The war in Iran had just started. I was meeting an American friend for coffee in San Francisco. There were “No Kings” posters on shop windows around us, symbols of protest against US President Donald Trump. San Francisco is a liberal bastion so that was not too surprising. Nor was it surprising that my friend was aghast about the war.
“It’s so embarrassing travelling anywhere as an American,” she said. “People are either upset with you. Or they look at you with pity.”
I agreed. Then she said, “It’s terrible. We were supposed to be the good guys.”
I remember looking at her quizzically. I am no expert in American foreign policy but even I could not but be aware of the country’s patchy record on democracy in many parts of the world. Much of the turmoil in Iran itself could be traced back to the CIA helping topple the left-liberal government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and propping up the Shah and Savak, his dreaded secret police, as an American bastion during the Cold War. The resistance to the Shah’s autocratic ways paved the way for Ayatollah Khomeini, and the US is still grappling with that seismic shift.
But in some ways my friend was also correct. America always projected itself as “the good guys”. Even in Iran. In 1909 an American teacher died trying to fight to advance what was called the Constitutional Revolution against royalist forces. When the Paris Peace talks happened after World War I, Iran was under Allied occupation and Washington advocated on behalf of Tehran.
The image of the “good guys” was baked into the Declaration of Independence. July 4, 2026 is the 250th anniversary of that founding document whose very Preamble said all men (sorry, women) are created equal and bestowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, I realise in retrospect, was the real American Dream. Britain ruled such swathes of the world it could boast the sun never set on the British Empire. But there was no British Dream like there was an American Dream.
It certainly inspired those striving to bring independence to India, who found moral strength in its assertion that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In an essay for Project Syndicate about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Shashi Tharoor writes that Jawaharlal Nehru was impressed not just by how the declaration staked a claim to independence but also the “articulation of a political philosophy grounded in a universalist conception of freedom and equality.” Nehru too believed that political independence had to come with social and economic justice. “And his historic ‘tryst with destiny’ address, delivered on the eve of independence in 1947, carried the Declaration’s sense of moral purpose and historical rupture,” writes Tharoor.
When I lived in the US, I didn’t really think too much about the Declaration of Independence. I was happier with independence with a lower-case i. Away from the watchful eyes of family and neighbours I felt free to explore myself, even reinvent myself. I remember renting a tiny studio apartment, called an “efficiency”, something I could ill afford because I wanted to live by myself away from the prying eyes and questions of desi roommates. The American Dream was about earning in dollars, pitchers of Long Island iced tea, and long drives down endless freeways. How I loved that word freeway—always with the promise of gas, food and lodging at the next exit.
What surprised me was how warm people were, even the white-haired church ladies who invited foreign students to Thanksgiving meals but with the hope of bringing them to Jesus. It was also a country of astonishing friendliness even when they asked the most naive questions about the world outside. The writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni once told me that when she arrived in Dayton, Ohio as a student, people would ask her in all innocence whether she went to school on an elephant. “I was a bad girl,” she chuckled. “I said, of course you know we had two elephants, a big one for me and a little one for my little brother.” She also told them all Indian women were born with bindis. But she was struck by how open people were about listening to what she had to say.
My parents had never been to America but my father had worked with Americans while building a power plant in Bandel near Kolkata. My mother would always marvel at how genial the Americans seemed compared to the reserved Brits she had known while living in London. They had boisterous parties where everyone was welcome. Once my father showed up in a dhoti and was dragged into the pool by the rest of his gleeful colleagues. The young American girl who lived down the hallway would constantly slip a note under their door inviting herself over for a meal of “dal and rice”. When they left, my mother inherited many of their possessions, hard to come by in India in those days, mixies and ovens and other kitchen gadgets. I grew up with a hard-bound cookbook left over from those days. America to me was all about the mouth-watering recipes I saw in that book—a glistening crown roast of lamb and scrumptious apricot almond tarts.
Of course the reality of America did not necessarily match those pictures. The first time I ate turkey for Thanksgiving it tasted rather dry and bland. I snuck into a Chinese restaurant and ate some kung pao chicken afterwards. And the independence I had craved in India was a double-edged sword in America. In Kolkata I would complain that nothing happened, that life was boring. Marooned in a small university town in the middle of America, without the money to make long-distance calls home, I would ache for the comfort of that boredom.
But America taught me to stand on my own feet. I burned my dal, wrecked my second-hand car, got mugged, was accused of smelling like curry. But along the way I realised the American Dream was not just about striking it rich. It was about the possibility of reinvention in a country which placed your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness dead centre. I went to America as a software engineer. I returned from America as a writer. I had always loved to write but I do not think I would have the courage to change tracks without having been to America.
In India, the idea seemed preposterous. A family friend’s son had switched from architecture to film studies in the US. That was held up as a warning to me. I saw it as a sign of derring-do. I was not as daring. I finished my degree and worked a Silicon Valley job before finally daring to make the great leap into the unknown. I didn’t tell my mother. I only came out much later when my sister said my mother was starting to get suspicious.
I was nervous. I had no degree in journalism or creative writing. But the woman who was hiring me, a MacArthur genius, had seen my work in the local Indian magazine and decided to take a chance on me. As we sat in the old Prince Hotel in downtown San Francisco, sipping red wine, she seemed to embody the American Dream where anything was possible. She hired me as an editor and writer. Then one day asked, “Do you want to try and host a radio show?” I had no training in broadcasting either but the American Dream was not fazed by the possibility of failure. It was a belief in what a future President would call the Audacity of Hope.
Now another American President vows to Make America Great Again. But I always thought the real allure of America was its enthusiastic conviction in its own greatness as derived from that Declaration of Independence. The American Dream was always its greatest export. Once that dream allowed us to reinvent ourselves in the pursuit of happiness. As America turns 250, it seems Donald Trump’s pursuit of happiness is to reinvent the American Dream itself.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.