Lockdown Read : The Promised Land - Barrack Obama

Lockdown Read : The Promised Land - Barrack Obama 

O, fly and never tire

Fly and never tire

Fly and never tire

There is a camp-meeting in the promised land.

       - from an American African Spiritual

Do not discount our power

We have made a pas 

At the infinite 

          - Robert Frost Kitty Hawk 

 I am lucky to read Barrack Obama’s third autobiographical account The Promised Land running in 980 pages, after success of  his ‘ Dreams from My Father’ and ‘The Audacity of Hope’. And hold your breath, it will be  followed with its second volume also. 

The book has created a sort of storm in tea a cup in India as there was a intentional leak in Indian social media space about Barrack’s observation about Rahul Gandhi. But the book talks about India much more deeply . We will talk about that later. 

In the present book, like the best autobiographers, Barack Obama writes about himself in the hope of discovering who or even what he is. It’s a paradoxical project for a man who is universally known and idolised, but this uncertainty or insecurity is his motivating force and his most endearing quality. 

Briefly for those who know little less about Barrack , he was born to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, brought up in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated in California and New York, he has a plural personality. His mother anglicised his given name by calling him Barry, though he liked to pretend that it was a tribal epithet that identified him as a chieftain. As a candidate for the Senate, he admitted that he was “improbable”; campaigning for the presidency, he revised the adjective to “audacious”. This new book is a searchingly introspective account of Barrack’s  first presidential term, he divests himself of the “power and pomp” of office, disassembles the “ill-fitting parts” that make him up and ponders his similarity to “a platypus or some imaginary beast”, unsure of its dwindling habitat.

The book, he claims , was written by hand, because he mistrusts the smooth gloss of a digital text: he wants to expose “half-baked thoughts”, to scrutinise the first drafts of a person. He mistrusts his own eloquence as an orator, even though it “taps into some collective spirit” and leaves him with a “sugar high”. Hunched at his desk, he has to renounce those winged words and submit to a more reflective self-interrogation. “Is it worth it?”his wife, Michelle, demands as his political ambition upends their placid family life. “When is it going to be enough?” she asks later. Obama, glimpsing himself through her eyes as “this strange guy with a scruffy wardrobe and crazy dreams”, is not sure how to answer. After his election to the Senate, a reporter deferentially inquires: “What do you consider your place in history?”, to which Obama replies with incredulous laughter. Told that he has been awarded the Nobel peace prize, he addresses the question more probingly to himself: “For what?” he says.

Success intensifies Obama’s suspicion that he is an impostor: the crowds at his rallies diminish him rather than causing his ego to balloon, because he knows they are not “seeing me, with all my quirks and shortcomings”. He resists “the continuing elevation of me as a symbol”, because he knows that this hero-worship is a betrayal of his conviction that “change involves ‘we’, not ‘me’”. To disabuse us, illicit glimpses of the private man are permitted. At one point, he guiltily skulks on the back porch of a Chicago apartment to smoke while watching raccoons, indulging a “foul habit” of their own, forage through his household’s rubbish bins. Much more painfully, he feels “a great shame” when a political campaign keeps him from his mother’s deathbed.

Even his idealism is assessed as a character flaw. “I got lost in my head,” Obama says of his student days, while in the White House he is “trapped in my own high-mindedness”. Feeling somehow intellectually disembodied, he is warmed by Hillary Clinton’s “good, hearty laugh” and he explains that he chose the chatty, convivial Biden as his running mate because most of all, Joe had heart”. Obama’s plaintive substitute for Biden’s glad-handing is a collection of amulets presented to him by voters – a Las Vegas poker chip given to him by an Iowa biker; a heart of pink glass from a blind girl in New Hampshire; a silver cross from an Ohio nun. Despite these tactile reminders, his inauguration begins a stealthy, mortifying process that leaves him feeling depersonalised, numbly estranged from those who placed their trust in him. Cleared of traffic so that his armoured limo can cruise unimpeded, city streets become ghostly. His wardrobe at the White House tidies him out of existence: the socks and shorts of this incorrigibly messy man are “folded and sorted as if in a department store display”. Aides mechanise the body language of the new Boss by teaching him to “deliver a proper salute”, with elbow jutting out at a dramatic angle and fingertips tightly clenched at his eyebrow. The simplest physical act – a signature, for instance – now requires forethought. When signing legislation, he has to use a different pen for every letter of his name, so that the monogrammed implements can be distributed as souvenirs. Sending personal condolences to the families of fallen service members, he takes extra care, “careful not to smudge the heavy beige paper with my left-handed sideways grip”, miserably aware that his

autograph can never console the addressees of the letter for their loss.

At the book’s taut, thrillingly narrated climax, Obama vanquishes two enemies over a single weekend. He sends out a team of commandos to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, while in an after-dinner speech in Washington he ridicules Trump, who was then peddling a calumny that suggested Obama may have been born outside the US, which would have made him ineligible to be president. Triumphal rejoicing over Bin Laden’s corpse is not permitted. Instead Obama, who once exultantly caught and killed a fly during a television interview, ruefully muses that he could summon a sense of common purpose when executing a terrorist but not when passing healthcare reform. He allows himself to enjoy Trump’s writhing discomfort at the dinner, then has to admit that Trump “was a spectacle and that was a form of power”.

