Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.

The closest Indian analogy to the position of black Americans is that of the Dalits - formerly called 'Untouchables,' the outcastes who for millennia suffered humiliating discrimination and oppression.

Shashi Tharoor Quotes