This has to be one of the most gruelling Navratri fasts that Mr Modi has undertaken. We don't have it from the horse's mouth but seriously just imagine sipping only water all day as you head for meeting after meeting watching people eat gourmet food, drinking freshly squeezed juice and then talk and talk more, like the fate of your country hangs on your words. Well it does actually.
Tonight, President Obama hosted a dinner in Mr. Modi's honour and he ate nothing. For all the planted stories of how the White House was preparing a fasting menu, the Indian Prime Minister stuck to his punishing regime of only warm water.
The menu itself seems quite simple and uninspiring. Compressed avocadoes for starters along with goat cheese and grapeseed oil. That is bland and dull. Crisped Halibut with ginger carrot sauce is something neither the Prime Minister nor External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj would have eaten since both are vegetarians.
A compromising dish of Succotash was there which is essentially corn and lima beans along with Basmati Rice; not half as interesting as Rajma Chawal. And desert was mango creme brulee. Now if the mango was not alphanso from Ratnagiri, they really needn't have bothered. We are Indians, you see, very sensitive about non-Indian mango preparations. How can anything compare with aamras of the Deccan plateau?
So did the two heads of government establish a rapport over dinner? Apparently they did, even though it was a bit crowded at the table. There were 18 of them at the table. This was a getting to know each other evening for the two leaders, we were told. But like a joint family gathering before an arranged marriage, the two leaders were crowded out with their colleagues. A bit out of the ordinary for Mr. Modi because for the past three days in New York, the Prime Minister has pretty much flown solo with the External Affairs minister conducting her own meetings with her counterparts and coming in for a few meetings with the Prime Minister.
Though it was the first time that President Obama and Prime Minister Modi were meeting they have managed to pen an op-ed for an American publication. Another first. No American president and Indian Prime Minister have jointly penned an article for any publication so far. How did they manage this meeting of minds when they hadn't met physically? Digitally. Obama and Modi are social media whiz kids. They both chatted about how they had used technology during their campaigns and felt frustrated at the resistance to technology in their respective capitals. PM Modi told the US president that he was used to using technology in Gujarat but when he got elected and came to Delhi he found it less tech savvy. President Obama shared similar stories of his early months in Washington DC.
In 2008 when Barack Obama won the election, he requested that the government provide him with a secure BlackBerry, which sent many in Washington into a tizzy. Former NSA official Richard George, who was a technical director then, told CNN that the agency established a laboratory with dozens of experts who worked for months to secure a Smartphone for President Obama.
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"Nobody wanted to put anything out there that wasn't completely secure," he said. So the phones were stripped off games and other accessories.
Prime Minister Modi's Smartphone we know has a twitter app, which he uses quite often and it has a photo app, which he uses for selfies. The dinner meeting went on for 90 minutes. Tomorrow, the two leaders will meet again and discuss "more substantive issues." So the conversation will shift to ISIS and Ebola, nuclear deal and taxation regimes, defense cooperation to Afghanistan draw down. A gamut of issues to talk about.
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