Mahanth is Editor of mahanth.org

Once in a while you come across a YouTube video that tugs at your heart strings and makes you proud to be an Indian-American voice. Such positive vibes come rarely for me these days, but still… last night was such a night. The almighty algorithm somewhere inside Sundar Pichai’s company earnestly presented my parents’ account with a beautifully made U.S. Government Cold War propaganda video from 1961 about Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s 3rd visit to the United States. My parents and I watched this engaging short documentary encompassing a military honor guard and audience with John F. and Jackie Kennedy in Washington, DC, a visit to NYC and the UN, a California jaunt to hobnob with Hollywood actors like Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston, plus a visit to a quaint-looking, unrecognizable version of Disneyland. I was particularly thrilled by the shots of the newly minted Indian Embassy in Washington, DC, where I worked as an intern for the Economic Wing, during the 1990s.

These days the Kennedy name is more likely to come up in the noise around RFK Junior and the MAHA(nth) movement (LOL), or the renaming of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. But in this video we have the JFK and Jackie Kennedy of Camelot times, a very different milieu from the divisive contemporary Kennedy vibrations. We have India’s first Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, who would go on to be Prime Minister. Not only can we witness in color two hale and hearty (and dare I say attractive) central figures in world leadership who would later be felled by assassins’ bullets (JFK & Gandhi), we even have Jawaharlal and JFK agreeing to keep a lid on India’s nuclear weapons testing ambitions publicly, though the PM’s daughter Gandhi was present. Then she would bust that lid right off in her own term as Prime Minister about a decade later as India became a declared nuclear weapons power, and remained so since the early 1970s. Of course, Pakistan followed suit and the world’s first “Islamic Bomb” was born.

There were many other serious tensions in the US-India relationship then and now, always were and always will be. The American and Indian leaders of that time came across as dignified intellectuals despite those.

Feels like a long time ago.