President Obama, in India for a state visit, was chided by local press after he was spotted chewing gum during Monday’s Republic Day parade, which celebrates the day that India’s 1950 constitution went into effect.

Barack Obama will do something in India on Monday that an American president almost never does in public: He’ll sit in one place, in a foreign country, for hours.(...) The unusual appearance, also making him the only two-time U.S. presidential visitor to India, caps a remarkable turnaround in bilateral ties since the December 2013 arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York.

While Modi has been raising the country's global profile for a while now with high-profile visits to Japan, the US and, most recently, to Australia, to be followed later with Russia and the UK, so far we have tended to dismiss each one of his visits as more hype than substance.(...)President Barack Obama's acceptance of Modi's invitation to be the guest of honour at the Republic Day parade is possibly the tipping point that separates pure atmospherics from reality.