India will see eye to eye: Narendra Modi on fasting, democracy, and peace

Lex Fridman opened by saying he had been fasting for almost two days, forty-five hours on water only, in honor of the conversation and to reach what he called the right spiritual level. Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, sounded genuinely surprised and thanked him for the tribute. He then recast fasting as something larger than skipping meals. In India, he said, religious tradition is a way of life; the Supreme Court has described Hinduism less as ritual than as a philosophy that guides living.

On a fast, he argued, the senses sharpen: you notice the faint aroma of water itself, catch tea as if it were coffee, and see a familiar flower in new detail. Thinking accelerates, and you start working outside the box. That, for him, is the point: fasting is not the same as going hungry because you are poor. A person forced onto an empty stomach is not fasting; fasting is a prepared, scientific process.

Before a long fast he spends five to seven days on Ayurvedic and yogic cleansing, drinking as much water as he can, resetting the system. Once it begins, the work of government does not pause. "Fasting never slows me down," he said. "I work just as much as usual, sometimes I even work more." The habit started in childhood, during a one-day silent protest inspired by Gandhi's vision of cow protection, when a schoolboy felt energy instead of hunger.

The calendar is demanding: from mid-June through Diwali he keeps Chaturmas, one meal in twenty-four hours for four to four and a half months; during Navratri he takes only hot water for nine days; in Chaitra Navratri he eats one fruit, once a day, and if the fruit is papaya it is papaya and nothing else. He has kept some version of this for fifty to fifty-five years. When Barack Obama hosted a White House dinner on his first visit as prime minister, staff whispered that the guest would not eat, and a glass of hot water arrived. Modi turned to Obama and joked that his dinner had come; on a later trip Obama remembered, and told him that this time, not fasting, he would have to eat twice as much.

Modi was born in Vadnagar, a small town in Mehsana district in northern Gujarat, and he spent some time locating it in a deeper past. A village elder used to tell schoolchildren to bring carved or inscribed stones to a corner of the schoolyard. Only later did he learn that China had made a film about the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, or Xuanzang, who had spent a long stretch there when the town was a center of Buddhist learning. As chief minister he ordered large excavations that, he said, showed Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions sharing the same ground, continuous settlement going back 2,800 years, and enough material to fill an international museum.

The family house was smaller than the room in which he was being interviewed: no window, one small door, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents. By public standards it was extreme poverty, and they did not feel it as a wound. Someone used to fine shoes will miss them; a family that has never worn shoes cannot know that shoes are a big deal. There was nothing to compare against, and difficult conditions, he said, never left a mark on their minds.

His father, Damodar, left the house at four or four-thirty in the morning, walked long distances, visited several temples, then opened his shop. The village-made leather shoes made a tok-tok-tok on the road. Neighbors told time by the sound: Mr. Damodar is on his way. His mother treated neighborhood children with traditional remedies before sunrise, which is how a spirit of service entered the house. One morning an uncle stopped the boy on the way to school, shocked that he was barefoot, and bought him white canvas shoes for ten or twelve rupees.

White canvas stains, so after school he went classroom to classroom collecting discarded chalk, soaked it, mashed it into paste, and recoated the shoes until they were bright again. They felt like treasure. There was no iron, so he heated water in a copper pot, gripped it with tongs, and pressed his clothes before walking to class. He did not think of himself as poor, did not inventory other people's lives, and the story became public only when television crews arrived in the village as he took the chief minister's oath.

At seventeen he left home and spent about two years wandering in the Himalayas, sleeping often with no roof. He still prefers not to talk about the inner weather of those years, but he will describe the experiments: winters were not brutal, yet December nights bit, and sometimes he slept in the open with nothing over him to see how far the body would go. Library, pond, washing the family's clothes, swimming: that was the daily round. The books that pulled hardest were Swami Vivekananda and the warrior-king Shivaji.

He retells a Vivekananda story as if it still organizes him. Vivekananda's mother was ill, Sri Ramakrishna told him to ask Goddess Kali for help, and he sat for hours, returned, and had asked for nothing. He went back the next day, and the day after, and each time came empty-handed; standing before the goddess and being unable to ask lit a flame. From that, Modi said, came the spirit of giving: "If my heart is only filled with the hunger to receive, that hunger will never end."

