Hope floats!

I left India for the US the next day as President Obama landed in India. So I had the unique privilege of seeing his visit from both sides of the borders and the proverbial lens!

In fact such has been the depth of symbolism, expectation and hope from President Obama’s visit that most conversations I have had on this trip so far have either started or ended on the President’s Indian sojourn. And they started right at the New Delhi airport with a friendly casual remark from an airline’s ground staff, “all roads are leading to India right and you off to the States?”, the friendly lady at the check in desk asked,  “Business”, I said, explaining my rationale, “that’s what I meant”, she said!

The world believes that the primary reason for President Obama’s visit to India was commerce. Who could’ve thought that one would live long enough to see an American President visit India to promote ‘business interests’!

I am reminded here of one of my favorite author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous ‘Black Swan theory’ which refers to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.

Could President Obama’s recently concluded visit be described as a ‘black swan’ event for India? I think so.

The Black Swan theory also says that a ‘black swan’ in spite of its outlier status, is explainable and predictable.

If the White House fact-sheet itself is to be believed over the last decade, investment capital from India to USA grew at an annualized rate of 53 percent. Add to that the fact that United States is India's largest trading partner in goods and services, and India is now amongst the fastest growing sources of foreign direct investment entering the United States. The 50,000 American jobs that this visit itself has created in America are being viewed as an emphatic underlining of the potential of free bilateral trade between the two countries.

We also have to view President Obama’s visit from two lenses. He is just out of an election defeat. With their increased muscle power, the Republicans are going to push for free global trade and if President Obama wants to make progress in Congress he has to adopt a different tune. The second is the open criticism by Heads of state of countries like Germany whose Chancellor Angela Merkel recently described “trade protectionism (as the) greatest threat to global recovery”. This censure of the protectionist agenda adopted by China and US is likely to reach its peak at the G20 summit.

The global eco-political environment has completely changed and President Obama’s action and speeches in India are a reflection of his appreciation of this changing reality.

As he rightly pointed out that with “more than half of all Indians being under 30 years old”, we are a country of millions of possibilities and America with its culture of innovation is a natural multiplier for this potential. And vice-versa. The time has come I believe to celebrate an uninhibited fusion of – as a leading Indian journalist recently described it - the ‘new world’ that India represents and the ‘old New World or the new Old World’ that is United States of America.

Hope floats, I say.

The above post is published in Economic Times