Former US president Barack Obama has revealed that during his childhood in Indonesia, he grew up listening to the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and how India has always held a special place in his imagination.
In his memoir A Promised Land, which has been making waves in India recently, the 59-year-old writes about his fascination for India, the very size of the country, its diverse cultures and languages.
“Maybe it was its (India) sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken.
“Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies,” Obama writes in the book. He visited India for the first time in 2010 when he was the US president and revealed that even before his visit, the country had “always held a special place in my imagination”.
In the new book, Obama writes about his political journey, the 2008 US elections when he was elected as the 44th president of the United States of America, becoming the first African American to hold office, and to the end of his first term in office.
A Promised Land has been at the eye of the storm in India after an excerpt from the book on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi went viral.
“Rahul Gandhi has a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject,” he wrote.
This caused quite a stir as a few leaders from the Congress did not take kindly to Obama’s opinion on Rahul. Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said the political discourse following the remarks is “distasteful”, and added that a foreign politician can’t give such opinions on Indian leaders. He further questioned Obama’s knowledge on India.
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi is also mentioned in the book. “We are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel, but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi,” Obama wrote.
A Promised Land, the first of two volumes, will be released on November 17 by Penguin Random House. Obama’s other works include the book Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.
