Terrorism is a principal preoccupation in most of our international contacts.

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

Basically, there are two kinds of stereotypes out there in the world about America. There's America the Goliath - the big, powerful, bullying country that pushes its way around the world and gets its ways, pursues its own interests nakedly, irrespective of what others want. And the other stereotype is America, the land of opportunity, where everyone can go and do anything, be anything, make any dreams come true.

The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.

India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.

Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy -- and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.

Terrorism is a principal preoccupation in most of our international contacts.