At the Ramakrishna Mission he met Swami Atmasthananda, who lived nearly a hundred years and later visited him as chief minister. The swami looked at him and asked why he had come: you have a greater purpose, is your priority your own well-being or the welfare of society, and you are meant to serve others. Modi remembers feeling disheartened; he had come for guidance and left with a few sentences. Fridman offered a fork in the road: without that monk, the world might have had a monk named Narendra Modi instead of a prime minister.

Modi would not accept the split. From the outside, people call him leader, prime minister, chief minister; inside, he said, there is only an unwavering spiritual commitment. The boy who helped his mother treat crying children, the wanderer in the Himalayas, and the man in the chair of government are the same person. Clothes change, the day's language changes, and the work changes, but the core does not, and the gulf other people see between saint and politician is not one he recognizes.

At eight he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The door in was a man he remembers as Makoshi, who carried a small tambourine and sang patriotic songs in a deep voice; Modi ran after him like a fan and stayed up whole nights listening at the local branch that offered sports and those songs. The first value he says he took from it was purpose: study enough to serve the nation, train the body so it can serve the nation. The organization is nearing its hundredth year, and he calls it a volunteer body of a scale that likely exists nowhere else.

He offered a ledger of offshoots. Volunteers built Seva Bharti, which he said runs about 125,000 service projects in the poorest settlements, with no government money, teaching children, tending health, pushing cleanliness. Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, working in tribal regions, has set up more than 70,000 one-teacher schools; some American donors, he said, skip a Coca-Cola and send ten or fifteen dollars a month. Vidya Bharati runs nearly 25,000 schools for around three million students, cheap and heavy on values. The numbers are his, offered as proof that RSS-inspired work is social more than electoral.

The labor unions trained in the same stream, he said, have around 50,000 affiliates and millions of members, perhaps the largest labor organization in the world. The left's historic slogan was "Workers of the world, unite" — gather first, then decide — while RSS-trained unions say "Workers unite the world." It looks like a shuffle of words, but he called it a large ideological shift: one logic gathers people against something, the other asks labor itself to be the glue. Nation as everything, service to people as service to God: that, he said, is the Vedic and Vivekananda line the RSS repeats.

Fridman asked what unifies India: a country of disparate worlds, languages, and long religious friction. Modi started with names: more than a hundred languages, thousands of dialects, and a saying that every twenty miles the language changes, then customs, cuisine, even clothing. Dig a little, he said, and a common thread appears. Stories of Lord Ram are heard everywhere, and from Tamil Nadu to Jammu and Kashmir people carry Ram in their names: Ram Bhai in Gujarat, Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu, Ram Bhau in Maharashtra.

Even a bath can hold the map: a ritual verse names the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, and Kaveri as present in the same act. At weddings and pujas, a resolution begins with the universe, then Jambudweep, Bharatkhand, Aryavrat, then the village, the family, and the family deity, a sequence he said still happens daily in every corner of the country. Western models treat a nation as an administrative machine. India has run through many administrations and many kings, and unity, in his account, lived in cultural bonds and pilgrimage.

Shankaracharya's four pilgrimage sites still move millions. People bring water from Rameshwaram to Kashi and take water from Kashi back to Rameshwaram. Administrative systems fragment; the calendar, the rivers, and the names do not. That is the idea of India he wanted on the table before the conversation turned to Gandhi, geopolitics, and war.

Gandhi, like Modi, was born in Gujarat and spoke Gujarati. He had been a lawyer abroad, with comfortable options, and gave them up. Modi admires the way the Mahatma tried to live the principles he preached, cleanliness included. Other freedom fighters, he said, were brave and left a mark through martyrdom. Gandhi did something else: he woke a nation into a mass movement fueled by truth, and he stitched even a sweeper into the fabric of independence.

Teachers were told their work was part of the struggle; people spinning thread were told they were freedom fighters; those tending lepers were told their service was a step toward freedom. Every ordinary task became a thread in the same cloth, and the common person became a soldier. The British, Modi said, never fully understood how a pinch of salt from the Dandi March could light a revolution. That redefinition of participation is the method he claims to have inherited: do not leave everything to the government; believe in social change.

He also likes Gandhi's mischievous edge. At Buckingham Palace, meeting King George in a breechcloth, Gandhi was asked about the clothes and answered that the king was wearing enough for both of them, which Modi reads as whimsical charm inside the moral seriousness. When Fridman later tried to pair Gandhi as the twentieth century's great leader with Modi as the twenty-first's, Modi waved the comparison off. Gandhi, he said, is not a century's man; his relevance will run for centuries.

