In Fashion, a new and successful Bollywood film playing in Bombay this week, a middle-class girl with dreams of becoming a supermodel enters the city’s big, bad fashion world, gets blinded by the glitz, and forgets her manners and morals. The nadir of her descent is hit when she dances with a black man; the next morning, she wakes up in his bed, realises her soul is in danger, and runs home to daddy and mummy. Her redemption has begun.

After Barack Obama’s victory, I stopped at a newsstand to scan the Indian newspapers. All of them seemed ecstatic at his win, and many had turned his triumph into a celebration of African-American history, carrying front-page articles on the Emancipation and the March on Washington. Some of the journalists writing those articles have seen that Bollywood film, I’ll bet.

Indian journalists often vent their frustration in private at racism in their society – where cosmetic markets are flooded with skin-whitening creams and insults to darker-skinned people (especially women) are a daily event. Mr Obama’s victory was every Indian liberal’s dream come true, not because of what it means for America – but because of what it could mean at home. Some have been asking if the Indian equivalent of an Obama victory would be the election of a Dalit (a member of the group formerly called untouchables) as prime minister. And so, without delivering a single speech, without deploying a warship or spending a penny, the US has become a force in the political life of another country. This is how America used to work.

Watching the way my friends across the world have reacted to Mr Obama’s win, I thought of the words of a Leonard Cohen song: “I haven’t been this happy/ since the end of World War Two.” There has been a war from the day George W. Bush became president – a war between America and everyone else on this planet – and the worldwide celebrations at Mr Obama’s win suggest that an armistice has been declared. No event of the past decade – no Olympic triumph, football victory, royal birth, or celebrity marriage – has spread joy like this politician’s victory has done.

'Change has come' - Obama wins in landslide

Sweeping victory for America's first black president is greeted by tumultuous scenes Watch our video

• Analysis: Barack Obama's victory is head-spinning stuff

• Full video and text: Barack Obama's victory speech

• Early US Election exit polls give hope to Barack Obama

Michelle Obama: a new type of First Lady

For Carla Bruni the game is finally up. In Michelle Obama she has truly met her match - a First Lady like none before

BACKGROUND

• Bush - 'We should all be proud of Obama'

• The challenge that greets Obama

• Full video and text: Obama's victory speech

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

Multimedia

• Team Obama - who are they?

• Bonjour 'Barack'

A friend from Sydney, inveterately antiAmerican like most Australians of his age (he holidays in Cuba because it is on the State Department’s blacklist), has been gushing about Mr Obama for days. I’ve been mocking him for days. Obama an underdog? You must be joking: he ran the most expensive campaign in the world’s history. A new face? He’s a Chicago politician, a Washington DC insider. The voice of change? A gravelly voice – he used to be a chain smoker!

The facts about Mr Obama are out there and no one seems to care. He’s young, handsome, and smart; is also black, with a white mother, a Muslim middle name, and with relatives in Indonesia, though he was born in Hawaii – so everyone has got some reason to imagine some kinship with him. I assume some element of liberal white guilt works in his favour – how else do you explain all those crazy German supporters?

But fundamentally, I think, most of us are sick of hating America, and would like things to go back to the way they were eight years ago – when we made regular mocking comments about American stupidity, while the rolodex kept the address of a brother or sister living in New Jersey with a green card, just in case.

And by voting for this man, Americans seem to be saying that they too want to make up with us.

Yet, even if Mr Obama turns out to be the best president in US history, he can’t undo the damage of the past decade. America’s economic clout is in permanent decline, and the recession at hand looks likely to be long and nasty. Its military still hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden, still hasn’t beaten the Taleban, and can’t possibly get involved in another country.

So why will the Russians, if they want to attack another of their neighbours, bother to ask Mr Obama for his approval? America will never again be hegemon over the world. An old college teacher of mine from New York says his fond hope is that Mr Obama will cut back America’s military involvement abroad and make the US something like what it was before the Second World War – a liberal, prosperous, modest country that influenced the world only by example.

“Won’t it bother you,” I asked, “that you’ll no longer be living in the world’s most powerful country?” He thought about it, and said: “It probably will. But a modest America will be better for the world – and better for America.”

Mr Obama may bring that modest, more culturally influential, America into being. Yet the foundations of the country he will govern – its press, its judiciary, its bureaucracy, universities and think-tanks – have been corrupted for decades; America’s neo-conservatives are obtuse and arrogant, and its academic Left is even worse. The country’s great newspapers and magazines are in decline. Without anyone watching over him, will Mr Obama fall into the old traps, will he put the same old timeservers and dolts into office – the same Greenspans and Wolfowitzs who created the financial mess and the war in Iraq? Is it entirely inconceivable that one day President Obama will order an invasion of Iran or Pakistan, and the world will learn to hate him as it hates his predecessor? None of these things can be ruled out, because the blows to America’s mind and soul have been so deep. The odds are against this armistice lasting.

And yet at a moment like this, a fellow would be less than human not to pray that the reconciliation will last against the odds.

Barack Obama graduated from Columbia College in New York in 1983 – just ten years before I got there as a foreign student. His victory made me remember those first hours in America again; taking the taxi from JFK airport and arriving at my dormitory at the very edge of Harlem, hearing American accents, counting American currency.

At my desk in my Bombay flat, listening to the radio announce that even Virginia, a southern state, had voted for Obama, I could see America emerge again from the waters, the country that seemed to have gone under for good: Kerouac’s America, Whitman’s America, where people still count in miles and ounces, and where the son of an African immigrant really does become the president. Obama has brought it back for so many, in India and Africa and Germany, even if only for a moment, their lost Atlantis, their other home.

There may have been political events that were far more important, but from now on, whenever anything significant and good happens in their country, millions will be telling themselves: “I haven’t been this happy/ since the day Barack Hussein Obama won.”

Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize 2008

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone