Even for a country whose prime minister had not too long ago publicly acknowledged to the American president how much Indians loved the United States, the ‘humiliation’ of one of its diplomats—a woman and an officer of the elite Indian Foreign Service—at the hands of US authorities in New York earlier this month was just too much to take. National outrage boiled over, as images of the slightly built Devyani Khobragade, deputy consul-general at the Indian consulate in New York and a 39-year-old mother of two, and news of her being arrested, handcuffed in public, strip-searched—and worse—cavity-searched too like a common criminal, appeared on the front pages of national dailies, provoking angry debates in the electronic media.