Fridman asked the old question about being loved or feared on the world stage, and Modi would not play. His strength, he said, is not his name; it is 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of culture. When he shakes a leader's hand, it is not Modi doing so, but those people, Vedic tradition, Vivekananda, and their dreams. "This isn't my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India."

In 2013, when his party named him its prime ministerial candidate, critics boxed him as a mere state leader who knew nothing of foreign policy. He would not unroll a doctrine in an interview, but he offered a sentence that he says still sits at the center: India will neither allow itself to be looked down upon nor look up to anyone; it will see counterparts eye to eye. The country comes first. Belittling others, he added, is not in his culture.

The slogans he has carried onto global stages come in a series of "ones": One Sun, One World, One Grid for the International Solar Alliance; One Earth, One Health during Covid, covering humans, flora, and fauna; One Earth, One Family, One Future as the motto of the G20 India hosted. No country, he said, thrives in isolation. The United Nations and its kin were born after the First World War and, in his view, failed to evolve. That inability to adapt has opened a global argument about whether they still matter.

Asked how a peacemaker works, Modi answered with identity first: he represents the land of the Buddha and of Gandhi, and Indians, he said, are not hardwired for strife. They do not seek war with nature or among nations. On Ukraine he has relationships with both sides, so he can sit with Vladimir Putin and say this is not the time for war, and tell Volodymyr Zelensky, as a friend, that no number of allies will produce a resolution on the battlefield. Settlement comes only when Ukraine and Russia are both at the table; talks with partners alone will not bear fruit.

The Global South, he added, has already paid in food, fuel, and fertilizer, and he has a line he keeps repeating: he is not neutral. "I have a stance, and that is peace." On Pakistan the temperature dropped: before 1947 people fought side by side, policymakers then agreed to partition, and what arrived, in his telling, were trains of the wounded and the dead. After getting their own way, he said, they did not choose live and let live; they waged a proxy war, and terrorism's trail often leads to Pakistan — Osama bin Laden was found there, which is why he called the country an epicenter of turmoil for the world, not only for India.

He listed his own gestures: a personal trip to Lahore, and a special invitation to Pakistan at his swearing-in, meant to turn a new leaf, a move he said even startled people who had doubted his foreign-policy instincts. Every such attempt, he said, met hostility and betrayal. He still hopes wisdom prevails, and he added that ordinary Pakistanis must also be weary of unrest. Fridman tried a lighter valve — whose cricket team is better? — and Modi declined to play expert, saying that sometimes results speak, they had just played, and the result said enough.

Football drew a warmer story: for the 1980s the name was Maradona, and today's young people say Messi. On a visit to tribal Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh he found eighty to a hundred boys in kit and asked where they were from; "Mini Brazil," they said. Four generations of the village have played, nearly eighty national-level players have come from it, and twenty to twenty-five thousand people from nearby villages show up for the annual match. Sport, for him, is not a sideshow but one of the few forces that can still connect nations without a briefing book.

The friendship with Donald Trump, Modi said, is easiest to see at Howdy Modi in Houston, where the stadium was packed with the Indian diaspora, unusual for a political rally in the United States. Both men spoke; Trump sat in the audience while Modi was on stage, a gesture Modi read as humility. After the speech he came down, thanked him, and casually suggested a lap: so many people, why not walk, wave, greet. In American political life it is almost impossible for a president to walk into thousands, yet Trump agreed without a pause, and the security detail was thrown.

That walk, Modi said, showed courage, a man who makes his own decisions, and trust enough to follow an Indian prime minister into a crowd. He later saw the same man after the campaign shooting: still dedicated to America First, a rhyme with his own India First. When they first met at the White House, the press had already written Trump into a caricature, and Modi had been briefed many ways. Trump dropped protocol, toured the building himself, without notes or an aide, pointing out where Lincoln had lived, why a room was so long, which president had signed at which table on which date. Modi took it as respect for the office and for American history.

In the Biden years they did not meet, yet whenever a mutual acquaintance saw Trump, Modi said, the line came back, dozens of times: Modi is my friend, convey my regards. Trump has called him the tougher negotiator; Modi would not pick that up. He always puts India's interest first, speaks for it in every forum, and tries not to harm anyone in the process, so nobody takes offense, because the people, he said, are his high command. On the same trip he met Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and found Trump's second-term team more prepared, with a clearer roadmap.

