Oh rest assured, I am not going to talk about nightmares or sweet dreams I enjoy in my night sleep, and not even about the ones I might be seeing da(y)ily... and for that matter it isn't my dreams we are talking about...
I just finished a book by Barrack Obama, (ok I have to admit I got it right after US elections got over!) but didn't get around to reading it then. It's called Dreams From My Father, a book that mirrors the American dream, a lot of Indians will actually connect to it.
It is the life of Barrack Obama. Life as a black, life as a child who was a result of miscegenation: an American mom and an African father, an Afro-American... with separated parents. A single mother taking care of the child with just memories as a means of recalling the father, who had returned back to where he came from... Africa. It is the life of a young boy confused by apartheid, struggling to see why he was different from others' perspective, a brilliant child who they say inherited his father's brains, his father a sort of a leader of the Luo tribe back home in Africa. The book speaks at length about the racial discrimination of the blacks, right there in the heart of America, the America that stood as a symbol of world power even back then... (the book was written when he was in Harvard Law School and republished when he became a senator).
Obama, as a priviliged kid felt that he should be giving back to the black community, been brought up mostly by his grandparents, he hasn't seen the days most young kids get exposed to and fall into the trap of a world that leads nowhere... drugs,booze,fag! Yet he did experiment, he did fall and he did get up back on his feet... The rest of the book tells the story of how he traced back his roots, went to Africa to see the relatives he had never met, to meet the cousins he hadn't heard of, and to visit the lands that somewhere he knew were never going to be his...
I would be the last person to glorify Obama as a President, because as far as I am concerned, he still has a lot to live up to, if he has to be great in my eyes. But as an author, and as a person who has endured so much, who has been given so much agony and who has but triumphed over them, he deserves a lot of respect.
The book deals with a lot of stuff that I, as an Indian would probably never understand, because whatever else we've seen, we haven't seen apartheid, we haven't seen a lot of these things... or maybe I live a life toooo protected... I dunno...
In the wake of what happened with SRK, I wanted to write a post but couldn't decide where my commitments lay coz arguments from both the sides sound extremely convincing. Infact, if someone asked me to participate in a debate on it, I might speak for the motion i.e. for the justification of the detaining, but somewhere deep, my heart tries to point out Iraq and its jail incidents, it tries to point out to New York(the movie) and how the innocent too suffer, it points out the sham America pretends to be when it champions the cause of human rights, lecturing other nations about it, when time and again there have been allegations that the US has always always acted in its own political interest and I can't say I have found all of them to be false!!!
But ladies and gentlemen, the House is open for the debate, and lets pray the attendance here is better than what Indian Parliament witnesses...
