Like tea, coffee and opium, tobacco was just one of many intoxicants that was originally used as a form of medicine.

The Madonna like status of Cory Aquino in the Philippines was inspiring in the heady days of People Power, but did little to bolster the institutions of a secular democracy.

Yet today s heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people s revolution has so far led only to a direct military takeover, with the decades old emergency law still in force and the country s political direction uncertain.

In the heady first months after it came to power, the Bush administration laid out a bold new vision that gave India a rising Asian democracy on China s border, proximate to the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and to the epicenter of Islamist terrorism a starring role in US foreign policy.