Editor’s Note: Marie Brenner, author of Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, is also contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women. Click here to read Michiko Kakutani’s review of her book on NYTimes.com.

I’m in India watching Barack Obama.

"Aap Obama ke baarey mein kyaa sochetyn hayn?" The TV anchor asks, which roughly translates to: “What do you think of Obama?”

I’m watching our new president from a small airport lounge in Bombay. It’s crowded with flyers on commuter flights headed for Jaipur, New Delhi, Bangalore. It’s four o’clock AM in Washington and noon in Bombay.

Hindi TV broadcasts iconic American moments — Jesse Jackson’s tears, Martin Luther King’s rolling cadences, “I Have a Dream.” India pauses —  takes it all in. The Hindi subtitles fill the screen. The script looks like laundry hanging on the line. Here is America on this astonishing day — the man and the moments — being shown to a country where 500 million earn one dollar a day. Tears are the essence of the day. A few moments later, India returns to its cell phones and coffees, its own headlines of bank scandals, but you could feel the atmosphere change.

The immensity and the meaning of who we are as a country — American flags waving and crying African Americans explained across the world. All heads at the small airport cafe stare up. The Indian next to me looks up and says ‘He’s a good man. I hope he can help the world." What a moment this is for everyone everywhere.

I’m alone in Bombay with my American-ness, sending out e-mails into the slumbering night hours of my friends.

“I’m in Beijing!" my friend Naomi, traveling poet, immediately replies:

"And I’m watching from Beijing! It’s 2:10 PM here and one girl in an Obama shirt slaps hands with me, in Obama shirt, in school hallway, and every teacher from every single far-flung place says, ‘Thank goodness, thank goodness, this day we have desperately awaited!’"

What a moment this is for everyone everywhere.

xxoo,

Marie