That the economy of the United States of America is in crisis is now old news. But when some of the most respected names in the entire history of business, such as Johnson and Johnson and General Electric recently got to be clubbed with the likes of Global Crossing, K-Mart and Martha Stewart, this writer's thoughts went back to the year, 2000. Shortly after my arrival in Washington two years ago as the correspondent of this paper, a European diplomat posted in the US capital, an old friend and a Moscow veteran in the era of the former Soviet Union, told me that America reminded him every single day of the Soviet Union. America is a communist country, but a successful one, he told me. The only difference with the Soviet Union and its east European satellites is that unlike in those societies, propaganda is very effective here. The people lap up all the propaganda in the US: in Russia they used to quietly put up with it and look for the truth elsewhere. Having lived in the US earlier, albeit in a different incarnation and for a shorter period than now, I politely listened to his thesis and did not feel inclined to dispute its well-argued premise. 'O these Kremlinologists!', I said to myself then, 'They can never get Moscow out of their system. Especially if the USSR has been their first diplomatic posting and if they harboured the ambition of one day being an ambassador in Moscow.' The European diplomat's thesis came back to haunt me in the last two years every time something in America reminded me of the ways of the Soviet Union or of communist eastern Europe. Yet, I resisted the temptation to give in to the theory that the US is a phenomenally more successful version of the former Soviet Union. But this month, two things happened, which made it more difficult than ever to dismiss the diplomat's thesis out of hand. One is the plight of Martina Navratilova, the nine times women's Wimbledon champion. Navratilova, who defected from what was Czechoslovakia in 1975 at the age of 18 and is now a US citizen. She is being pilloried from coast to coast in America for having spoken out her views on the values of American society. 'The most absurd part of my escape from the unjust system is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another', Navratilova wrote in the German weekly, Die Zeit. 'It's depressing', she wrote. 'Decisions in America are based solely on the question of 'how much money will come out of it' and not on the questions of how much health, morals or the environment suffer as a result'. Despite living in a country where free speech is enshrined in and guaranteed by the constitution, the tennis great has become a figure Americans love to hate. Her situation has been no different from that of the actress, Jane Fonda, who was forced to apologize for having visited Hanoi during the Vietnam war and posed in front of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Or that of the celebrated TV anchor, Bill Maher, who just lost his programme on ABC television for having suggested that bombarding Afghan civilians from the air with smart bombs is not exactly an act of heroism. So far Navratilova has stood her ground, but safety for her has come only from numbers. By suggesting that she is being attacked because she is openly lesbian, the tennis star has sought the protection and the lobbying power of lesbians and gays, who are powerful forces in the US. 'Love it or leave it', Connie Chung, CNN's latest star anchor, told Navra- tilova during one of her many TV appearances last week to defend what she had written. Chung suggested that the one-time refugee from Czechoslovakia should go back to where she came from. Navratilova responded: 'I live here. I love this country. I have lived here 27 years. I have paid taxes here for 27 years...I love it and I am here and I am trying to do my best to make it a better place to live in, not just this country, but the whole world'. The second instance is best described as a bolt from the blue. The Economist, that standard-bearer for everything that Western free-market democracies stand for, began a recent editorial on corporate dishonesty in America with the following words. 'Business leaders are being knocked off their pedestals faster than Communist heroes after the fall of the Berlin Wall'. America's way of doing business and running its economy was hitherto touted to countries like India as a model for reform. American corporate enterprises have been hailed worldwide as beacons of the future, especially since Marxism was comprehensively discredited in the Nineties everywhere. But The Economist drawing a parallel, however tenuous, between the current crisis in American capitalism and the fall of the Berlin Wall? Its first leader article brought back memories of how Lenin's statues were toppled all over the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the context of how men with iron-clad reputations such as Jack Welch of GE have been discredited? Maybe my friend, the European diplomat, had a point after all? I recall the excitement in a financial newspaper, where I worked during the early years of P.V. Narasimha Rao's reform programme, when it was announced by the Indian unit of GE that Jack Welch would make a trip to New Delhi. It was, in corporate terms, the equivalent of Jackie Kennedy's celebrated visit to India when her husband was the US president. In the Eighties, when I was doing an internship with an international news agency at their Berlin office, I was put up in West Berlin, but my work was mostly in East Berlin, where the agency maintained a more modest set-up. The arrangement was complicated, but it was more than acceptable. West Berlin was more attractive at night and East Berlin was professionally more challenging. The agency could structure such an arrangement because the Western powers did not consider Berlin a legally divided city or East Berlin as the legitimate capital of the German Democratic Republic: Berlin was a city under occupation with its various Allied zones: Soviet, French, British and American. GDR officials, whom I used to meet, emphasized in interviews and on other occasions that their country ranked 12th globally as an industrial power. The news agency's bureau chief, who was a drinking buddy of a central committee member of the Socialist Unity Party, even told me once with obvious German pride that East Germany was the only instance in history where a colony was more prosperous than the centre of the empire, a reference to Moscow. A few years after the unification of Germany, I visited the headquarters of the Treuhand, the organization set up to privatize East German state enterprises. The head of Treuhand was still reeling from the realization that GDR was anything but the 12th biggest industrialized country. Everything had been inflated. The books of state enterprises had been cooked up, their inventories were maintained by sleight of hand, productivity had been exaggerated and many of the firms in GDR only deserved to be closed down. Enron was described a few months ago as the biggest bankruptcy in US history. Last weekend, a new record was set when WorldCom became the world's biggest bankruptcy. Re-reading The Economist editorial on the fallen idols of the corporate world, I could not but recall the horror of the Treuhand executives a decade ago and compare it to expressions these days on millions of American faces following the realization that they had been taken for a ride by their country's version of capitalism and by those who were the corporate leaders of that system which claimed to have ushered in the most prosperous phase in America's history. All this is not to say that America's economic system is in terminal decline. Or that any other political system is better than what is practised in the US. Indeed, the Economist editorial portends what could well be the future: 'By all means tear the statues down, but don't destroy them. The faces can be rechiselled next time round.' It is pertinent to ask how or if all this is relevant to India. To answer that question in context, one must go back and recapture the mood all over the world, and more so in the US, on September 14 last year. The world was in shock after the terrorist outrage against America. And yet, on September 14, a mere three days after the world's most spectacular terrorist attack, Kenneth Lay, the boss of Enron, not only had the time, but also the temerity to write a letter to the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, equating his company with the American state. What is happening in Wall Street today is relevant in New Delhi because, notwithstanding the crisis in American capitalism, some US official will again try to twist the Indian government's arm and extract Enron-type concessions by complaining that US investment in India is 'as flat as a chapati'. It is for Vajpayee and the finance minister, Jaswant Singh, and the external affairs minister, Yashwant Sinha, to tell those who use the chapati analogy that this version of Indian bread, however flat it may be, sustains millions of Indians. Reforms are due and badly needed, but India is not yet ready to exchange the familiarity of its chapati with the unknown promise of bagels - even with the added attraction of cream cheese.