Indo-US Peoples Summit

Actually,sir, he replied,if they had outsourced the whole plane to us,it would have been finished early.

There was something distinctly un-Indian about a response like this. An unmistakable whiff of America had gotten into him. The young mans parents probably wouldnt have spoken in that way. But what was Indian and un-Indian was changing,and such verve,confidence,self-belief were contagious among the globalised,upwardly mobile young.

The man came to my mind this week as US and India,during President Obamas visit to the subcontinent,breathed new warmth into a relationship that has heated up considerably since the Cold War,then was seen in some quarters as cooling again under the Obama administration.

Those fears seemed dampened by a shower of economic deals,by visible chemistry between Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,by an Indian news media that fawned over the Obamas,and by the US presidents surprising announcement of support for a permanent Indian seat on an expanded United Nations Security Council.

The prevailing narrative of how such partnerships form tends to emphasise diplomacy and trade: the media covers such partnerships through the vehicle of summitry and communiqué; they almost always involve a world leader travelling with droves of chief executives in tow to reinforce economically what is politically achieved.

But the case of India and the United States reveals what is true of many other cases as well: beneath the summitry and state dinners and trade deals,there is a gradual human weaving through which two countries sensitise themselves to each other,inspire and learn from each other,mimic each others fashions and management philosophies,discover each others pressure points.

It happened in the bookstores. In India,where the self had for many millions traditionally been something to sublimate to the family and clan,the stores began to fill with take-charge-of-your-life American self-help titles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. US-style management philosophy likewise taught a rising generation of Indian managers to invigorate their fathers sluggish enterprises.

In the US,meanwhile,books on meditation,yoga and ayurvedic medicine proliferated. And writers like Jhumpa Lahiri explained India to Americans and America to Indians. A new crop of Bollywood song makers merged American hip-hop beats into their tracks and sometimes even rap interludes. Indian advertisements began to speak in the American language of selfhood,freedom and choice. Filmmakers began to make popular off-Bollywood films more likely to appeal to Westerners: darker,grittier,shorter song-and-dance-free titles like Love Sex aur Dhokha.

America reciprocated with an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire,with the casting of Aishwarya Rai in Bride and Prejudice,with Indian characters in mainstream television shows like Outsourced and movies like Office Space.

It happened in the realm of style. In India,the jeans slowly grew skinnier and acquired deliberate,paid-for wear and tear,while slipping from the waist down to the hip. Slinky tank tops multiplied on the streets of Mumbai and Delhi,sold by men who would faint if they saw their wives wearing one. And US stores seem simultaneously to have concluded that their jewellery could use a little masala,sparing no opportunity to Indianise necklaces and earrings.

So much of the bottom-up bilateral warming took place in a handful of spaces: places like the Bagel Shop in the Bandra quarter of Mumbai,where expats and locals mingled; Rasika,an Indian restaurant in Washington,where Indians and Washington lobbyist types dined side by side; the business-class cabins of Continentals and Deltas direct US-India flights,aboard which it became increasingly common for regular pliers of that route to run into one another.

When a summit meeting occurs,cameras click and analyses are penned and prognostications are offered. What is sometimes lost in the lights is the quiet daily summitry of millions of ordinary people. It can build a relationship over long years and can make diplomatic breakthroughs,important though they are,seem merely like acknowledgements of what already,inexorably is.