I am going to begin this column with a joke. A man was being beaten in the public square of a town, but the more he was beaten, the more he kept laughing. Finally, someone watching the proceedings asked him why he was laughing. The man answered: “These people are beating me because they think I am Dhiru. But I am actually Viru."

The joke may sound facetious, but it is both an illustration of the essence of Vedantic wisdom—that you are not what you (or others) think you are, Tat tvam asi—and of the principle that it is futile to beat the wrong person!

My worry is that, in our reaction to Donald Trump’s (DT) tantrums, we may lose sight of the fact that India has diplomatic relations with the United States of America, and not with a transient individual who will, within the next two years hopefully, become part of a short chapter of history that both Indians and Americans may wish to forget.

I accept that it is tempting in today’s age of 24-hour news cycles and Twitter-driven diplomacy to see history through the narrow prism of personality. But to reduce Indo-American ties to the temperament of one man is to profoundly misread both the long arc of history and the deeper convergences that bind the world’s oldest democracy with its largest.

India and the United States are bound not merely by trade statistics or transient political........

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