This year, President Barack Obama will see the festivities firsthand. He’s the first U.S. leader India has invited to be the guest of honor and the first president to visit India twice in his tenure.
That’s a sign, I believe, of how far India has come from the nation of my childhood.
Back then, I stood in the crowd thinking of things I learned in school about India’s rich history and valiant struggle for freedom from British colonizers. But it was impossible to forget I was born in the “Third World.” Signs of poverty and despair were everywhere.
I often heard this refrain: “The East shall rise again.” But I held no expectations, no hopes, really, that my homeland would ever be any different. Not in my lifetime.
But over the last two decades, I have been going home to a radically transformed India, one that has experienced immense economic growth and social change.
Now, Obama is making history with his trip. He’ll stand with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Rajpath, the grand avenue that leads to India Gate, Delhi’s version of the Arc de Triomphe.
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Hall, of course, is interested in strengthening Indian business ties with the city of Atlanta, home to more than 100,000 South Asian immigrants. He says he is impressed by the burgeoning middle class in India and by the fact that India is rooted in democracy, unlike China.
India has the advantage of leapfrogging its development, says Hall. Indians are innovating above and beyond what was normal in the West and they have the advantage of learning from mistakes made by developed nations.
“They have a chance to address education, poverty and heath care in a wholesale way,” says Hall. “Whichever emerging superpower brings its people along the best will be the most dynamic. The human element is what people always leave out.”
Obama, says Hall, has every reason to reach out to Modi, a man who began as a “chai wallah” — a tea seller — and became prime minister of India.
That, after all, is the American dream realized in the land of my birth.
