Modi’s letters to be published

INDIAN prime minister Narendra Modi’s book, Letters to Mother, translated from Gujarati by film critic Bhawana Somaaya, will be released by HarperCollins Publishers as an e-book and a hardback this month.

As a young man, Modi got into the habit of writing a letter every night to Mother Goddess, whom he addressed as Jagat Janani.

However, after every few months, Modi tore the pages and consigned them to a bonfire. But the pages of one diary, dating back to 1986, survived.

“This is not an attempt at literary writing; the passages featured in this book are reflections of my observations and sometimes unprocessed thoughts, expressed without filter…

“I am not a writer, most of us are not; but everybody seeks expression, and when the urge to unload becomes overpowering, there is no option but to take pen and paper, not necessarily to write but to introspect and unravel what is happening within the heart and the head and why,” Modi wrote in the foreword to his collection of poems.

Somaaya, recipient of the Padma Shri award in 2017 and author of several books on cinema, said: “In my opinion, Narendra Modi’s strength as a writer is his emotional quotient. There is a raw intensity, a simmering restlessness which he does not disguise and that is his attraction.”

Sometimes

Time tiptoes out of the room Sometimes,

It spreads like a rock

On my chest

Weighs me down with its burden I wasn’t aware

That time has thorns

It pokes and pierces Bruises and bleeds this heart Sometimes

Time is fragrant too

And gently, smoothly passes by Exits without remnants of aroma Without touch, without signs! Man has forever trapped time Within the hands of the clock Assembled it in small Structures and machines

And yet sometimes, somewhere Time must feel restricted …