Washington: Former US president Barack Obama’s memoir ‘A Promised Land’ mentions several senior leaders from Congress, including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh. The ex-US president wrote about Sonia Gandhi’s beauty saying, “we are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel, but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi.”
Obama was all praise for ex-PM Manmohan Singh and described him a person of “kind of impassive integrity.” Ever since the days of his presidency, Obama has always held Singh in high regards. During his stint as the Indian PM, Singh shared a very healthy relationship with the 44th US President.
While addressing the world leaders during the G20 Summit in Toronto, Obama had praised Singh saying, “I can tell you that here at G20, when the Indian prime minister speaks, people listen”.
The New York Times reviewed Obama’s memoir ‘A Promised Land’, in which the first American Blac president was quoted saying Rahul has “a nervous, unformed quality about him as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.
Besides commenting on the Indian political leaders, Obama’s book also mentions about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he described as “physically, he was unremarkable”. In his memoir, the former US president says that Putin reminds him of a tough, street-smart ward bosses who used to run the Chicago machine.
Writing about US president-elect Joe Biden, the 44th US President senses he “might get prickly if he thought he wasn’t given his due – a quality that might flare up when dealing with a much younger boss.”