The Hindu Business Line : ‘Times they are a-changing’

How the times are not only a-changing, but are being stood on their head. On big and small things, the manners and mores within countries and all over the world are becoming unrecognisable. The old timers must be plaintively and pathetically quoting to themselves A. E. Housman’s famous lines: “I, a stranger and afraid, In a world I never made”. Far from making their world, they must be feeling that they are losing all grip over it.

They could never have imagined a scene like that between the Pakistani President, Mr Asif Zardari, and the US Vice-Presidential candidate, Ms Sarah Palin, taking place in their times, or even barely five years ago. Mr Zardari, it will be recalled, got carried away as he entered Ms Palin’s presence and uninhibitedly exclaimed, “How gorgeous you are!”, adding for good measure, “I now understand why the whole of America is crazy about you!”.

Flashback to March 2005. In a biography on the US Secretary of State, titled Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and her Path to Power, the author who is also the Newsweek magazine’s senior editor, Marcus Mabry, reveals that, when Ms Rice visited Pakistan that month, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz “tried his Saville Row-suited gigolo kind of charm… staring in Rice’s eyes,” but that, unfazed by his rich baritone and charm, Ms Rice stared him down and by the end of the meeting he was “babbling and shifting uncomfortably”.

Great to-do

Well, well, when heads of state or government go overboard in demonstrating the fondness welling within themselves in the full glare of the entire world in the manner above described, that is enough proof, if proof were at all needed, that times must have truly changed.

The US, as in everything else, leads in this particular enterprise of twisting times in unthought of directions. When it sees the need, it never hesitates. For instance, I remember the great to-do when John F. Kennedy stormed his way into US presidency in 1960. It was not simply that he was the youngest (being in his mid-40s), but that he was a Catholic and no Catholic before him had ever imagined in his wildest dreams that he would have the ghost of chance of being nominated, leave alone elected, for the top job.

Nobody nowadays gives a thought to the age question, which kept the US agitated at the time. Youth, in face, confers an advantage. Religion too is regarded as a purely personal matter, not to be dragged into the electoral domain. So Senator Obama who models himself on Kennedy can feel easy on the score of both age and religious persuasion.

Just as Kennedy was the first Catholic to secure the nomination and make it to the White House, Senator Obama is the first African-American to contest the presidency. Unlike in the case of Kennedy, whose faith kept the political analysts and journalists engaged in intense country-wide discussion, Senator Obama’s race has hardly been a subject matter of public discourse.

This, in itself, is a historic transformation of the American people’s psyche, in the background of the vicissitudes through which relations between and whites and blacks in that country had passed. It does great credit to the tremendous strides America has made towards building up an integrated and inclusive society.

One more pointer to how ‘the times they are a-changing!”

B. S .RAGHAVAN