Full circle

Reports suggest that somewhere between one and two million people crowded into Washington DC for the inauguration of Barack Obama, more than doubling the population of this staid little city of broad, empty avenues. After eight years, America was ready to begin again at year zero. For a country that wears its history lightly (the past, however troubled, is swiftly incorporated into a national myth of irrepressible progress), the Bush years have been unusually wearying, eroding the optimism and confidence that Americans seem always to have assumed is their birthright.

But by electing Obama, America has once again reinvented itself, and those of us who have succumbed to America-fatigue ought to consider rekindling our fondness for this vast and various country. Obama is celebrated in the US as its first African-American president. On its own, this is historic enough but he is also perhaps the world&rsquos first truly cosmopolitan leader &mdash polymorphous and protean, his background makes him, like a character in the best fiction, at once intensely particular and universal. 

The 2008 election showcased America&rsquos most admirable quality its openness, paradoxical in a country long accused of self-absorption. America is famously a society of immigrants, its composite culture shaped and reshaped by successive swathes of outsiders. Nowhere is this more evident than New York, a city that doesn&rsquot so much absorb newcomers as suck them into its vortex. You become a New Yorker as soon as you stride purposefully into the miasmic maw of the subway, resisting the temptation to gawp skyward.

For the visitor, once the embassy gauntlet has been run, America&rsquos genial indifference to strangers is a boon. Never feeling too closely watched, too foreign, too conspicuous, the stranger is free to make what he will of America. The visitor is seduced by the prospect of forging his own path. Naturally, the shibboleth America most cherishes about itself is the open road &mdash freedom and possibility in the beguiling form of a rented convertible and a stretch of tarmac. 

Even 20 years ago R.K. Narayan was able to write that, &ldquoAmerica and India are profoundly different in attitude and philosophy... Indian philosophy stresses austerity... America&rsquos emphasis, on the other hand, is on material acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity.&rdquo Since those words were written, Indian consumerism has become almost American in its cupidity, while in America it is the morning after the night before. The lower prices and cheaper, more attractive packages mean that this is as good a time as any for Indian tourists to be travelling to America.