I am not a sentimentalist. But, when a firm believer in Democracy and the innate goodness of Human Spirit sees what is now transpiring in the USA, thousands of miles away, it is hard not to be moved.

Despite all the hatreds and jingoisms we may attach to or with the US, it is indeed uplifting to see the election and now, the inauguration, of a non-white to the most powerful position in the world.

Yes, tomorrow will wash away the tears of sentiment and reality will return. It is not a happy US that Barack Hussein Obama and his aspirations are about to take the helm of. Yet, it did not take a set of unlikely accidents as Irving Wallace foresaw in his book 'The Man' to get a black man into the White House.

Martin Luther King Jr, if he had been alive, would have felt vindicated. I still remember, like I said in my first post on this blog, the tears running unashamedly down MLK's friend Jesse Jackson's face.

Personally, I am not very taken with having another Democrat in the White House. I speak as an Indian, of course. Democrats tend to be rather negative for India!

But then, it needs a Democrat, a true blue Liberal Democrat to get us out of the mess that Dubya got us into! If the US is not healthy, especially its economy, then the rest of the world too is not.

The question now is, with all his ideals of bipartisanship, will he really be allowed to be a real Democrat? Will the US president be able to take more control of a Republican ravaged economy and government? Will the trashing of the US Constitution be really accounted for? What about all the expectations?

These are questions for the morrow.

This one day, let us set our apprehensions aside and with the citizens of the United States of America, rejoice in the true ideals of democracy.