​Tip was in college with me in India and he turned up in the US five years after me. He was to teach in a university in the west, but landed in New York to meet an uncle and chose to spend a week with me in Washington. It was a delightful week, full of trips, walks and reminiscences, and I was sorry to see him leave.
 
He visited me a couple of times after that, accompanied by his wife Maureen. Maureen was polite and pleasant, but I never struck a chord with her. Overall we had a good time together, but I could not resist a sliver of resentment that I did not retrieve the euphoric time I had earlier with Tip.
 
Twelve years later I had a frantic call from Maureen. Tip had long suffered from Muscular Dystrophy and had started relying on a cane to walk. Apparently it had taken a sudden turn for the worse; doctors feared the worst. Maureen had nobody to turn to and wanted me to come.
 
It took me a day to extricate myself from commitments and take the first available flight for San Diego. Tip was in the last stage and passed away two days later. I stayed behind a few days more to help Maureen.
 
She needed help because Tip was a singularly disorderly person. He had done nothing to prepare for the eventuality. Maureen ran the house, but knew very little of Tip’s work at the university and nothing of their accounts. Without a Power of Attorney it was difficult to sort out his affairs at the university. It was no easier to break into his computer and unearth the financial problems and resolve them one by one.

Maureen was grief-stricken and helpless. I felt it my duty to tell her what I was doing and explain what she need to pursue after I had left. She listened well and asked pertinent questions. I found her attentive and bright, though understandably distracted at times. She said she felt a little overwhelmed. I could understand her discomfort in an unaccustomed role and felt sorry for her. ​

​I realized she was a retiring, off-stage person who was ill at ease interacting with strangers. She took time to connect with people, but she was neither asocial nor charmless. She let me make the coffee in the morning, but insisted on making breakfast – a changing one every day – and serving it with reticent grace. Her computer skills were initially modest, but she quickly proved herself an uncannily fast learner, who swiftly mastered the financial details of her home, mortgage, utilities and insurance and stumped me with her intricate questions.
 
Our relationship thawed, my misgivings dissolved. My original resentment ceded to a grudging admiration and, when the time came to leave, I found to my surprise that helping her had come to mean a pleasant chore for me.
 
The last day we returned from a long day at the bank, where we sorted out the last vexing issues that Tip had left a mystery for both of us, and Maureen settled down to preparing our last dinner. We chatted amiably during dinner and then, as I started packing my things afterward, she said, with what in retrospect seems an uncharacteristic forthrightness, “Please sit with me and talk to me a little.”
 
“In a little while,” I said, “after I have finished packing.”
 
She passed me by a half-hour later, and I added, “Just a while longer.”
 
By the time I finished packing, a call came from an office colleague and it took a while to explain what had to be done in my absence. From a corner of the eye, I could see Maureen waiting patiently at the other end of the room.
 
When I finished talking, I turned and could not see Maureen. Guiltily, I presumed she had retired for the night.
 
A taxi came for me early the next morning. Maureen came sleep-eyed to the door to say good-bye. This was no time to talk, I thought, I would call her later.
 
I was quite busy when I returned to Washington, not the least because of a week’s absence. One thing or another took my time. Three weeks later I had a call from a San Diego hospital: Maureen was admitted with a cardiac infarction. No, I could not talk to her in her present state.
 
I never had the chance to sit down and talk with her.

​Some people you never forget.
 
The Philippines was a professional landmark for me. Until then I always had a nine-to-five job, rushing to an office early each day and returning home late to lick my wounds. In Manila, I decided to be a consultant, devoting three days to teaching and advising in a management institute, two days to consulting for a development bank, and the remaining day to writing and lecturing.
 
My work entailed contact with a German foundation and I met its chief, Lyssa Schmidt. Lyssa was swarthy and statuesque, with dazzling eyes, shoulder-length hair and a slow, sly smile. What I found most striking was her style of talking. She had been a public prosecutor in Berlin for many years, and her legal career had left her with a streak for the precise turn of phrase. Yet she was new to spoken English and the exact word she wanted wouldn’t readily come to her tongue. So she spaced herself curiously: one moment her words would gush out in a torrent, and the next moment she turned deliberate, turning out each word with polish and precision that would be a diamond-cutter’s envy. I simply loved to be with her and hear her talk.
 
We had to work together on a project. I spent the previous night assembling data from diverse sources and hammering out the draft of a project proposal. I thought we could have a running start with the realistic outline I had created for a first discussion. I began our meeting the next morning by setting out the criteria for decisions on the project. Lyssa agreed readily. Our work had begun well.

​Then I presented the draft. She listened intently and said she appreciated the scrupulous work I had done. Then she methodically revisited the draft step by step. She began with the objectives and made some marginal suggestions for making them more specific. Then she took each project element and tested it against the objectives one by one. As she did so, I began to see, more clearly than before, what each element could contribute to the project – and what, alas, it could not. Though I had created the document with great care in the first place, I gained an amazing perspective, as she talked, about the strength and weakness of the different elements, though she had not said a single word specifically on their merit. Then, she took a few more minutes, went the same methodical way over the time sequence of some main elements, focusing on what had to happen first for the ensuing activities to succeed.
 
