George Bush had developed a good rapport with Manmohan Singh after four meetings over six months and genuinely appreciated his sincerity. The charmer-in-chief though, was Natwar whose slightly irreverent, flirtatious courting of "Condi" brought a smile to her face every time. "You can't smile more cheerily at Hu Jin Tao (Chinese president) than me," he told her once. In one of the first encounters, his opening line was: "I am in the Guiness book as the oldest foreign minister and you, surely, are the youngest." From one banquet, Condi and Natwar even emerged hand in hand. The easy, and many, phone calls—at least eight—since Rice's trip to Delhi also helped ease the bottlenecks.
Natwar's insouciant manner had Bush in splits too with his promise of a grand welcome. He recalled that as Dwight Eisenhower's escort officer he had produced a million people in Ramlila grounds to welcome the US president and India's population was "a mere 100 million" then. Can Bush imagine the numbers cheering him when the population is a billion? Good bonding was evident between the two national security advisors too—both M.K. Narayanan and Stephen Hadley (eerily they even look alike) are low-key, self-effacing and studied. They quietly hammered away at the deal, unseen and silent. Then it was Saran, pleasant and personable, who was on the phone to Burns, an equally professional and smooth diplomat who betrays only the positive. The two teams were well-suited, determined to hammer out a deal. Still, the game only got played because the two captains were ready for a match.
