How about Pseudango?

"The US is looking forward to eating Indian mangoes.”

And while I sit there, reading Bush’s comment on the bbcworld site, chewing on a red, juiceless, thick-skinned mango from Whole Foods, Sam’s land’s best imitation of the delicious orange drupe from my motherland, my eyes light up and I even let a little saliva drip (an act hitherto restricted to tangible foods and quite excessively so).

While the thought of soon being able to delve into a bonafide Indian mango in the ‘comfort’ of my Philadelphia apartment is exhilarating enough, I must say that’s not the only reason for my new found glee. That I’m a die-hard patriotic Indian who would defend India no matter what couldn’t be further from the truth. But most of my criticism of India stems from my image of the country that ‘could have been’, and I say, quite smugly, that presently (and pleasantly), the India that is, is almost looking like the one that could have been.

Most eloquently portrayed by Fareed Zakaria in this msnbc piece, India’s current position on the world’s economic stage was something many of us happily predicted the moment we learned that the intelligent populace of the country had elected itself the most intelligent leader in history. If Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms in ’91 were the dream-budget, he’s now put together a “dream team” – the group that went to sell India at Davos was a crème-de-la-crème melange of politicians and business-men, who would be hard to ignore at a country club, much less the world economic forum. Articulation – trying not to let my unrelenting obsession with it become a factor here – is indeed one of the greatest gifts your country’s leaders can possess on the global stage, and while Indian financial bigwigs have always been gifted in the area, for the first time in decades, we’re seeing enterprising politicians, and in my opinion, Chidambaram leads the pack. And who better than the peerless Zakaria to articulate that!

Having devoured Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in college, I turned from a die-hard Marxist to an out-and-out capitalism touter. And the fact that my country just happens to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the free market economy delivers a kind of deep satisfaction that even the alphonso I’m dreaming about may not. Suffice it to say, while I don’t completely understand what Tom Friedman and Gurcharan Das are talking about (for a person that barely keeps track of her own finances, I can’t be entrusted with the world’s), I do comply with their world-is-flat hypothesis. And I’ve always been one to refute theories widely recognized and believed :)

The facts are all there. We’re big! Terms like global power and most important partner have been dripping from the mouths of top US officials since Singh’s visit here last May. From adamantly insisting that India must sign the nuclear NPT to imposing sanctions the US has now grown to recognize that India is a responsible, not to mention economically expanding democracy and welcomed us into the club. And for the politically and economically apathetic Indian, it still makes a difference that Americans are now looking beyond the spicy samosa chaat and the dazzling colors of the Punjabi sharara, to its intellectual competence, its computer technology, its super power potential.

Of course, the jokes still abound – videos of the prototype Indian at the call center being floated around the internet, the blatant stupefaction at “accent” schools and the much graver, more disheartening National Geographic account on untouchability. But now that’s just part of the spectrum of issues, almost successfully camouflaged by Discovery channel’s reviews on the changing Indian lifestyle or Tom Friedman’s piece in the NYT pondering over why Indians are more academically competent.

I say “camouflaged” because I am no blindly optimistic sunshine-seeker (though, literally, I can't seem to get enough of that huge ball of fire). I realize that India has a long way to go but it’s good to know we’ve made a start...And partnering with the best in the business is as good a start as any.

I just wish our partners would call this oblong red thing in my hand by a different name...how about pseudango? I’ll let you chew on that a while. And if you got yours at Whole Foods, that could be a really long ‘while’ ;) Not quite made for the molars, this......