Welcome to Switzerland! Bonjour, this is France! The Alps are as beautiful as their storybook reputation on the drive from Geneva airport to Lausanne, a town on the banks of Lake Geneve – on the other side of which lies Evian, the village in France, where the G-8 meeting is being held. Obviously, this is one part of the world for which India’s Foreign Service officers would give their eye and teeth to be posted. Clearly, too, a number of them wanted to be around within earshot and eyeshot of the Prime Minister over the next couple of days, as he participates in the ‘‘extended dialogue’’ of the G-8 meeting.And so we have as many as three officers here ‘‘looking’’ after the PM and his delegation. There’s ambassador to Switzerland P.L. Goyal, ambassador to France Savitri Kunadi as well as the permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, Hardip Singh Puri. Evidently, Goyal pointed out that he had to be here in his capacity as India’s representative in Switzerland, while Kunadi, ‘‘naturally’’, had to be present in hers as India’s representative in France. As for Puri, he is said to know the ropes so well in this part of the world that his presence was essential too. All of which is very well, except that the joint secretary in the MEA in New Delhi responsible for multilateral economic relations Rajiv Mishra – the man whose beat the G-8 extended dialogue really is – is missing in action. Mishra preferred to remain far from the madding crowd at home. • The world gave itself up to voting with both its feet in favour of Vladimir Putin in St. Pete over the last two days — even as Jacques Chirac, using the excuse of being the host at the G-8 meeting in Evian, left last evening even before the Russian President could host his dinner. Still the Tercentenary is already being dubbed a bit of a sideshow to the great media drama currently unfolding in the West, with George Bush and Tony Blair being accused by some of the most influential newspapers in the world – The Guardian in Britain and The Washington Post in the US — of having deliberately overstated the case against Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. Increasingly, as questions are being asked about the raison d’etre of the US invasion of Iraq, the desire for a section of the Bush administration to carry out ‘‘regime change’’ in Iran becomes more remote.• At the G-8 summit in Evian tomorrow, Chirac looks certain to get his back on the US by hogging the limelight — having been castigated by the Americans for the last few months on Iraq. Germany’s Schroeder is there too, a man Newsweek says Bush is still furious with. Admittedly, its been fun watching the slow unfold of international realpolitik over the last week on and off Air India One, even if its been on the sidelines — and parts of it on television.• What’s in a name? Plenty, as St. Petersburgers will quickly tell you. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the city was called St. Petersburg. For a few years after the Revolution it was named Petrograd. After Lenin’s death in 1924, its name was changed again to Leningrad, a name it kept for the next six decades. This is the city that gave Russia its finest painters, writers and poets, among them Anna Akhmatova (So many ways for a poet to die/Stupid child, to choose this one) and Osip Mandelstam (In Petersburg we’ll gather again/Around the grave where we buried the sun), two who gave voice to Russia’s soul during the Gulag years.This is the city that also celebrated the triumph of the human will against the Nazi army during the 900-day siege of Leningrad, from September 1941-January 45, in which one million people are believed to have died from the war as well as starvation. But Leningrad never gave in. Rations were reduced to 125 gm of bread for an individual a day. The city opera never stopped its performances, not for one night, and patrons turned up in their overcoats, because there was no gas or electricity to heat the theatre. The story of the blockade has often been eloquently told, but its only when you see the memorial to Mother Russia on the edge of the city with its grave stones all neatly lined up, thousands upon thousands of them, that the enormous sacrifice really sinks in.• PM Vajpayee’s meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in St. Pete on Saturday had an interesting aide: India’s ambassador K. Raghunath to Moscow, now retired, but who knows China almost as well as he does Russia. Raghunath was a young officer posted in the Indian Embassy in Beijing during the 1962 war. Despite his diplomatic immunity, the Chinese sought to make an example of him and another officer P. Vijay, by frogmarching them in town. It was a humiliating experience and neither ever forgot. Vijay was so traumatised that he even quite the IFS. Raghunath rose to become India’s foreign secretary during the Pokharan tests.Still, there are other historical incidents in the Sino-Indian relationship that are more easily remembered. Like the visit of now President Hu to India in May 1984. He was then a member of the youth wing of the India-China Friendship Association.
