Rumi Nations

So, it's one year now since Obama won a historic election. We — not to mention the media — tend to overuse the 'historic' word all too often and thereby have devalued it quite a bit. I think Obama's win was one of those occasions that truly deserves this epithet. We humans are at a stage in our evolution when our ethnic, national, racial, etc. identities mean a lot to us. We have not yet learnt to transcend these narrow definitions of who we are. In India, of course, we still continue to cling — like our lives depended on this — to our religions, our caste, and sub-castes and what not. And so the media will predictably spend hours discussing Obama's successes and failures in these past 365 days. Perhaps in a set-up as complex as that prevailing in the United States, it's not much that a President can do. Crises of course present opportunities. FDR was a "war President" who rose to the multiple challenges that he was presented with. Lincoln of course sh...