His second stint in Washington has allowed Ed Luce the proximity and objectivity to observe the changes in American society, and the world at large, post-9/11. It has also lent him the distance, of time and space, to better explain his book, In Spite of the Gods: The strange rise of modern India,in the country it deals with.

Luce’s first US stint was as assistant to Larry Summers, then Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary. “It was the heyday of globalisation. But 9/11 changed the world, and Washington in particular. Everybody was an economist in the 1990s, and everyone is a security and terrorism analyst today. The most important cabinet portfolio in the Clinton administration was the Treasury Secretary; today it’s the Pentagon”.

Things obviously haven’t changed for the better. “Today, every bit of foreign news, every development, is filtered through the prism of one question: ‘How can this harm us?’ The political analysis is maniacal, it takes everything out of context. What is disappointing is the level of debate; here in India you get many different points of view on almost anything (except possibly Kashmir); in America it’s much less diverse.”

Much of the Western world is afflicted with the same unifocal vision. Put that to Luce and his response is swift: “The US is exporting paranoia to the world.”

One positive spin-off of 9/11 was how it shifted the goalposts to India’s advantage, “Funnily enough, how the US looks at India goes against everything I’ve said so far: back in the 1990s it looked at India through the prism of security, now they see it in economic terms. When the Bush administration lists its accomplishments, the turnaround in relations with India will figure prominently.”

... contd.