“I grew up listening to Ramayana & Mahabharata, have a special place for India”: Barack Obama

Former US President Barack Obama said that he has always held a special place for India thanks to his childhood years spent in Indonesia taking note of the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and therefore the Mahabharata.

Maybe it had been its (India’s) sheer size, with one-sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand distinct ethnic groups, and quite seven hundred languages spoken, Obama writes on his fascination of India in his latest book ‘A Promised Land’.

Obama says he had never been to India before his Presidential visit in 2010, but the country had “always held a special place in my imagination”.

Maybe it had been because I’d spent a neighborhood of my childhood in Indonesia taking note of the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and therefore the Mahabharata, or due to my interest in Eastern religions, or due to a gaggle of Pakistani and Indian college friends who’d taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies, Obama writes.

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

“A Promised Land” is that the first of two planned volumes. the primary part hit bookstores globally on Tuesday.