Here is something that worked for me. Not a solution I would go for if I had a choice, but it did work!
First I copied atom and gdata directories from /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages to my working directory. I did this because it made editing any files easier. Python looked for the import modules first in the working directory. And I got permissions on the copied directories and files. Plus I retain the original copy in the original location.
Next I edited the data.py file from atom. I changed the import statement from import atom.core to import core.
Next I edited the client.py file from atom. I changed the import statement from import atom.http_core to import http_core.
This seemed to be working as I didn't get any errors at these points anymore. Now I realized that in both of the above instances, import statement tried to import the module as atom.module from inside the atom package. So then I proceeded to change all the instances where atom.module was used in the above files to just module. The code ran fine.
