Perhaps I sound bitter. I have suffered. Each day’s press pass is to be given out new, perhaps out of security reasons, and this means long lines. I have spent more time in lines for the press credentials than in doing anything else. Standing for hours in a queue of foreign journalists, in the corridor of the Hampton Inn and Suites, I have become intimate with the faded brown wallpaper, the potted plastic plants, and the smell of disinfectant.

Today, on the first day of the convention, after having done penance in the line at Hampton Inn and Suites, I attended the first-ever meeting of Indian Americans at a political convention. Organized by a group called Indian American Leadership Initiative, the gathering was held in the Denver Athletic Club, its members working out in the next room on treadmills and elliptical machines.

At the Club, I talked to S R Sidarth, the Indian American youth who, during the 2006 Senate election, became the centre of a media storm. Sidarth had been working on the staff of Democratic candidate Jim Webb in his home state of Virginia. One week in August that year, he was given the task of tracking Webb’s Republican opponent, Senator George Allen. Sidarth would accompany the Senator on his “listening tour” and videotape his speeches. At one of these meetings, in Breaks Interstate Park, Allen had pointed to Sidarth, and having identified him as “macaca or whatever his name is” proceeded to welcome him “to America and the real world of Virginia.”

... contd.