Narendra Modi and Barack Obama meat

It will not be quite a "historic" tea ceremony as happened in Japan. The last historic tea ceremony the Americans had was when they dumped boxes of East India Company tea into the Boston harbour in 1773.

No chai pe charcha but Narendra Modi will meet Barack Obama over two separate days in September, not just one. "The fact that there will be interactions over two days is a signal of the importance we place on the US-India relationship," says Obama’s National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden.

But don’t expect the Modi-Abe bromance. These are two men cut from very different cloth.

Obama, writes Tunku Vardarajan in The Daily Beast, is “an exquisitely calibrated product of American liberalism” and the “acme of political correctness (notwithstanding the odd drone directed at ‘AfPak’).” Modi, he writes, in contrast, is a “blunt-spoken nationalist, opposed to welfare, and to the ‘appeasement’ of minorities.”

Vardarajan guesses that the two in their heart of hearts, likely have “vigorous contempt” for each other. In fact, an unsubstantiated story by K P Nayar in The Telegraph had Obama telling a closed door group of wealthy donors that he “continued to have concerns over Modi’s past.”

Whether that story is apocryphal or not, any “concerns” will be kept firmly under wraps on 29 and 30 September. That will not be that difficult. It’s a meeting, not a US Open final where one player has to emerge as the winner.

Instead the chances are both sides will strive to play up points of synergy. "There are few places in the world other than India and the US where the son of a tea-seller in a small time town can rise to be the Prime Minister or the child of a Kenyan father can rise to be president," said US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel on his recent visit to India.

If Obama’s father had grown coffee beans the parallels would have fit a little better.

But the elephant in the room — that visa denial — will remain. "The Americans should be even more cautious and curious to see if there is unhappiness from the Indian side," says foreign policy analyst Kanwal Sibal to IndiaWrites.com. While a “pragmatic” Modi will obviously not bring it up, Sibal says unlike Manmohan Singh he has "no reputation of being particularly pro-American" either, forcing the Americans to work “extra hard to build a personal relationship with him.”

For Modi’s supporters, this is not a visit as much as it’s a victory lap for him in a country which had him on a visa denial list for years. That’s why instead of the usual meet-and-greet with the community at some hall or auditorium, Modi is choosing to hold what amounts to being a “victory rally” at Madison Square Garden. While the target audience is the Indian community, its message will not be lost on his American hosts either. Modi will play rockstar on their home turf.

Luckily for Obama, the visa denial was not on his watch. Aziz Haniffa reports in India Abroad that at an 2 April fundraiser, Obama claimed he did not even know about the “visa situation.” “But this is not right and I will ask the White House staff to prepare a brief for me and I will act on it,” Obama told the donor saying he wanted to have “great relations with India.”