama's new memoir, "A Promised Land" is creating tons of controversies in India. Obama's narration of his experience in India is making the Congress party of India uncomfortable.
Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a White American mother, with a sometimes Indonesian step-father, pretending to labor under the time-worn cliche of bearing the "Whiteman's burden", in a broad sweep encapsulates the nation in its entirety with these images.
The image of India he offers up with supercilious condescension to his readers is not something he had seen for himself, as he acknowledges not having travelled to the country before becoming president, although "the country had always held a special place in my imagination".
Obama and his wife reportedly received $65 million as advance from their publisher for their memoirs.
"A Promised Land" ends with 2011 and the next volume is to pick up after that. For that reason Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not figure in the book.
The ascent to prime ministership by Singh, a member of "often persecuted Sikh religious minority," he writes, "sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country's progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving".
"More than one political observer believed that she'd chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her 40-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party," Obama writes.
But Obama is smitten with Singh, whom he describes as "wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest" and "man of uncommon wisdom and decency" with a white beard and a turban that "to the Western eye lent him the air of a holy man".
He writes that with Singh, he developed "a warm and productive relationship" and forged agreements for cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade despite a bureaucracy's historic suspicion of the US".
SOURCES: IANS