NEW DELHI, Nov 13:
Former United States president Barack Obama, in his memoir titled — ‘A Promised Land’ referred Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as someone who is nervous and uninformed and lacks aptitude and passion, while also making a remark on former prime minister Manmohan Singh and INC president Sonia Gandhi.
The former president wrote that Rahul Gandhi and they met at least twice – in 2015 and 2017 – has “a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject”, according to a direct quote in the NYT review.
He writes approvingly of Mr Manmohan Singh, who was Obama’s first state guest at the White House, and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, “Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh both come across as having a kind of impassive integrity.” On Sonia Gandhi, he observed how, “We are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel, but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi.” The first African-American President goes on to mention his vice-president and current President-elect Joe Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin among others. He also wrote about his days after leaving the White House and gives an insight on today’s politics of division, indicating towards Donald Trump’s four years into the office. According to the publisher Penguin Random House (PRH), A Promised Land is the story of Obama’s “improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.” (UNI)