WE IN India badly need politicians of the Barack Obama kind right now – given that our country is ruled mostly by selfish politicians who will exploit anything that comes their way to advance their political career. We also need actors of the Bill Cosby kind who believe in calling a spade a spade. The Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, all set to make his political debut would do well if he took a leaf out of Cosby’s book.

Obama minced no words when he told a packed congregation at one of Chicago’s largest black churches that absent fathers were responsible for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. He recalled that more than half of all black children lived in single parent households. The number of such households had doubled, since his own childhood. Too many fathers were missing from too many lives and too many homes. They had abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. The foundations of the black families had grown weaker as a result.

He advised the mostly-black audience not to just sit in the house watching SportsCenter and not to give themselves a self-congratulatory pat for mediocre accomplishments. "Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation. You are supposed to graduate from eighth grade", he thundered, which brought many members of the congregation to their feet, applauding.

Blacks needed families to raise their children. They needed fathers to recognise that responsibility did not just end at conception. That did not make one a father. What made one a man was not the ability to have a child. Any fool could have a child. That did not make one a father. It was the courage to raise a child that made one a father. Obama spoke of the burden that single parenthood placed on his mother who raised him with the help of his maternal grandparents. He knew the toll it took on him - not having a father in the house. So he resolved many years ago that it was his obligation to break the cycle that if he could be anything in life, he would be a good father to his children.

Amongst those who heard him were his wife Michelle and his daughters Malia and Sasha, seated in the front pew – proof that Obama, himself a black, had the credentials to chide missing black dads. Incidentally, in February, addressing a mostly-black audience, Obama advised the blacks to take responsibility for the education and nutrition of their children and lectured them for feeding their children cold Popeyes for breakfast.

Another prominent black figure, comedian Bill Cosby, stirred a debate among black Americans by bluntly speaking about an epidemic of fatherless-ness in African-American families. He even suggested that some blacks used racism as a crutch to explain the lack of economic progress.

In my view, Obama’s speech should rate as the best speech ever made by a black leader, even surpassing the one made by Martin Luther King Jr, for its sheer forthrightness. It also reminds me of some of our own politicians who used and still use casteism as a crutch to explain the lack of economic progress of certain sections of society and to advance their political career. It is time our polity boasted of leaders of the Obama kind.It is time too, our film world boasted of actors of the Cosby kind, given our actors’ penchant for politics.