America at 250: From Saul Bellow to Clint Eastwood

Fifty years ago in 1976, the American Cultural Centre in Dhaka organised a quiz contest as part of the celebrations of the bicentennial year of the United States. The venue was the Bicentennial Hall situated at Bijoynagar. As a student of Dhaka University, I took part in the competition and having won the contest went home with the prize, a collection of works by Saul Bellow, the Nobel Laureate for literature that year. Sometime later, one of my classmates borrowed those works of Bellow from me, promising to return them soon. The books never came back to me.
Today, as America observes the 250th anniversary of its independence, my thoughts go back to the many times in which America, through its history, its politics and its literature was a major factor in my journey from childhood to youth. In this autumn of my life, my interest in America has not wavered or waned. Since that cold day in 1962 in distant Quetta, where my father worked for the Geological Survey of Pakistan, images of John Glenn in an American magazine that Father brought home have been imprinted deep in my imagination about the mystery of space. Glenn’s pictures were many, showing him in various stages of preparation for a space flight he was about to undertake.
In subsequent years, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union fascinated me, making me wonder which country would be the first to land a man on the moon. On Christmas Eve 1968, it was sheer thrill which coursed through me as I heard, on the Voice of America, the astronauts of Apollo-8 reading from Genesis as their spacecraft re-emerged from the dark side of the moon. It made me think of God in all His glory as our beautiful Earth rose in the distance, tens of thousands of miles away from the moon. I recall that even in that moment of excitement I remembered sadly the astronauts who had in the previous year died when their spacecraft caught fire before it could lift off.
I would like to believe that I have always been a diligent student of American politics. My interest in the subject began on a tragic note when news came in of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. A pupil of class three in school, I pored over the newspaper Dawn day after day, reading every bit of news item about the assassination and its aftermath. The photo of global leaders, among whom were Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie, Ludwig Erhard and Anastas Mikoyan, at Kennedy’s gravesite has been an enduring image in my mind. Thirty-three years after the 35th President of the United States was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, I stood at the very spot, letting the old images of those world leaders attending the funeral and of Jacqueline Kennedy lighting the Eternal Flame flash through my mind. I remembered too that President-elect Bill Clinton knelt at that very spot a few weeks after he was elected to the White House in November 1992.
At the USIS in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province --- the centre was later transformed into the Quetta Divisional Library --- I devoured the biographies of all American Presidents who had come into office till 1969. It was Richard Nixon who had by then succeeded Lyndon Johnson. American political history apart, I grew up reading comics that peopled my imagination in their many forms. Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, Yogi Bear, Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Archie, Dilton Doily, the Flintstones --- you name it --- were all part of my childhood reading. 
An overriding purpose in my school years for me was regular visits to the bookshops to procure comics with the money my father gave me. And then there was my Sindhi classmate and friend Awais Ahmed who at one point in high school began to pass on to me magazines containing beautiful images of homes in what I later learned was small-town America. Those images sent my imagination into a feverish spiral, making me wonder if my family could ever inhabit such charming homes that were the epitome of fairy-tale cottages. I have never seen or heard of Awais since we both finished school. 
One of my intense ambitions was to undertake higher education in the United States. Part of the reason for the growth of such an ambition had to do with the fact that the principal of my school --- it was St Francis Grammar School --- and my teachers were so impressed with my classroom and examination performance that they let my parents know (and this was in 1970) that they would recommend me for Oxford. 
Unfortunately, owing to some factors beyond my control --- illness was one --- that plan did not work out. But in Dhaka, some of us friends went seriously into the job of applying for admission to American universities in the 1970s. My friend Mansurul Hasib made it to the United States in 1977, while another friend Shah M. Hasan went there in 1981. I was the one left behind, owing to the fact that I was unable to secure a scholarship or come by the financial means that would allow me to earn a top degree at such institutions as Brandeis.
No, I have no regrets. Neither am I letting emotions take over. My whole point is the interest I have always had in America. The courage and wisdom of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin taught me the meaning of patriotism when I was too young to comprehend the many ways in which history shaped the lives of nations. Abraham Lincoln remains much more than just the President who kept America together, for in him I have felt the force of spirituality, the essence of the human soul. 
Closer to our times, Richard Nixon has been one American leader whose intelligence and grasp of diplomacy has never failed to impress me. Back in 1968, it was the poet in Senator Eugene McCarthy which made me hope that he would win the election that year and provide moral leadership to his country. Martin Luther King Jr is an enduring presence in my thoughts, an idea which was reinforced when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.
American writers have been part of my literary upbringing inasmuch as British authors and poets have been. I have never felt tired of reading Hemingway and Emerson. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is a work I have read many times over and still do when the mind in me yearns for solitude, for a walk in the woods. In school, our teacher Allahyar Malik’s brilliance came alive as he taught us Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. And then I watched the movie with Gregory Peck filling the entire ambience of the story. 
When, and that is even at this twilight of my life, I need to hear an actor deliver his dialogues in the perfection of the English language, I go back to Gregory Peck and, of course, to Richard Burton the Welshman. Movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made mellifluous with the song ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’, have cheered me to no end. In the humour of Bob Hope and Woody Allen I have often set aside the worries of life in order to understand the need for life to not always be tied down to the quotidian grim realities of life. I may not have been much of an admirer of Ronald Reagan, but I have noticed how he filled a room with his presence and his ready wit. 
On a beautiful June day, a long, long time ago, I walked in the shade of the mammoth trees in Big Sur in California. As evening descended, it was the serene lights of a small, tranquil village called Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Clint Eastwood once served as mayor, that threw up a world of poetry in the mind. Fireworks lit up the imagination. 
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy, history and culture