Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I started my working life as a trainee in The Statesman in New Delhi, more decades ago than I care to remember. We, the lowly ones in the hierarchy, were forbidden to use the first person singular. To write about oneself was a cardinal sin, guaranteeing expulsion from the ivory tower that was this newspaper – preeminently a male citadel – in the 70s. Even today, it takes a lot of revving up before I can bring personal anecdotes and revelations into my writing. But this time, as you will see, there’s good reason to.

Grandmotherly duties and pleasures bring me to Washington DC in the cold heart of winter. Despite having spent my childhood here, memories of my years here have long since fossilised. Nothing, not even Dunkin' Donuts or passing by the home we lived in or the schools I went to stirs them enough to rise to the surface. But the other day three words caught my attention and suddenly a host of images and emotions came flooding in.

It was late evening and we were on our way home when we passed the entrance of Glen Echo Park, an amusement park in Bethesda: it’s in the state of Maryland, on the outskirts of the American capital. Of the park itself I don’t remember much, other than images of cotton candy and a colourful merry-go-round. What does remain is the conversation with a young African- American girl I met through friends a few weeks later. If memory serves me well her skin was a kind of honey mocha, substantially lighter than mine. When I mentioned the visit to Glen Echo Park she went silent before blurting out : ‘How could you go there, only white people are allowed!’ The ‘you’ was in caps.

Well I suppose diplomats and their families were then considered beyond race, the exceptions. And we who lived inside the cocoon of those blessed with diplomatic immunity were oblivious to the segregation and gentler version of apartheid going on in the world outside this laksman rekha protecting us. The schools we went to were predominantly white and the African Americans didn’t exist, or were invisible to us. In fact, many of us thought we were closer to white than black!

Needless to say that day came as a rude awakening about racial discrimination – and the realisation that Indians were way down on the other side of white on this colour chart. Strange, as coincidence can often be, a couple of days after the amusement park jogged my memory there was a moving story in The Washington Post, a national daily, about the death of Senator Gwendolyn Brit, a senior African American Maryland politician who had been arrested in 1960 for riding on the merry-go-round at Glen Echo Park. The placard the young Gwendolyn was carrying said: ‘Discrimination is NOT for our generation’.

Today, the handsomely elegant Senator Barack Obama – hanging in there somewhere between the generation of those who fought for Civil Rights like Brit and the hip-hop generation – is a frontrunner in the race for the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. An African American in the White House is no longer a mere fantasy. Rev Jesse Jackson who won 13 primaries had declared himself as President of Black America. Actor Chris Rock even made a comedy, Head of State with a black president.

Obama, who has a Kenyan father and a white mother, beat Hillary Clinton to the post at the caucus in Iowa, a state that is predominantly white and prides itself on its common sense. The youth, mesmerised by Obama’s stirring oratory and his call for change, turned out in large numbers for him. Editorials followed, like an avalanche; with some even comparing him to a young John F. Kennedy (he did go to Harvard as well), while others mentioned him in the same breath as Martin Luther King Jr. Senator Clinton turned the tables on him in the primary in New Hampshire right after this, but the halo round him continued to glow.

However, the Obamamania (as some in the media have called it) soon hit some road blocks as the campaigning began to get a little more down and dirty and that R word – race – began to crop up. Volleying repartees between the Clintons – Bill and Hill and their supporters – and Obama have been sharp. While the Clinton camp has said that Senator Obama was no Martin Luther King, his supporters accused the Clintons of racial baiting.
No matter how many ceasefires, the matter of race will always be in the subtext here. But there’s one question that has been bothering me. It’s that whole chestnut about being half full or half empty. Obama’s father is black but his mother is white, and this fact, in a sense makes him an ideal representative of both races – a unifying factor if you will. Doesn’t it?

Political Idol
There was always something carnival-like about political campaigns. Certainly, it could not get much more colourful and surreal than what goes on the battlefields of electoral politics in India. But in the United States it is fast turning into a spectator sport, with political junkies hopping from one caucus or primary to another, with their cameras in tow. One of the papers even described them as ‘voter vagabonds’. Some of them even campaign-hop as a group – much like a bird watchers’ party that may go from sanctuary to sanctuary. It wouldn’t be surprising if an enterprising travel agent were to specialise in political tourism. The run-up to the presidential elections is quite unique this time: a woman and an African American man are major contenders.

What makes it all more entertaining is the fact that this is taking place in the age of the internet – especially youtube. Take the teardrops that threatened to spill out of Senator Clinton’s eyes when she was asked an innocuous question in a New Hampshire café (‘How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?’) just after her defeat in Iowa. The teary eyes got continuous replay on cable television, and women feeling sorry for her turned out in large numbers to assure her victory in the North Hampshire primary. Perhaps, she was just exhausted.

The whole thing seems to be playing like reality television for ‘political idol’, or even Oprah. What the normally emotionally reticent Senator managed with a hint of emotion or a lump in the throat, Tom Cruise couldn’t do, despite jumping up and down on the sofa on Oprah Winfrey’s show.
Screenwriters (on strike here for months) could not have scripted this one.