US President Donald J Trump ...

... that sounds awfully nice!

It was August 1978 and I had just landed in the US, to pursue higher studies. Within a few months I was reduced to wondering whether I made the right choice.

No, it was not because I was overwhelmed, like Nehru’s quip: one should never visit the US for the first time. To be honest, maybe I was, but my severe discomfort was due to something else: what our then Prime Minister had said in an interview to Dan Rather of CBS News in his appearance on the show, 60 Minutes.

Among the Indian students at the university, it was de rigueur that not only you unfailingly watched the Sunday evening show but also, at the very least, show appreciation for it, no matter you understood it or not. Monday morning water cooler conversation must be punctuated by references to the show. It was quite heavily Americana, of course, but not exclusively. This was the problem.

I did not have a TV and watched the show only if I got lucky, at a friend’s house, the Student Center or somewhere. That fateful week I somehow seem to have missed the show.

The next day what Prime Minster Morarji Desai said on the show was the talk amongst all of us, Indian students, no exception. I came uo to speed pretty quick. We felt that our prime minister did us bad, not just pretty bad, but threw us to the wolves. In a place like Lexington, Kentucky, not the most developed of the states, to put it mildly, and not very aware of the rest of the world, India lay somewhere beyond the boondocks, still a place of snake charmers. And here, our prime minister just chiselled that in stone, for all to see.

I was asked, whenever there was a gathering of Americans and/or other foreign students (Taiwanese, Iranians, Polish et al.) whether I drink my own urine. “Your prime minister does. Why don’t you?”

Well, we survived.

Now, I come to why I want Donald Trump to be elected President of the United States of America on November 8, 2016.

Now with the always-on, worldwide news, particularly of the salacious kind, I will get my chance to heap the same insult that was thrown at me on every white, male American I may come across. I will just ask, “Do you grope women? Do you “Grab them by the p***y”? Do you kiss married women (other than your wife) on the lips? Do you enjoy sexually assaulting women?”

I expect the answer to be a horrified, screaming, “NO!”

Then, I, calmness personified, take the parting shot: “Why not? Your president does!”

I would have waited for 38 years for this sweet revenge.

How sweet, it would be!

Raghuram Ekambaram