President Bush celebrates his 60th birthday on Thursday. A surprise birthday gift comes his way in the form of a column by Fareed Zakaria in the Newsweek magazine.
Zakaria asks sympathetically why is that the Bush administration, despite its recent broad shift in American diplomacy, still gets unfavourable response within the country and worldwide.
“The Bush administration must wonder these days if it has a Rodney Dangerfield problem. No matter what it does, it can’t seem to get any respect.
“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has engineered a broad shift in American diplomacy over the last year, moving policy toward greater multilateralism, cooperation and common sense on Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and several other issues.
“And yet it hasn’t produced a change in attitudes toward the United States. The recent Pew global survey documents a further drop in America’s poor image abroad.
“President Bush tried to be conciliatory while visiting Europe last week but confronted an angry public. A poll published in the Financial Times on the eve of his visit showed that across the continent, the United States was considered a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea.
“Why aren’t people noticing the new, improved Bush foreign policy? First, the changes coming out of Washington have been very recent. Perhaps more important, they remain incremental and incomplete.
“This is probably because they are still contested within the administration. Almost all of those officials who embody the administration’s crude and clumsy policies of the first term — led by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — remain in office. They merely appear to be lying low, for now.
“So there’s a limit to how much things can change. What appears like a revolution in Bush policy — the administration is now finally thinking that maybe, possibly, Guantánamo should be shut down — often is just the belated arrival of common sense.
“Rice and her team are clearly in charge—and extremely capable—but they operate within fairly tight constraints. The result is that the new approach retains many elements of the old: hectoring rhetoric, constant conditions and stiff demands…”
Bush is part of the first wave of the 78-million strong baby boomers to enter their senior years.
Baby boomers, generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, now dominate the halls of power. As of last year, they controlled 41 of the nation’s 50 governorships, exactly half of the 100 Senate seats and 275 of the 435 House seats. With the ascension of John Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr., they have even begun to crack that last bastion of the Silent Generation, the Supreme Court, where with Clarence Thomas they now have three of nine seats.
“Born in New Haven, Conn., on July 6, 1946, 10 months after the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, Bush represents the first wave of the postwar generation to reach its seventh decade. Others turning 60 this year include Cher, Reggie Jackson, Diane Keaton, Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Susan Sarandon, Suzanne Somers, Steven Spielberg, Kenneth Starr and Donald Trump, not to mention Bush’s wife, Laura, and his predecessor, Bill Clinton.”
Mr Bush will hold birthday celebrations tomorrow, inviting “150 close friends and family” to dinner, before watching Washington’s Independence Day firework display, says The Guardian.
“But it is impossible to avoid the sense that turning 60 is a genuine personal shock for the world’s most powerful baby boomer – as it surely will be for other members of the generation who, according to the cliche, believed they would live forever.”
Swaraaj Chauhan describes his two-decade-long stint as a full-time journalist as eventful, purposeful, and full of joy and excitement. In 1993 he could foresee a different work culture appearing on the horizon, and decided to devote full time to teaching journalism (also, partly, with a desire to give back to the community from where he had enriched himself so much.)
Alongside, he worked for about a year in 1993 for the US State Department’s SPAN magazine, a nearly five-decade-old art and culture monthly magazine promoting US-India relations. It gave him an excellent opportunity to learn about things American, plus the pleasure of playing tennis in the lavish American embassy compound in the heart of New Delhi.
In !995 he joined WWF-India as a full-time media and environment education consultant and worked there for five years travelling a great deal, including to Husum in Germany as a part of the international team to formulate WWF’s Eco-tourism policy.
He taught journalism to honors students in a college affiliated to the University of Delhi, as also at the prestigious Indian Institute of Mass Communication where he lectured on “Development Journalism” to mid-career journalists/Information officers from the SAARC, African, East European and Latin American countries, for eight years.
In 2004 the BBC World Service Trust (BBC WST) selected him as a Trainer/Mentor for India under a European Union project. In 2008/09 He completed another European Union-funded project for the BBC WST related to Disaster Management and media coverage in two eastern States in India — West Bengal and Orissa.
Last year, he spent a couple of months in Australia and enjoyed trekking, and also taught for a while at the University of South Australia.
Recently, he was appointed as a Member of the Board of Studies at Chitkara University in Chandigarh, a beautiful city in North India designed by the famous Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students there.
He loves trekking, especially in the hills, and never misses an opportunity to play a game of tennis. The Western and Indian classical music are always within his reach for instant relaxation.
And last, but not least, is his firm belief in the power of the positive thought to heal oneself and others.