Musk's Department of Government Efficiency excited him because it rhymed with work he says he began in 2014: prying the state off bad habits. Welfare, he claimed, was being collected by people who did not exist — ghost names, widow pensions before marriages, disability pensions without disabilities. Scrutiny, he said, found about 100 million fake or duplicate names, and they came out of the system. The figure is his, offered as a shock he still enjoys delivering.

Direct Benefit Transfer, in his account, sent every rupee from Delhi to the rightful person and cut out middlemen. He put the saving at nearly 3 trillion rupees. A government purchasing portal, GeM, was meant to raise competition and quality. He said he eliminated 40,000 unnecessary compliances and about 1,500 outdated laws that served no purpose. The slogan he wrapped around it was freedom from needless dominance and inefficiency, and he was happy to see an American version become a global argument.

When bold changes happen, he said, they become a topic of discussion worldwide, just as DOGE had. He was happy about that recognition, because the instinct was one he dated to 2014. Freeing governance from needless dominance and inefficiency is, in his telling, the same fight whether the name on it is Indian or American.

Fridman asked whether friendship with Xi Jinping could be rekindled. Modi reached first for a longer ledger than any recent clash: two old civilizations, centuries of learning, a period when India and China together accounted for more than half of world output, and, in his telling, no real history of conflict, only of exchange, including Buddhism's passage east. Differences between neighbors are natural, as they are in a family; the work is to keep differences from becoming disputes. He did not deny the border — 2020 created significant tension — but after a recent meeting with Xi, he said, it had returned toward normalcy, with both sides trying to restore the pre-2020 condition, even if trust would come back slowly after a five-year gap.

The twenty-first century, in his phrase, is Asia's century, and he wants India and China to compete in a healthy, natural way. Competition is not a bad thing; it should never turn into conflict. Asked how the world avoids a wider war — among China and the United States, Ukraine, Israel, the Middle East — he reached for Covid, which he said put every self-image of greatness on the same ground. People expected a new geopolitical order, as after 1945; instead the world fragmented, and wars made it worse.

Modern conflict, he argued, is no longer only about resources. International organizations have gone almost irrelevant; the UN fails to fulfill its role; people who disregard rules act freely. The prudent choice is to drop expansionism for a development-driven approach. The world is interdependent. From the forums he attends, he said, one thing is clear: everyone is worried, and the only hope is that peace returns soon.

Fridman raised the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which more than a thousand people died in Hindu-Muslim violence while Modi was chief minister, and noted that India's Supreme Court, in 2012 and 2022, found Modi had no involvement in the violence. Modi did not begin with the charge; he asked for twelve to fifteen months of atmosphere. On 24 December 1999 an Indian flight from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked to Kandahar; in 2000 terrorists attacked Delhi's Red Fort; then came 11 September 2001, an October attack on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, and the 13 December attack on India's Parliament. In eight to ten months, he said, major attacks stacked up, and in that air a small spark could catch.

On 7 October 2001 he was handed Gujarat, a state still recovering from the previous century's largest earthquake, with thousands dead. He had never served in government, never contested an election, never been a state representative, and rehabilitation was the first job. On 24 February 2002 he became an elected representative for the first time, and around the 24th, 25th, or 26th he walked into the Gujarat Assembly. On 27 February, three days into that life, during the budget session, the Godhra incident happened — people burned alive — and against Kandahar, Parliament, and 9/11, he said, one can imagine the temperature.

The idea that 2002 was Gujarat's biggest riot, he called misinformation. Before that year the state had seen frequent riots and curfews — kite contests or bicycle collisions could turn communal — and he put the count of significant pre-2002 riots above 250, with 1969 lasting nearly six months. That history, he stressed, long predated him; 2002 became a spark. The judiciary, he said, investigated under political opponents who wanted the allegations to stick, twice found him innocent, and those truly responsible have faced the courts.

The sentence he wanted left on the table was about the years after. In Gujarat, riots used to happen somewhere every year; after 2002, he said, twenty-two years passed without a single major riot, and the state remains peaceful. He described the shift as leaving vote-bank and appeasement politics for a mantra of development for all, trust from all, effort by everyone: aspiration instead of appeasement. Gujarat, in this telling, became a developed state contributing to a developed India.

On criticism he was brisk: if he had to summarize in one sentence, he welcomes it. Criticism, he said, is the soul of democracy, and Indian scripture tells you to keep critics close because they speed improvement; he wants more of it, sharper and better informed. What he sees instead, he argued, is not criticism, because real criticism needs study, research, analysis, and a hunt for the actual weakness, while shortcuts skip all that and jump to accusation. Allegation and criticism are different things, and the 2002 material Fridman had cited, he said, belongs in the first pile, not the second.

