Spent childhood years listening to Ramayana, Mahbhrata: Obama writes about fascination with India

For the former US president Barack Obama, India “always held a special place” in his “imagination,” PTI reported. “Maybe it was because I’d spent a part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahābhārata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions,” Obama wrote in his memoir ‘A Promised Land.’

It might be “because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies,” the former US president wrote.

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Although he had never been to India before his 2010 presidential visit, the country had “always held a special place in my imagination,” he wrote.

“Maybe it was its (India’s) sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages spoken,” Obama wrote in his memoir.

Obama lived four years in Indonesia, from age six to 10. He moved to Jakarta after his mother split up with his father and remarried an Indonesian man, according to Voice of America (VoA). While his mother, Ann Dunham, stayed in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.

In ‘A Promised Land’, Obama has given an account of his journey from the 2008 election campaign to the end of his first term with the daring Abbottabad (Pakistan) raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

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‘A Promised Land’ is the first of two planned volumes. The first part hit bookstores globally on Tuesday.