To use an Americanism, India's ardent sanctionbusters should get a life. They seem to be unaware that the world has moved on somewhat in the last three decades, since the time when anti-Americanism was a culture thing, hip and cool and, oddly enough, mature and committed at the same time. It was a time when anti-Americanism, the rejection of US hegemony, could be simply expressed by the rejection of an American icon. And what icon was more visible, more representative of the spread of US influence across the world, than the cola bottle? For the hip, the token was enough. For the more mature, it represented a refusal to feed the US economicmachine, which in turn fed the Cold War machine.

No matter who the objector was, it was possible to take a stand and reject the whole caboodle US militarism, commercial interests, spooks, the academic establishment, Mom, apple pie, everything by the simple expedient of spilling a bottle of cola. In the decades since, that simple world has ended.

The new reality is one where nations are far more likely to display their aggression through trade than weaponry, where territorial expansion goes under the name of increasing market share. Here, sanctions are literally weapons of war. They must be fought by hardheaded economic measures, not by the symbolic rejection of a bottle of Coke or Pepsi. In this day and age, Pepsi-spilling jamborees serve no function but to make their organisers look ridiculous. As ridiculous as the naive party workers who celebrated the advent of a weapon of mass destruction.

The commitment of India's sanctionbusters is certainly not in doubt. There has been an overwhelming rejectionof sanctions throughout the country and in the NRI community. But really, to use another Americanism, they need to wake up and smell the coffee. They should realise that by agitating in a manner that went out of style thirty years ago, by refusing to live in the present tense, they are laying the nation open to derision on an international scale.

Days after the tests, an NRI businessman seriously suggested that if a dollar was raised from every Indian in the US, the effect of the sanctions would be offset. As it happens, it would take care of only a small fraction of the total effect. Despite the best of intentions the public and political reaction to the tests and their fallout have been dogged by such immaturity, lack of perspective and failure of the imagination.

It is time for India's sanctionbusters to move on to more useful enterprises than vandalising soft drink trucks. Let them try to organise steady inflows from the NRI community, for instance, which has shown a reluctance to part with more thanits token dollar per head. And let them realise that anti-Americanism is a doctrine as obsolete as the geocentric universe.