MUMBAI: Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remained the most popular leader in the country in the last six years. This has been reflected in several surveys and two parliamentary elections.

He is a widely respected politician. A lesser-known fact is that as a school going child, he had a huge interest in acting and drama.

His love for acting and stage has been well documented in one of his most well-received biography, The Man of the Moment: Narendra Modi by MV Kamath and Kalindi Randeri - published in 2013.

Our very own Prime Minister had written about his passion for acting and drama in his book, Exam Warriors.

In the same book, our minister recalls an incident that happened when he was rehearsing for a play. He had to deliver a particular dialogue and he was struggling with it. The director of the play then got impatient and said he wouldn’t be able to direct him.

But Modi thought he was delivering the dialogues perfectly. "So I found it perplexing that the director would say this about me. The next day, I asked him to act like me and show me what I was doing wrong. In a matter of seconds, I realised where I was going wrong and was able to improve myself," Modi wrote in the book.

One school time play, however, stands out for its message understood and conveyed by a teenager Narendra Modi. He barely was 13 – 14 years old when he acted in a play to raise funds for his school in his home town. The school compound wall was broken and the school didn’t have money to repair it.

Modi and his friends decided to raise funds for their school themselves. Modi and his friends decided to come up with a play and he  wrote, directed and acted in it. It was a one-man (boy) show, one-act play.

The name of the play was Peelu Phool in Gujarati. It literally means the yellow flower. The theme of the play was untouchability, an age-old practice. It had been declared unconstitutional under Article 17 of the Constitution.

The first law to declare untouchability an offence was passed by Parliament in 1955. But when this play was enacted (1963-64), untouchability was still deep-rooted.

The play was about a Dalit woman who lives with her son in a village. The son falls ill and the mother takes him to a vaidya (traditional physician), doctor and also a tantric but all refuse to treat the child as the two are "untouchables".

Someone suggests the son would be cured of the illness if she touches a yellow flower offered to gods in the village temple. She runs to the temple but is not allowed to enter. The priest yells at her.

But she begs for one yellow flower so that her son can be saved. The priest, finally, agrees to give her one flower and Modi's play ends with a message that everyone is equal before God and everyone has the same right over flowers offered to gods in temples.

It is said that Modi's play was inspired by a real incident in which he saw a priest shooing away a Dalit woman from a temple in Vadnagar.

( SOURCE: INDIA TODAY)