Bye-bye Condi

Well, it's the day of Inauguration in the US, where the Great New Hope floats in, while the outgoing admin bows out. Oddly enough, I had a flashback of a brief memory from 10 years ago:

Back in 1998, when CNN first upgraded their website and started their chat boards, I remember being avid participant there, where you could even find assorted journalists and academics lounging online.

We used to have some heated discussions about geo-politics. I remember one such debate over the headline issue at the time - the opportunistic bombing of Belgrade by the war-mongering Clinton and Albright. I angrily denounced Albright (whom I always referred to by her original foreign-born name, Madlenka Korbel), complaining that she was an extra-territorialist Atlanticist whose own personal past had prejudiced her into imposing war on Serbia. I also made pointed comparisons to the 1991 Gulf War and how the United States had built up Saddam's war machine into the menace it became, before bludgeoning it into submission after it chomped on America's little Kuwaiti poodle. A Malayalee living in Kuwait rebuked me, complaining, "You and I share a common name - a Mahabharata figure who was famous for his foresight! How can you then be so blind to the suffering Saddam has caused your fellow Indians here!"

Before I could retort back, another poster named Condoleezza curiously inquired as to what our name meant, upon which I had to summarize the Mahabharata story for her. A regular on the forum, she preferred to stay out of our acrimonious debates and never used to voice any opinions of her own, only asking occasional questions. I figured she was some Mississippi grandma visiting the forum to pass the time. It was only later to my chagrin that other forum participants mentioned to me she was a political science professor from Stanford.

It was only a couple of years later during the 2001 US Presidential campaign that the memory of that exchange came back to me, as I read about George W Bush's new foreign policy advisor, and how she was actually a former student of Josef Korbel's.

Heh, an odd set of coincidences, but a true story.