Being nostalgic for the American
Every political junkie has someone in the political realm who to them is more perfect than the rest tried in the field. As it often happens, the very reason for our gravitation towards politics is that one person whose imagery makes us follow their shadow. Even if our expectations do not match with the pessimism invoked by the functioning of politics, we are driven by emotions of hope and the positive change that they inspire within us. The long-suppressed idealism finds a new lease of life binding us in faith that what was once called stupid utopianism is achievable. So as we move along with that person capturing their moments and sharing their griefs and pleasure, we have the sudden realisation of having gone way deep into politics than we could discern.
I can claim to conjure up one such man with a striking and no less enamouring impact on my way of envisioning the world. Barack Obama dragged me from the mundanity of life languishing in the corner when I was not well at anything save solving Math’s numerical to the liberating journey of exploration of reading some of what is churning in my background that concerns not just me but everyone. To study social sciences is to be mindful of power structure surrounding you while empowering yourself with ideas to overcome it. Obama’s eloquence apart, his charismatic quality of communicating ideas with poignant persuasion forced me to look around myself and to contemplate over my version of normative on politics and moral standards. There was also a period of me abandoning his ideals as being completely cut off from the ground of realism and even dissed him as “another politically correct liberal who hates the majority and is too coward to condemn perpetrators.’’ knowledge is an evolutionary process-a product of dialectic between us and the external. Without exchange with the latter, we grow only in a physical sense of being.
The peculiarity of Obama was not him being a first black president of the USA.Au contraire, he, for first six years of his presidency, barely cared about the colour of his skin, especially held back from speaking on racial tensions in the country. He, in one private interview, remarked that he was not the president of black America. His evasion had an element of conviction that he could not let himself push for racial equality only because of his own racial identity, rather his identity of American disallowed him from seeing his compatriots as white and black. He did not step further on the issue of racism, to convince Americans that his actions are immune to his blackness; that he was the president for all.
Alas, it could not alter the way white America thought of him. A section of them just couldn’t grasp the historical phenomena of him winning the presidency. He stayed in their imagination a black man who was ruling over them in a paradoxical departure from the past. Did they succeed in compelling him to flaunt “his blackness” in public as a president? Yes, when he effusively joined a black church in mourning for the black people who were mass murdered by white supremacists in the church, singing prayers as if letting his black identity that so much defined how people perceived him speak to the world for the very first time.
There is so much one can write of him. His grace, humour, craftsmanship with words, an American president who inspires(not a very quotidian thing to happen), who for all his miscalculations in foreign policy wished for a world more peaceful and just.
But the world from Obama’s years has changed; it may look to be totally stranger from the frame of the pre-Trump world. That, even more, presses one to look back at the man and the era he represents. And I, aware of the absurdity of saying it for an Indian, have melancholic nostalgia for him holding a mike, exhorting, joking and motivating young men like me far across the ocean and thereby leading the world even at a more individual and human level. If the internet had the first thing to offer me, I can scarcely think of any name other than his.