Ahamed, Meenakshi Narula

Meenakshi Narula Ahamed was born in Calcutta (Kolkata), India. She’s enjoyed a varied career working as a development consultant, journalist, and the foreign correspondent for New Delhi Television (NDTV), based in London. Since returning to the U.S. in 1996, her op-eds and articles have been published in The Asian Age, Seminar, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She divides her time between the U.S. and India. In 1951, President Truman told Ambassador Chester Bowles that he “thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around the streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges, but I did not realize that anybody thought it was important.” It has been a long journey. Following Indian independence, India and the U.S. were caught in a dysfunctional cycle of resentment and mistrust for decades. In A Matter of Trust: India U.S. Relations from Truman to Trump (HarperCollins India), Ahamed draws on a trove of presidential papers, newly declassified documents, memoirs, and interviews to reveal the prejudices, insecurities, and political imperatives that so often have cast a shadow over this vital relationship.