To understand the lead sentence of yesterday's NY Times p.1 lead on Obama's visit to India, you need more background on US public diplomacy there.

A female tribal leader working to get more girls into classrooms, in a rural society that places boys first. A former civil servant running a website to battle corruption. Schoolchildren who got the first couple dancing for the Hindu festival Diwali. These were some of the Indians whom President Obama met Sunday on the second day of his four-nation Asia tour.

The town hall event, featuring Obama as a professorial host, was a moment of unscripted public diplomacy as he sought to bridge the divide between two bitter rivals.

Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes... The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India.

Indian premier Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Malaysia comes at a time when India is also rediscovering its long historical and cultural links to the region, which scholars once dubbed ‘Greater India’. It coincides with efforts by numerous Indian bodies such as the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) to rebuild the cultural bridge with a part of the world that is so close to India, and yet somehow distant.

The Hindustan Times carried a small news item the other day that, depending on your perspective, is good news or a sign of the apocalypse. It reported that a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing third-generation mobile network service, or 3G, at the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, to “allow thousands of climbers and trekkers who throng the region every year access to high-speed Internet and video calls using their mobile phones.”

Indian Army personnel are holding an annual joint military exercise with their American counterparts involving airborne specialist operations in sub-zero temperatures in Alaska.

As an economy prospers, its culture perhaps begins to grow in appeal. Over the last 100 years or so – jeans, Coke, McDonald’s, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood — about everything American had been lapped up as things of global cool. They still are. The 20th was entirely America’s century.