Did you know PM Modi was a teenage acting sensation?

Did you know PM Modi was a teenage playwright and actor? If you had forgotten, India Today insists that you remember. 

On September 16, India Today published an article by Prabhash Dutta on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s playwriting prowess. It informed readers about the plot and characterisation of Peelu Phool, a Gujarati play on untouchability that Modi allegedly wrote when he was 13. 

For reference, the piece cited Exam Warriors, a 2018 book by the PM on life, exams and yoga, and The Man of the Moment, a 2013 biography of Modi by MV Kamath and Kalindi Randeri.

Before we could ask why publish such a fawning piece, we found ourselves asking why fawn so badly.

The author tells us that to fix a broken compound wall in his Vadnagar school, Modi (then 13) and his friends decided to stage a play to raise funds. “Modi wrote the play, directed it and acted in it. It was a one-man (boy) show, one-act play,” writes Dutta. “Peelu Phool was well received.”

In Modi’s play, a Dalit mother has just one way to save her dying child: touch a yellow flower in the village temple. The priest first turns her away, but ultimately relents. 

The moral of the story, in Dutta’s words: “Everyone is equal before god and everyone has the same right over flowers offered to gods in temples.”

While not blaming the author for blushing over the PM’s past, the copy was riddled with grammatical errors and contorted sentences. Besides, we have no idea why books published in 2013 and 2018 should be used as a peg for a story in 2019. Mysterious are the ways of online reporting. The notorious editorial desk at India Today gave the story as much attention as Union Minister Piyush Goyal did to physics. 

So, we decided to help out a little bit. You’re welcome.