When she finished, I told her frankly that I had worked with several capable and experienced groups on such projects, but had rarely seen such a penetrating analysis. It was a veritable tour de force, and I had gained a new clarity about my own proposal. I intended to create a second and better draft, and would welcome an equally deft analysis.
 
That was the beginning. We collaborated on a number of projects, and we became close friends in the process. I learned to identify the slowly emerging suggestion of a smile when she agreed with an idea and the gentle but impatient shake of her locks when she didn’t. I learned to drive at what I considered a painfully slow speed when she sat by my side, as I wove my way through Manila’s crowded streets. I learned not to ask but always order Pinot Noir, irrespective of whatever we ordered for entré. She was a delight to work with and be with.
 
She left Manila for Germany about the time I too left for the US. In a month I received the shattering news that her convertible was crushed by a truck on the autobahn. Her life hung by a thread for several weeks. She recovered, only to remain in a hospital bed for months. In Europe for a conference a year later, I hesitantly called her, not knowing whether she was mobile. When she said she was out of the hospital, I flew to Berlin to meet her.

​I rang the bell for her apartment and waited. I did not know what to expect. Since her legs had been badly damaged, my best guess was that she moved in a wheelchair. The next moment the door flung open, and Lyssa stood there, firmly on her legs, the shoulder-length hair slightly askew, but with the same slow, sly smile. Whatever might have happened, she looked radiant as ever. She hugged me. Surprised and thrilled, I kissed her with abandon.
 
Without disengaging herself, she said, in her typical unhurried, deliberate English, “I thought you had given up on me. Did you?”

​If you live in Washington, as I do, you feel the presidential election has sucked all the oxygen. That is all the people talk about, and all the television channels talk about.
 
A lot of people are upset about the harsh mood of the election, the aggression and ferocity of the campaigns. Of course, the stakes are high; the effort is to defeat the opposite side, preferably with a knock-out blow. But the bitterness of the adversity, the venomous charges levelled against the candidates, have left many stunned. Granted that the two sides will attack each other, but few expected the degree of hate and contempt the campaigns would spew.
 
I have lived through ten US presidential elections, six of them at close range as a Washington resident. I have not seen an election as full of anger and acrimony as the current one. Even as I say this, I realize how badly I represent the reality. The vulgarity of the exchanges during the election owe squarely to the plebeian character of one candidate, Donald Trump. He is restrained neither by a sense of decency nor a minimal respect for the truth, and can merrily state as a fact what is at best a surmise and at worst the wish fulfillment of an ailing mind. Trump makes allegations with no allusion to evidence and levels charges with no respect for reality. This has sadly created an atmosphere of animosity that spells a danger sign for normal democratic dialectics.

​Even this perhaps is less disastrous than the other phenomenon that seems less noticed and regretted. The central idea of a presidential election is not the elevation of an individual, but the ‘electing’ of an option, the collection of ideas and policies of which a candidate is both an advocate and a symbol. From the very beginning, Trump has spurned that idea and declined to elaborate or explain his policies. A wall is not a policy, but only a notion of hate and contempt for strangers; its estimated cost of $20 billion and dubious utility as a deterrent makes it an absurd non-starter. Quick and wholesale deportation of 12 million residents is another such notion, hugely expensive and totally impractical, dished out only to gain the support of disaffected whites who loathe the idea of living next to non-whites.
 
Nor is it a policy to bar people from entering the country, as a refugee or immigrant, on ground of religion. It is rather a trial balloon, to gain some people’s support by fomenting distrust of a community. A similar idea is to initiate close police surveillance of Muslim communities simply because they are Muslim. These are preposterous ideas that can never become policy, for they are blatantly unconstitutional.
 
Just as ridiculous – not just loathsome – are the ideas that we should torture adversaries or kill their family members. Or that we could eliminate the Islamic State by indiscriminate endless bombing without any concern for civilian casualties.
 
Trump advances these infantile ideas simply to warm the cockles of the simple-minded hearts who are yearning for simple solutions to vexing problems. Clearly he has not thought out these ideas or taken the advice of people who have thought them out. These are in fact not policy prescriptions at all. These are just mantras that the gullible can spout to other gullible people and feel that a solution is at hand.

​Trump, we must grant, has offered little pretense that he has a bunch of policies to recommend. He has occasionally and reluctantly read from talking points prepared by his staff, but his heart has never been in policies. At times, he has clearly said the opposite. He has declared that he knows, better than our generals, how to defeat the Islamic State, but he would never reveal them.
 
That is the tell-tale sign of a man who does not intend to play by the critical rule of a democratic society: you must tell the people what you intend to do and let them decide whether they want to let you do it. You must unfurl your policies and humbly let the voters choose what they like. If you are not ready to do so, then you are unfit to play the game at all. Kicking the chess board does not qualify as a style of playing chess.
 
Hillary Clinton, likable and credible or not, has clearly entered the arena with a readiness to observe the rules of the game. You may scoff at that as the guiles of a policy wonk or the wiles of a sly politician, but you cannot but accept her as a legitimate player. It is better than being just an astute charlatan.