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B. S. Raghavan

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.

John Masefield

THE Prime Minister is already becoming the butt of cartoons making fun of his visiting India occasionally in the midst of his travels. Most of his Ministers, and other VIPs down the line, too find the urge to take off to foreign shores on the slightest pretext irresistible. But I thought the President, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, was the last person to allow himself to be swallowed up by the system and ethos at Delhi. I was surprised to see him undertake what to me seemed a somewhat unexciting State visit, of all countries, to UAE, Sudan and Bulgaria.

On all accounts, no singular benefits seem to have accrued from this trip. Dr Kalam, however, is reported to have returned "elated over growing goodwill for Indians abroad". Surely, given his perceptive and sensitive nature, he would have observed that there has not so far been a single instance of a State visit by exalted constitutional functionaries such as the President and the Prime Minister to other countries ever being unsuccessful or ever producing anything but elation.

Indeed, if the trumpeting by the dignitaries when they are reluctantly back to their posts is to be believed, their visits are, without exception, a roaring success. There is a remarkable similarity in the gushing descriptions of their achievements while abroad: If we take them at their word, the visits unfailingly evoke an enormous fund of goodwill for India; and an unquenchable thirst for fostering and strengthening relations of all kinds and at all levels and for all time. Usually, some agreement or other of little consequence is signed to justify the expensive gallivanting.

To add to the futility, the criteria adopted by the mandarins and their masters in Delhi for the choice of countries are mystifying. Some of them are nondescript and some others come nowhere near India in any of the parameters — size, GNP, heritage, traditions, complexity, challenges — that may make it worthwhile to compare notes and exchange views.

I cannot, for the life of me, divine why our constitutional functionaries should be spending precious time, money and energy to indulge their wanderlust in this manner. Of course, if the top dignitaries of these countries are bent on paying us a visit, we have no option but to lump the waste of time, receive them courteously and give them a nice holiday.

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