The great anticipation surrounding President Barack Obama‘s long overdue visit to Indonesia on November 9-10 ensured that it would be one of the most watched stops on his recent Asian tour. After domestic political issues in the U.S.

Public diplomacy has been the norm in the US and European countries for a long time, but in China this concept has yet to be understood and accepted widely. Government efforts at communicating with the public both home and overseas are often criticized as insensitive and opaque.

NATO has a public diplomacy department staffed with smart and dedicated people, but it became apparent at a conference on “The Power of Soft Power,” held recently in Brussels, that this contingent is increasingly lonely.

BRUSSELS --- Since its founding in 1949, NATO has been a bastion of hard power, first as an alliance arrayed against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, and more recently as a manifestation of Western muscle in conflicts such as Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011. Coming off its decisive performance in helping to end the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, NATO seems to be happily basking in macho glory.

“This is what I like, we are sitting here in my gallery in former East German ground, former Russian land and I now have visitors from all over the world and the theme is peace, togetherness, freedom, anti-racism. I feel when I have such tools and I have such guests here, like you, that my work makes sense.”

On the whole, foreign investors find India an excellent investment opportunity that relates to the arena of “needs and wants” marketing, as opposed to “desires and aspirations” marketing. For the latter, China is an excellent destination, and not India.

A need to engage with industry on an equal plane while Indian industry, too, stops crawling when asked to walk....If we don’t get any of the above done, GDP growth notwithstanding, the reputational damage we would have caused Brand India will be immeasurable. So someone needs to wake up and pretty soon at that.