Here I am sitting in Café Linx (Parktowne’s solution to get away from all the noise generated in the apartments) writing my second post for this blog. I come here to do my assignment and guess who caught my attention. None other than the President of the United States, Mr. Barack Obama! I am surprised Microsoft Word didn’t get his spelling updated in the word dictionary. I can’t say the whole world is obsessed with him as I would be generalizing. When I was in India, the Indian news channels wouldn’t stop campaigning for him! When I came here, I realized the obsession is probably a thousand times more. Obama managed to create a wave here and probably in most parts of the world. No wonder my roommates who chose to stay away from novels all their lives(fact or fiction) decided to buy a book on Obama’s life. It’s a totally different story that they eventually didn’t read a single page. They bought it as “The Obama” aura was all over.

Here are some of the Obama merchandise for you guys if you are interested. I haven’t done an extensive online research but there are these road-side shops, independence hall (Philadelphia), all malls where you can get his merchandise. Obama T-shirt, “YES WE CAN” t-shirts, Obama’s inaugural CDs, Obama caps, Obama’s pictures with his family and kids, Obama’s face printed on US flag, Obama’s magnet, Obama’s historic campaign CDs and what not. The newspaper on the day the election results were announced, giving millions of Americans the good news that Obama would lead the country, is selling for $15 in Independence Hall. Poor Michele Obama has to put with unnecessary media attention of people talking about her clothes and speculations about her having a third child as the couple hopes to have a son. I may have missed a lot of things but this will probably give you a good enough idea of crazy the country is about a politician.

The inaugural was crazier. I know of a few friends who drove to Washington D.C to watch the inaugural. I read in news about a woman who sold her ovaries for a pair of tickets to Obama’s inaugural. Temple University staff was all eyes on the inaugural speech. They were like “awwwwww” when Michele Obama walked along with her two daughters to hear daddy’s inaugural speech. They found it sweet when excited Obama stuttered during the oath. Some of them brought black and white television sets from home to watch the inaugural while some chose to sit in the lobby and watch the inaugural on LCD. A department played it on a large screen on the library. Clearly there was Obama all over.

India is a place where movie stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Rajnikanth, SRK etc are apotheosized and where politicians are almost always looked at with distrust, disrespect and disgust. Is this the east-west divide in the way people perceive people or the powerful Obama campaign (we have a case study on how he reached out to millions using technology as the medium of his campaign) that got the whole world stand up and take a look or is it the timing that did the magic for him? Only time will answer all these questions!

While I am tempted to leave the answers to the future, here are I am trying to reason out what really made Obama the person he is. America was a country that was looked at with awe for many years until senior Bush did some damage and later on junior Bush made the catastrophic and expensive mistakes. The economy went into doldrums. People were and still are losing jobs. Thousands of families shattered after the 9/11 and Iraq and Afghanistan war. Clearly the US was looking for a messiah of peace. And here he is doing all he can (or at least trying) to change the image of The United States.

While time will tell if he is as charismatic a leader as his speeches, America will continue to be obsessed and the rest of the world will watch the drama unfold closely. Oh by the way, I used the word Obama 21 times in this one page document of mine. How obsessed can I get! :-)

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