In his 980 page first volume of his book, Obama did find space for India especially Mahatma Gandhi. He writes

"More than anything, though, my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with (Abraham) Lincoln, (Martin Luther) King, and (Nelson) Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking," writes Obama, who had visited India twice as president.

"As a young man, I'd studied his writings and found him giving voice to some of my deepest instincts," the former US president said.

"His notion of ''satyagraha'', or devotion to truth, and the power of non-violent resistance to stir the conscience; his insistence on our common humanity and the essential oneness of all religions; and his belief in every society's obligation, through its political, economic, and social arrangements, to recognise the equal worth and dignity of all people -- each of these ideas resonated with me. Gandhi''s actions had stirred me even more than his words; he''d put his beliefs to the test by risking his life, going to prison, and throwing himself fully into the struggles of his people," Obama writes.

Gandhi's non-violent campaign for Indian independence from Britain, which began in 1915 and continued for more than 30 years, hadn't just helped overcome an empire and liberate much of the subcontinent, it had set off a moral charge that pulsed around the globe, he writes.

"It became a beacon for other dispossessed, marginalised groups - including Black Americans in the Jim Crow South - intent on securing their freedom," says Obama.

Recollecting his first visit to India in November 2010, Obama said he and then First Lady, Michelle, had visited Mani Bhavan, the modest two-story building tucked into a quiet Mumbai neighbourhood that had been Gandhi''s home for many years.

"Before the start of our tour, our guide, a gracious woman in a blue sari, showed us the guestbook Dr King had signed in 1959, when he'd travelled to India to draw international attention to the struggle for racial justice in the United States and pay homage to the man whose teachings had inspired him," he writes.

Obama said Gandhi had had more than his share of struggle. "For all his extraordinary gifts, Gandhi hadn't been able to heal the subcontinent's deep religious schisms or prevent its partitioning into a predominantly Hindu India and an overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan, a seismic event in which untold numbers died in sectarian violence and millions of families were forced to pack up what they could carry and migrate across newly established borders," he said.

"Despite his labours, he hadn't undone India's stifling caste system. Somehow, though, he''d marched, fasted, and preached well into his seventies - until that final day in 1948, when on his way to prayer, he was shot at point-blank range by a young Hindu extremist who viewed his ecumenism as a betrayal of the faith," Obama writes.

“Violence, both public and private, remained an all-too-pervasive part of Indian life. Expressing hostility toward Pakistan was still the quickest route to national unity, with many Indians taking great pride in the knowledge that their country had developed a nuclear weapons program to match Pakistan’s, untroubled by the fact that a single miscalculation by either side could risk regional annihilation. Most of all, India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste.” He wrote.

Obama extensively praised Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s beauty. “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,” he wrote.

He described her as a “striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence.”

Commenting on Sonia’s role in upholding the Gandhi legacy, he added: “That she — a former stay-at-home mother of European descent — had emerged from her grief after her husband was killed by a Sri Lankan separatist’s suicide bomb in 1991 to become a leading national politician testified to the enduring power of the family dynasty.”

“It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence,” he wrote.

Obama wrote that Congress President Sonia Gandhi may have picked Manmohan Singh as the country's 13th prime minister because "he posed no threat" to her son, Rahul, "whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party." "[Singh] owed his position to Sonia Gandhi," he added.

Elsewhere in the book, Obama described Singh as "wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest." Singh had brought about higher living standards, lifted millions of people out of poverty, and earned a positive reputation, Obama wrote.

Obama also commented on Rahul Gandhi and writes "has a nervous, unformed quality about him" — though also said he was "smart and earnest."

He likened him to "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."

Manmohan Singh was ‘wise, thoughtful and scrupulously honest’

Obama admits that he was able to develop a warm and productive relationship with Manmohan Singh over the years.

He further praised Manmohan Singh calling him a man of “uncommon wisdom and decency”.

“Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, meanwhile, had engineered the modernisation of his nation’s economy,” Obama wrote. He said that he found Singh to be “wise, thoughtful and scrupulously honest”.

Recalling his first visit to India in 2010, Obama said that Singh had expressed fears about the rising “anti-Muslim sentiment” that had strengthened the influence of the BJP. “‘In uncertain times, Mr. President,’ the prime minister (Manmohan Singh) said, ‘the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else,’” he recollected.

Obama’s fears about India’s future.

Obama called modern-day India a success story for surviving “repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals”. But he pointed out that the India of today, which is rife with inequality and violence, bore little resemblance to the society Gandhi had envisioned.

He raised concerns about the rise of a “divisive nationalism touted by the BJP” after Manmohan Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister was completed. “Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?” he asked. His visit to India also made him question whether impulses of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism and religious intolerance “were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain.”

“For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments,” Obama wrote.

While the present Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi did not find mention in the first volume of Obama’s memoir, he is likely to include his first impression of Modi in his subsequent book.

I may be wrong but I feel that Barrack Obama has expressed his impression about India or few of its politicians from the point of view of an American, you may agree or not agree with him. But, yes he wrote with passion so his book is worth reading.