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It is always better than saying, 'I don't know', which is anti-thetical to our national character. Our PM's ubiquitousness has made it easier not to travel on a long journey with a stranger from another country in silence.
My father was once on a train in Sweden. When his co-passenger discovered he was Indian, he asked, 'Have you ever thought of climbing Everest?' And then, reviewing his Indian compatriot, a short, paunchy Bengali man, added, 'Never mind' and retreated to his stoic Swedish thoughts. Modi removes this awkwardness.
This is a recent phenomenon. Over the last five years, wherever one travels, any inquiry about India from a foreigner is an embedded enquiry about what the Indian traveller thinks of the Indian prime minister. Whoever has done the PR job of making the two things synonymous has done a marvellous job of making it easy for Indian citizens to make friends with foreigners with a common point of reference, from which take-off point, any opinion, no matter how illogical it may be, is allowed.
When I was asked the same Modi question recently in the US, I said, 'He came from nothing you know. And today he is everything.' Sure. It sounds like a shallow, random opinion trying to pass off as insight. But the foreigner nodded gravely in agreement, as if I was India's foreign minister, making a policy statement.
Before Modi's popularity, the conversations were vague. When you met someone as an Indian person in Russia, for example, it would always be, 'Indian? Disco Dancer!' This was followed by the Russian man (often your taxi driver at the airport), breaking into a rendition of the classic, 'Jimmy Jimmy' song. And you, with jetlag, unsure of custom, and regardless of whether you knew the film, would be forced to join in, in some forced camaraderie.
In Cairo, vendors would see an Indian and ask, 'Indian? Shah Rukh Khan? Amitabh Bachchan?' And you'd not know what to do except to say, 'Yes,' as if taking sole credit for both those people.
In Europe, the Indian reference points, pre-Modi, were often specific and spiritual. A gent once asked me on an Austrian train if I knew Sukashu Baba, a mystic who roamed nude in Rishikesh, claiming to foreigners that he could delve into their past lives. When I said that I didn't know of this mystic and that chances of running into him as a Mumbai-based comedian were limited, he lost interest. But he said with finality, 'You are missing out. In my past life, Sukashu Baba said I was a squirrel in Afghanistan.'
When authors say there are many Indias, you realise most of them you don't recognise, especially when pointed out by a foreigner whose memories are from his teenage hash-smoking, backpacking India trip to 'discover himself'. Modi builds a bridge from there to a place you can recognise.
The trick is sometimes you think you have Modi's protection. But then the rug is pulled out from under you. A few weeks ago, I was on a flight from Dubai to the US, and a businessman next to me began with, 'Indian huh? So, what do most people think of Mr Modi?'
Like a well-oiled machine, I was prepared to launch into my illiterate diatribe that sounded BBC-ish, when he stopped me and said, 'I feel we know too much about Mr Modi. I'd rather discuss something else about India. Did you know that my company buys half a million wigs from South India. I love Indian wigs. What do you know about that?'
Silence.
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