The post-mortem has begun on the recent visit of US President Barak Obama to India. Preliminary autopsies suggest a heavy leaning towards optimism and even braggart assertions about the bilateral relations.

For the first time in years, filmmakers in America and around the world are daring to make films criticizing communism. This heartening trend began with 2008’s blockbuster hit “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull,” produced by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg, in which Indiana Jones fights Soviet communist agents who are trying to capture an alien crystal skull in order to brainwash the West.

During her landmark trip to Pakistan in 2009, Secretary of State Clinton participated in a nationally televised town hall-style meeting, entitled "Our Voices," with a group of Pakistani women.

World governments are increasingly excited about the economic power of the arts and the value of cultural exchange in a changing world. Because the prodigious levels of government support in Europe and Asia are diminishing, they want to better understand our American advocacy techniques.

The film was inspiring and profound, and presented the true colors of citizen diplomacy as a connecting force between people of different nations, cultural systems, and religious identities.

Last week I was in Prague, meeting with young leaders from across Central Europe and other young leaders from the United States. Before that, I was in Dubai attending a conference of young entrepreneurs from across the Middle East and their American counterparts. This is indeed citizen diplomacy at work.

The plan would create bureaus for international energy affairs and crisis and conflict operations at State as well as offices for policy planning and science and technology at USAID.