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Nalin Mehta at the Times of India blog
The prime minister has been doing what he does best in Silicon
Valley- rock-star style public meetings, sizzling town-hall meetings
that bring back the best of his election campaigning in 2014 and acting
as India’s salesman No. 1 to American businesses. It has already yielded
big promises from several companies like Google (plans for 500 wifi at
500 railway stations), Microsoft (plans for broadband in 5 lakh
villages), Qualcomm ($150 million startup find) and talk of new
possibilities with Apple.
(Picture courtesy: PTI/Subhav Shukla)
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From Madison Square Garden last year to the Facebook town-hall with
Mark Zuckerberg this year, the PM’s American performances highlight a
uniquely Modi-an trait: His ability to engage a two-way duet of emotions
with his audiences. In the land which turned politics into a
high-performance art, where every presidential election since Kennedy
beat Richard Nixon on a TV debate in the 1960s has been as much about
sound-bytes as substance, the prime minister’s special ability to play
the pied piper holds out a lesson in political messaging.
(Picture courtesy: Reuters/ Stephen Lam)
From the emotional ‘mere paas maa hai’ moment with Mark Zuckerberg to
the rousing SAP Centre meeting where he turned the audience into as
much of a participant in his speech as himself, the PM has once again
demonstrated his USP as the ultimate political impresario — aware of the
pulse of his audience, expertly touching its underlying chords and
repeatedly smacking his message home.
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Where most other Indian politicians are prisoners of prepared
speeches, speaking boringly from death-like bureaucratic texts or
sticking slavishly to talking points, Mr Modi knows that he himself is
his message, his personae its embodiment.
(Picture courtesy: Reuters/ Stephen Lam)
The domestic is as much his audience as the foreign. While his
official speeches as prime minister were in English, all subsequent ones
have been in Hindi — aimed as much at the NRI or the foreign investor
as at desi voter. Not for nothing did he tell a chanting SAP Centre
audience, “mujhe aap ka certificate chahiye” (I want your certificate).
“I am working round the clock and fulfilling my promise.” Just when a
sense of ennui was beginning to build around his government, Mr Modi has
used his American trip to bring fresh energy and vitality, to renew the
sense of dynamism that created the magic of 2014.
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Now his challenge is to come back and convert the fine words and sizzling oratory into action.
