There is little doubt in my mind that in the coming years when I grow old and haggard and sit down for a chat with my grandchildren telling about all the things that I have witnessed in my lifetime, November 4th 2008 and January 20th 2009 will be two important dates.  I will mention the fact that the biggest and the most powerful nation of my time, for the first time ever achieved what it used to proudly proclaim, liberty and equality. It took nation some 232 years to finally deliver the promise it had made. By becoming the 44th president of the United States of America, Barrack Hussein Obama has finally proved that the nation is one of dreamers and achievers, not of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or Mormons. Today the White House in Washington, DC, is no more just a white’s house.

Surely, my grandchildren will wonder as to what was so great about an African American becoming a president, when there were a huge number of Black Americans in USA. With a benign smile, I will tell them of the class struggles, how the Blacks or African Americans were niggers in the past. How through the ages, slave traders from Spain and Britain used to capture innocent people from Africa and make them lead a despicable existence in some farm. I will divulge how in spite of all tall claims of modernity, the American society was very much fractured on the basis of colour, though it might appear otherwise. I will give examples of rampant discrimination in every form, be it schools, colleges, workplaces, restaurants and even public transportation, talking about the life in ghettos, full of crime and penury.  I will also tell them about an incident that I had known about the race riots in America, after a Black (Rodney King, hopefully) was mercilessly battered by a few White cops.

In this context, I will paint Obama as a bigger hero than he was.  I will proudly boast of how I was in the US when the elections results were declared and how I witnessed the frenzy. Even as I talk, I will reach for my cupboard and from therein I will pull out yellowing copies of SF Chronicle and NYT dated November 3 and 4th, 2008. I will also show off the round pin-up batches of Obama campaign that I had picked up from an old vendor from San Francisco, with a small American star and stripe flag. I will preen about those days, reminiscing about how the entire world was completely wonderstruck and joyous about a Black Democrat being the President of the USA.

And then, I will tell about January 20th 2009, when Obama took the oath of office in front of millions of individuals that had thronged the White House.  I will briefly mention the whole ceremony, and also tell them of how Obama spoke to the world at large from the podium.  I don’t think I will be able to tell much about what he spoke, since his speech was not up to the historic moment.  Even now when I think of it, there is little that I can recall about his speech, it was just like the hundreds he has made over the past year or more. I will rue in front of my grand kids of how I sat in front of the television, waiting for every word from his lip, hoping that he will touch my chords, make me proud of this moment, reassure that course of history has been corrected, paint a picture of beautiful and equal future and how Obama did noting of that.  I will give them the example of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech on India’s freedom, “at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps..”.

Hopefully, I will have a lot more to tell my grand kids about Obama and how his presidency was vastly different from the rest, that he was not merely a Black or an African American President but a great one and that he might have made history by becoming the supreme commander, but he left a bigger mark on history as the supreme commander.

Just in case, my memory fails when I am older, I will read this post written on that historic night of January 20th, and then ask my grand kids to gather around me and tell them the story of a certain Obama and how I lived in his times.