While in school, Narendra Modi was interested in plays. He wrote and acted in a play called, Peelu Phool was well-received in Vadnagar, the home town of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (File photo)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remained the most popular leader in the country in last six years. This has been reflected in several surveys and the two parliamentary elections. He is a widely discussed and debated politician. There is very little that people don't already know about Narendra Modi. Still, not too many people know that as a school-going child, Narendra Modi had huge interest in acting and drama.

His love for acting and stage has been well documented in one of his most well-received biography, The Man of the Moment: Narendra Modi by MV Kamath and Kalindi Randeri - published in 2013, when he had emerged as the numero uno political leader in the country. Modi himself has written about his love for acting and drama in his book, Exam Warriors.

In one of the chapters of Exam Warriors, Modi recalls an incident that happened while he was rehearsing for a school play. "I had to deliver a particular dialogue which, for some reason, I was struggling with. The director of the play got impatient and said he would be unable to direct me if I kept saying the dialogue in that manner," Modi says in the book.

But Modi thought he was delivering the dialogues perfectly. "So I found it perplexing that the director would say this about me. The next day, I asked him to act like me and show me what I was doing wrong. In a matter of seconds, I realised where I was going wrong and was able to improve myself," Modi writes in the book.

One school time play, however, stands out for its message understood and conveyed by a teenager Narendra Modi. He was around 13 or 14 when he enacted a play to raise funds for his school in Vadnagar, his home town. The compound wall of the school had broken at several places and the school did not have funds to repair it.

Modi and his friends decided to raise funds for their school themselves. They came up with a plan to stage a play for fundraising. Modi wrote the play, directed it and acted in it. It was a one-man (boy) show, one-act play.

The name of the play was Peelu Phool in Gujarati. It literally means the yellow flower. The theme of the play was untouchability, an age-old practice. It had been declared unconstitutional under Article 17 of the Constitution. The first law to declare untouchability an offence was passed by Parliament in 1955. But when this play was enacted (1963-64), untouchability was still deep rooted.

At the centre of Modi's play is a Dalit woman who lives with her son in a village. The son falls ill and the mother takes him to a vaidya (traditional physician), doctor and also a tantric but all refuse to treat the child as the two are "untouchables".

Someone suggests the son would be cured of the illness if she touches a yellow flower offered to gods in the village temple. She runs to the temple but is not allowed to enter. The priest yells at her. But she begs for one yellow flower so that her son can be saved. The priest, finally, agrees to give her one flower and Modi's play ends with a message that everyone is equal before god and everyone has the same right over flowers offered to gods in temples.

Kalindi Randeri, the co-author of The Man of the Moment: Narendra Modi said in one of her interviews that when she visited Vadnagar for ground research for the book, many people recalled the play saying it was a well-written and well-acted play.

It is said that Modi's play was inspired by a real incident in which he saw a priest shooing away a Dalit woman from a temple in Vadnagar.