Obama is hope

Intrigued by Obama's idealistic vision that he often paints in his speeches, his unflappable demeanor and charisma, I wanted to learn more about him.

"Is Obama just another politician who is really good at politics or does he mean what he is says?"

I read "Dreams from my father", the autobiography that he wrote after a publisher approached him after he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, which explains a lot into why he thinks the way he does and I am happy that the book very much reaffirms my faith in Obama.

"Dreams from my father" is a book on his search for identity. Born to a Kenyan father and a white American woman from Kansas, Obama's is an extra ordinary journey. Through his travels to Indonesia as a young boy and Kenya before he joined Harvard, Obama understands that the dreams of someone in the third world is no different from someone in America, a dream for a better life. This is the foundation for his respect for other cultures and countries and people of other faiths.

Trying to come to terms with his race, he does community service for 3 years, trying to help a black neighborhood in Chicago stand up on its feet.

In the last part of the book, he tries to understand his father, who after his studies in America, returns to Kenya to contribute to his country with great ambitions but gets disillusioned with the bureaucracy and the politics, and loses after trying to fight the system.

My favorite passage is this extract:

“I dropped to the ground and swept my hands across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed at the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead– a faith in other people.

“The silence killed your faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. Too little of the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the markets, the stories around the fire. The loyalty that could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles. Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love. For all your gifts– the quick mind, the powers of concentration, the charm– could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving these things behind…

"A faith in other people". Being part of the system to change the system. That is perhaps a lesson that Indian US returnees who give up quickly when they go back to contribute, can learn: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/business/global/28return.html