MUMBAI: A year after the Prime Minister came to power, ending a long spell of Congress rule, things were not looking good. He had started with huge promise, and acclaim from around the world, but the realities of ruling were tripping him up. So he did what all politicians do when faced with problems at home — set off on trips abroad, and where better than San Francisco, the city of which Oscar Wilde once said, "It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco."It didn’t quite work, because it never does. The PM made speeches about how well his government was doing, but foreign correspondents back in India kept filing stories to the contrary. His appearances were spoiled by vigorous groups of protestors, some Indian students, some Indians settled in the US. And the American media had no interest in his deep thoughts, but a lot of interest in his unorthodox diet. Comparisons only go that far.PM Narendra Modi’s situation as he travels to California a year and few months after taking power is nothing like as dire as PM Morarji Desai’s was when, in June, 1978, a year and few months after being sworn in, he arrived in San Francisco accompanied by a future PM, then his Minister for External Affairs, Atal Behari Vajpayee.Desai could claim good reasons for the trip. The Janata Party’s victory the year before had been hugely acclaimed in the USA, both for its affirmation of democracy, and the hope that it could correct the Congress tilt towards the Soviet Union in the Cold War. He had spoken at the UN General Assembly in New York and was due to go to Washington DC to meet President Jimmy Carter.In between came a hop-over to the West Coast where he would receive a citation from the University of California at Berkeley, and also speak to the small, but growing Indian community there. Silicon Valley’s pioneering Indians were still only few at that time.Vinod Dham, for example, who developed the Pentium chip, had just graduated from the University of Cincinnati, and was two years away from joining Intel.But California had long had an eclectic Indian community, ranging from Sikh farmers who arrived in the 1920s (Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian-American member of the US Congress was one of them) to gurus like Paramahansa Yogananda, author of the perennialbest-seller Autobiography of a Yogi, who established an ashram near San Diego and had died – or taken samadhi, according to his followers – during a dinner for the Indian ambassador at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in 1952.PROTESTS AT BERKELEYThe Times of India (ToI) of June 12, 1978 reported that a hall at Berkeley was packed with these West Coast desis, who were "generally sympathetic and gave him a big hand." But the event was rather disrupted by a group of Indian students wearing face-masks who demonstrated noisily outside: "Some of the placards read ‘Only communism can save India, Down with Desai regime,’ ‘Puppet of imperialism,’ ‘Down with Desai, butcher of Indian people.’"Another group called South Asia People’s organisation distributed handbills calling for release of 3,000 political prisoners "and an omnibus demand for the end to all forms of exploitation." Desai ignored them, but wasn’t able to do so when an Indian lady confronted him directly over dual citizenship. "Mr Desai declared himself against it on the grounds that he did not favour dual loyalties," wrote ToI.Vajpayee tried to support him. "We are happy to have him as our leader," he said at Berkeley, adding somewhat gnomically, "if Mr Desai knew the way when he was the deputy prime minister, how can it be said that he has lost his way now that he has become Prime Minister?" Earlier in New York he had faced problems of his own after addressing a group of Indians in Hindi. Protests seem to have come from South Indians, since ToI reported that Vajpayee "pleaded with the audience not to import the language controversy to the US."Desai did have a few moments of respite. He visited the Giant Redwood trees near San Francisco and was presented with the key to the city by Mayor George Moscone (who would be assassinated a few months later, along with gay rights activist Harvey Milk). It would have been some distraction from the knowledge that, as the New York Times (NYT) reported, his coalition back home was in such dire straits that the cabinet had refused to meet in his absence "so that none of the rivals for power within the government would have the privilege and prestige of presiding in his place."MEDIA COVERAGENYT apart though, the American media seems to have had next to no interest in Desai. As ET’s Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar would note when Vajpayee visited the US as PM in 2000, the US media’s response to such visits by foreign dignitaries is "yawn, yawn, one more Third Worlder here to try and boost his domestic image." The only thing that might change this if there is some personal quirk that makes for a good story, like PM Modi’s fasting when he visited the US last year.And this Desai provided in plenty. The quirk was, of course, his practice of drinking a glass of his own urine every day, and as veteran journalist MV Kamath, reporting for ToI, noted rather despairingly, the problem wasn’t just that Desai did this, but he was very eager to talk at length about it: "in a 15-minute appearance on a very popular Sunday TV show called ‘60 Minutes’, Mr Desai was seen taking practically half the time to commend urine therapy."How sensational this was in the US can be seen in celebrity TV interviewer Barbara Walters memoir where she writes of how, when Desai first revealed this to her, ABC news, for which she filed the story, was so repulsed it didn’t carry the story. Only when CBS (which ran 60 Minutes) came out with the story, "finally, then, playing catchup, ABC ran my footage. The network urine wars."Desai was admirably unfazed by such American attitudes. ToI reported how on the plane from San Francisco to Washington ‘belying his image as a rigid, unsociable person, Desai remained in the company of travel-weary reporters." Standing in the aircraft aisle he lectured them on going vegetarian and how nature-cure – on which he would write a book – could deal with many diseases.Above all, he told them, it was important to stop worrying. "Worry does not help," Desai told the journalists up in the air. "I think in moments of crisis in a family if you stop worrying you will have more resourcefulness to help yourself or others. In any case, do you think you have more worries than the Prime Minister of India?" Despite the many differences in their situation, this ‘what me worry’ attitude of the PM then will probably resonate with the PM today.