What India Means To Me

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: Ten days ago, I gave my final policy speech as US ambassador to India. Today, I shall share with you personal thoughts about how this country has shaped me during these past two years.

Unlike Siddhartha, my meditations while preparing this address have not produced total Enlightenment. Unfortunately, Brahma and Saraswati, because of my own limitations, will not adequately inspire my remarks on this occasion with regard to my spiritual and intellectual advancement. I clearly need to spend more time at Brahma’s temple in Pushkar. And, despite my continuing contemplations, I am not always able to follow Krishna’s wise words, “Be thou of even mind.” He might have added, including at your Round Tables at Roosevelt House.

Notwithstanding my many inadequacies and the persistence of Maya, the ever-present veil of illusion, please permit me to proceed since India is the great storyteller, and because I am soon leaving this amazing country.

Shortly after my arrival, I took the train from New Delhi to Mumbai to see and feel the land and people of India. You must understand that I love to ride the rails. Paul Theroux, the glorious American writer who was my friend in the Peace Corps in Africa more than thirty years ago, describes train travel like this, “the train soothed and comforted me and stimulated my imagination. It...provided access to my past by activating my memory. I had made a discovery: I would gladly go anywhere on a train.” That’s also me.

So let’s quickly take the train around India, pausing in Delhi before we begin. Learning about the seven cities. Presenting my credentials to President Narayanan in the Rashtrapati Bhawan, hearing my name read out by an official with the deepest voice on the planet. I so wished that my mother, Roma from South Dakota, may her soul rest in peace, could have been there to see her boy, Bobby Dean, on that splendid occasion.

I was astonished to find myself there. She would not have been surprised.

Visiting Humayun’s tomb with US Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill who commented that when it was erected, those living on my continent had built no structure higher than twenty feet. So you see, we Americans fell behind you Indians very early on in the architectural sweepstakes. It seems doubtful that we will ever catch up.