Barack Obama said that he has always held a special place for India due to his childhood years spent in Indonesia listening to Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Expressing his fascination for India in his latest book ‘A Promised Land’, Former US President Barack Obama said that he has always held a special place for India due to his childhood years spent in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Obama’s memoir, “A Promised Land,” arrives at a moment of deep political, cultural and social unrest — tensions that have been heightened by a global pandemic and an economic crisis.
“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 dal and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies,” Obama writes.
“Maybe it was its (India’s) sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken,” Obama said.
Obama says he had never been to India before his Presidential visit in 2010, but the country had “always held a special place in my imagination”.
“My book is for those young people — an invitation to once again remake the world, and to bring about, through hard work, determination, and a big dose of imagination, an America that finally aligns with all that is best in us,” Obama said.
In the 768-page first volume of his memoirs, the 44th US president reveals that he writes longhand with a pen on a yellow pad instead of on a computer and confesses to an inability to be concise.
