For the last 40 years, Modi fasts during Navratras devoted to Ma Amba. He drinks lukewarm water and sometime he eats a fruit a day.
No other foreign leader seems to have been extended such a warm welcome by an Israeli Prime Minister in the past few decades.
The camaraderie between Modi and Obama has taken the India-US relationship to unprecedented and transformative levels.
'We use the word "historic" perhaps too much, but the prime minister's visit certainly was historic in so many ways.'
'Is Trump going to play a mediating role? Can he play a mediating role? It's out of the question.' 'Kashmir is an Indian responsibility.'
'Every index of the US-India relationship is pointing north. The time has come for us to set much more ambitious goals for ourselves,' says India's new Ambassador to the United States Dr S Jaishankar.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will retain DoPT, Atomic Energy as well as all important policy issues and portfolios not allocated.
'Some Pakistani generals are saying -- a little more so now than before -- that the biggest threat to Pakistan is not external -- not India -- but internal.' 'The proof of that will be their change of policies and that is going to be the challenge,' Rakesh Sood, one of India's most distinguished diplomats, tells Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com in Washington, DC.
Those who know Shiv Shankar Menon will vouch that he did lots of things, substantial in the immediate neighbourhood and widespread in South Asia, but without making things public. Twenty per cent of Menon's job was visible, while 80 per cemt of his job was not known to the public, says Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com
'We are witnessing a spectacle of breathtakingly creative diplomacy at work, riveted on the firm foundations of the country's strategic autonomy,' says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'I could see it not having any impact whatsoever,' says Stephen P Cohen on Obama's India visit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Barack Obama will meet on Sunday, January 25, at Hyderabad House a few hours after the American leader's arrival in New Delhi.
Indian Ambassador to the United States Dr S Jaishankar told Rediff.com's Aziz Haniffa that it was "a very nice meeting and President Barack Obama was extremely cordial."
Modi presented Obama with a richly silk-covered special edition of Mahatma Gandhi's interpretation of the Bhagvad Gita, and recordings of Dr Martin Luther King's speech when he visited India in 1959 and also a specially framed photograph of Dr King when he visited Rajghat. Modi had scrupulously researched and selected these gifts for Obama and more gifts would be presented on Tuesday during their summit for both the President and the First Family.
'This is going to be an opportunity to hear from the prime minister of the new India and the progress made in the last two years of the growing cooperation between the US and India in several areas, including areas that would have seemed implausible a few years ago.' US Congressman Ed Royce, who led the campaign to have Prime Minister Modi address a joint session of Congress, speaks to Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com in an exclusive interview.
'We have never before seen an Indian prime minister's visit to the United States so heavily business-oriented and so packed with meetings with the US business community.' Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com reports from Washington, DC.
'We want to provide data, we want to provide consultation, but we don't want to lecture.' 'The consciousness about this issue in India is starting to get quite high and if we can help contribute to solving this air quality issue in a spirit of partnership with the Indians, it would be a big achievement.'
Secretary Tillerson met with Foreign Secretary Jaishankar on Friday to discuss the US-India relationship and the agenda for Prime Minister Modi's meetings at the White House on June 26, a State Department spokesman said told PTI.
'India has to judge what Pakistan says to us, not what they say to a domestic audience,' a source tells Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com, explaining why India-Pakistan talks remain on track despite discordant noises from across the border.
'We are encouraged by what the prime minister said recently on these issues... We will keep a close eye on these issues. They are very important and as are other elements of our human rights and religious freedom.' 'So, absolutely, we'll keep a focus on them.'
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