Catchy headlines he can live with; a deliberate agenda that ignores truth, he said, can injure a country for decades. In London, at an event for a Gujarati paper, he asked journalists whether they wanted to be flies or bees: a fly sits on dirt and spreads it, while a bee takes nectar from flowers and shares sweetness, and if something is wrong its sting can make you hide your face for three days. Half the analogy was clipped, and a controversy followed. He says he was not insulting anyone; he was describing the force journalism should have, and regretting that some people prefer the fly.

Anyone who believes in democracy, he said, should hear the logistics of 2024. There were 980 million registered voters — twice the population of North America, more than the European Union — each with an ID in a vast database, and 646 million of them went out in May heat, in places up to 40 degrees Celsius, a voter base twice the population of the United States. The machinery included more than a million polling booths, more than 2,500 registered parties, 900 round-the-clock news channels, and over 5,000 daily newspapers. Some countries take months to declare; India, he said, announces in a day.

Helicopters move booths; Arunachal Pradesh holds a record for the highest-altitude station; in Gujarat's Gir Forest a booth was set up for one voter in the middle of nowhere. The Election Commission, he argued, is a global benchmark that universities should study as a management case. He will not call himself powerful: he calls himself the prime servant, not the prime minister, entered politics to serve rather than play power games, and cares about productivity more than office. Loneliness, he said, does not arrive, because of a one-plus-one philosophy — Modi and the Almighty — and during Covid he built a video-conference government and, every day without fail, called about forty party volunteers aged seventy and above.

He does not accept the title of hardest worker: farmers under an open sky, soldiers in snow and desert and underwater, mothers first up and last asleep — looking at them, he asks how he can sleep. In 2014 he promised never to fall behind in hard work, never to act with bad intent, never to work for personal gain, and twenty-four years as a head of government, he said, have been measured against those three. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught mathematician Fridman raised, matters to him because science and spirituality are not separate, and Ramanujan said ideas came from the goddess he worshipped. Discipline, for Modi, means immersing until you become the work; information carried in bulk is not knowledge, which grows only by processing, reflection, and understanding.

At the Paris AI summit he said something he still stands behind: no matter what the world does with AI, it will remain incomplete without India, because development is collaboration — Fridman recalled the image-model example of a person writing with the left hand, which systems still draw with the right. India is not only writing theoretical models; it is putting applications into specific uses and has built a marketplace so GPU access reaches more of society, and the world once thought it was far behind on 5G until, he said, it became the fastest large rollout. An American executive told him that a U.S. engineer advertisement fills a room, while the same advertisement in India would not fit on a football field. Asked whether AI will replace us, he flipped the fear: every era staged a contest between technology and humanity, humans adapted, and the real power of AI is that it forces a question about what it is to be human — people have an innate ability to care for one another, and "Can someone tell me, is AI capable of this?"

Each year he hosts Pariksha Pe Charcha with students drowning in exam culture, in which schools rank themselves by ranks, families treat a child's score as status, and tenth and twelfth grade start to look like an entire life. Exams, he said, measure a domain of knowledge and cannot be the sole measure of a person: someone who will not top a class may hit a century on a cricket pitch. One teacher sent children home for ten chickpeas, fifteen grains of rice, twenty-one moong beans, then mixed the piles into arithmetic; another left a diary so the first arrival wrote a sentence and the next had to answer it, a game that taught Modi to arrive last, read the others, and answer better. These days he learns less from reading than from being fully present — no calls, no messages — because you cannot learn to drive from a racer's biography; you have to take the wheel.

Does he contemplate death? He asked Fridman which side of the coin is more certain, heard "death," and asked why fear the certain side: life is a whispered promise of death and also destined to flourish, so the work is to enrich it before death knocks. Meditation, he warned, has become a cliché; in Indian languages it is dhyan, not enlightenment but freedom from distraction, the opposite of sitting in class and thinking only of lunch. A Himalayan sage taught him a technique with no mantra in it — a large leaf catching a stream, an upside-down bowl, water dripping in rhythm — and he was told to hear only that, not birds, not wind, for hours, until the drip became concentration and then meditation. Hindu mantras, he noted, end on the same word three times, peace, peace, peace; after two days of Fridman's fast he advised him to ease back into food slowly, and said the conversation had pulled out thoughts he had long kept to himself.