Two-time Olympic medallist PV Sindhu has reminisced about her best moments with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his 76th birthday, as she penned a special opinion piece in The New Indian Express.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was born on September 17, 1950, in Vadnagar, a small town in Gujarat.
In 2001, Modi became the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a position he held for more than 12 years before taking the oath as India’s Prime Minister in May 2014.
“For most of our history, the answer to a big dream in India was ‘you can’t’. Not because you were not good enough, but because the door didn’t exist. The quietest and largest achievement of Narendra Modi’s leadership is that the answer became ‘why not’,” Sindhu wrote in her opinion column.
“It’s worth
understanding how deep that shift goes. For decades, ambition in India ran into a wall of permissions. To do almost anything that mattered, you needed a licence, a clearance, a contact or the right family name,” Sindhu added.
Meanwhile, a motorcycle journey from Varanasi to Vadnagar in Gujarat is among the special programmes planned to mark Modi’s 76th birthday on Thursday. In Varanasi, 76 young priests also performed special prayers and offered milk ‘abhishek’ to the Ganga, seeking his good health and long life.
“PM Modi’s real insight was to look at that wall and see it for what it was. He put the shift in a simple line: government moving from ‘prohibited unless permitted’ to ‘permitted unless prohibited’,” Sindhu said.
“That’s the steady idea behind much of his decade’s work: take down the wall of permissions and build in its place a country of open doors. A country where it doesn’t matter whose child you are, only what you are willing to build,” Sindhu added.
Sindhu will soon be in action at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya.
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