Dreams From My Father – Barack Obama

I finished reading this book on 1st January. As I progressed through it I had posted my thoughts and opinions on this blog. But I will try to summarize them here anyways.

I had picked up this book with some skepticism as I distrust politicians as a rule. True, Mr. Obama had penned it down before he became the resident of the White house. That kind of precludes the possibility that it could have been written by a ghost writer. So either he is a very sincere guy as can be seen from these pages or is very skilled at portraying a favorable image. As a jury, I am still out on this one.

Whatever the case, this is an interesting book about the origins of someone who went on to become the first colored US president. Let’s leave aside the “colored” and “president” part of it aside for a while. Even then it is an interesting journey of one man’s search for his roots. I must admit that coming from a country where husband and wife stay together almost “till death do us part”, I found it a bit difficult to digest that the author doesn’t have a single sibling who shares the same biological parents as him. After a while, I couldn’t keep track of which parent a particular sibling came from. If I place myself in the author’s shoes, I would have been completely bewildered and would have promptly dropped the whole idea of finding out who my extended family was.

Come to think of it, neither I nor my brother has taken particular pains to know our ancestors – either on maternal or paternal sides. We of course know our grandparents and have heard tidbits about great-grandparents from our parents. But our knowledge doesn’t go beyond that and we have never tried to find out more. We kind of took it for granted that we carry some good things and some bad things from these ancestors gone long before we came to this world. And as long as we knew that we were okay. But as I was reading this book, I wondered if it would have been a good idea for us to find out if anyone knew about the family tree beyond these branches. Now with 3 out of 4 grandparents gone, I don’t see much of a chance of doing that.

I have stayed in the US for a while. Most of the times I have seen ordinary Americans – what we call the Middle Class in India – and sometimes the more affluent side of them. But I have never truly seen what the author refers to as the South Side. Though I wasn’t particularly ignorant of their status, the sorry state of affairs of a few years ago that the author describes did come as a shock. I don’t know how much things have improved since then. In a way, I could relate their neglect to that of a major chunk of population that still resides in the Indian villages. That’s the reason someone referred to the people in Indian metros as “India” and the rural population as “Bharat”.

I hadn’t gone to the US with any particular bias against the colored people. But I remember one incident very clearly. Barely 3 months after I went there, I had been to the Atlantic City with my friends. None of us much cared for casinos so all of us were sitting somewhere on the boardwalk. Out of nowhere, came a group of teenage colored people and started dancing in front of us. I am still not sure whether they were making fun of us or were having fun themselves. I do remember, however, that I was shocked out of my skin at this – the word “Mugging” uppermost in my mind. :-(

It is so good to see that the author didn’t suffer much inferiority complex at the color of his skin - beyond the 1st incident in the library where he read about some colored people who went to great pains to change theirs. Growing up with a dusky skin in a country where “Fairness” is a natural obsession, it hadn’t been easy for me in the childhood. I haven’t still forgiven those girls in my school who acted superior because they were all fair-skinned. :-(

Two things struck me as he wrote about his ancestors after visiting his native place. One, that the names of the ladies who bore children that made up the clan were long since forgotten. The patriarchal society of India has achieved exactly that over the years. And second, the plight of the African women on the matrimonial front is only a shade worse than the lot of most of the women in India. :-(

So all said and done, I am glad that I read this book – if only to get a glimpse into the earlier life of the man who now runs the US of A. But I wonder if he will be able to bring about the same kind of change that he did by working tirelessly at the grassroots level all those years back. And I sure hope that what they say about “absolute power corrupting absolutely” doesn’t apply to Barack Obama.