Obama's on the line... not

The Asia Times' M K Bhadrakumar explains India's discomfiture over a missing phone call from Barack Obama. Usually Ambassador Bhadrakumar is a sober interpreter of the events in Asia, but in this article he pokes some fun at India and its 76 year-old Prime Minister Manmohan Singh:

The Indians could learn a thing or two from the Kremlin. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev found himself exactly in Manmohan's predicament when by November 8 his Kremlin telephone still had not rung. But 43-year-old Medvedev did a smart thing.

He put a call through to Chicago to the 47-year old president-elect. The Kremlin thereupon went ahead and publicized the conversation in an upbeat account. A budding controversy was nipped before it could blossom.

snip...

Young people move real fast.

The murky area of the US/India nuclear agreement seems not to be as resolved as Singh may have thought, but Bhadrakumar comes up with a novel plan:

Delhi's priority is to use the deal to provide the context to access to sensitive US military technology within the overall framework of the "strategic partnership". Surely, there is a grey area here. Did the Bush administration negotiate the deal with transparency? Hard to say. Are Indians so dumb as to be led up the garden path and hustled into a deal full of ambiguities? Not really. Only Bush and Manmohan would know.

It appears India and the US have a growing need to retain Manmohan and Bush in their current jobs as lifetime heads of governments so that the strategic partnership can go from strength to strength.

That's change we can believe in! I suggest you read the entire article, lots of good clean fun for the whole family.