BEFORE Dilip Kumar befriended him and invited him to Bombay, Sadda Mian had believed that Bhad-Bhada, the lake that dominates Bhopal’s topography, was the most expansive water body on earth.

A scion of the erstwhile Bhopal royalty, the quirky, genial Pathan is fondly remembered by his contemporaries who, like Dilip Kumar, are now in their 90s. He fed his pet partridges, they would tell you, with kaakun stored between his lower lip and ageing gummy teeth. It was 30 years ago or thereabouts the actor had recalled to me Sadda Mian’s startled look upon discovering that Bhopal’s celebrated landmark amounted to a drop in the ocean, literally, before the wild waves lapping Bombay’s Marine Drive.

“Kya haqeeqat hai Bhad-Bhadey ki!” (What chance does the Bhad-Bhada stand!) It was all that Sadda Mian could mutter in disbelief, his unbuttoned sherwani fluttering in the gale force from the Arabian Sea.

Critics believe Narendra Modi need not have moved to Delhi bag and baggage to measure his three consecutive innings as chief minister of Gujarat. It’s a stride from the provincial baby pool of easy sociology, they point out, to India’s syncretic complexities that matters. It’s not a question of who got how many votes for parliament. His Congress rival Rajiv Gandhi, India’s new prime minister would learn in Delhi, won over a hundred seats more — an unprecedented 414 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha in 1985.

Brute majority can dissipate as quickly as it comes.

It would be no consolation for anyone to know that the unparalleled Congress victory came on the back of an unspeakable massacre of Sikhs. Another lesson Mr Modi might glean from his predecessor’s victory is that brute majority can dissipate as quickly as it comes.

However, now that Mr Modi is here he will hopefully learn a few early lessons about being the captain of the ship we know as India. Mr Modi will want to be quickly disabused of any self-limiting notions he may have cherry-picked from doctored history books about his country’s cultural heritage.

Among his many duties, to be sure, regardless of cultivated hang-ups about India’s Muslims, he will address the nation from the ramparts of a 17th-century Mughal fort on Independence Day. And though there is not much evidence to support his party’s ideological involvement against colonial rule he will get to appreciate India’s annual celebration of freedom and democracy each Republic Day.

The colonial-era Raisina Hill is where a cultural parade starts on every January 26. It merges with a British-built Rajpath, the former King’s Way, to take the marchers towards India Gate. If Mr Modi cared to look closely — although Indira Gandhi turned it into a monument to the fallen soldier after the 1971 war with Pakistan — India Gate was originally a memorial to India’s colonial subjugation. Engraved on all sides of its towering walls are names of Indian soldiers — mostly Sikh and Pathan — who died fighting for a foreign ruler on foreign shores. Yet no Indian, and rightly so, wants to pull down the structure to get even with history.

When Mr Modi visits the Presidential Palace, he may wish to gaze at the beautifully crafted ceiling of the Ashoka Hall — its humbling name negating the narrow quests. Spread across the ceiling is the drawing of a Persian hunt. Lord Irwin placed the Qajar painting there, and an Italian painter filled out the remaining spaces with vignettes from Firdausi’s Shahnameh.

Mr Modi is rumoured to favour the dismantling of India’s essential scientific temper in favour of religious revivalism. He should hear the BBC’s Alistair Cook in one of his inimitable Letters from America. It took the Pope 400 years to pardon Galileo for having claimed it was the earth that revolved round the sun, and not, as the scriptures said, the other way around, Mr Cook informed us. It would hopefully not be so inordinately long before Mr Modi finds out that placing the source of the Ganges in Lord Shiva’s mythical tuft was an aspect of religious tradition.

It would be helpful if the source of the Ganges is more scientifically located in the formation of ‘new fold mountains’ that the Himalayas are. If the Himalayas get no rain any river they spawn will dry up. Keeping the Ganges replenished will require more than supplication to the rain gods. It would need solid environmental policies, something that doesn’t fetch high grades in Mr Modi’s model of economic development.

It was good to see Saarc leaders in Delhi to greet Mr Modi. However, the prime minister’s prescriptions for neighbours are at variance with his approach to similar issues at home. Expecting Sri Lankan soldiers to treat Jaffna Tamils gently will rightly raise eyebrows in Kashmir or Manipur. Looking at water disputes with Pakistan or Bangladesh as an upper riparian state will run into trouble with the Chinese if the Brahmaputra issue boils into a dispute.

Mr Modi’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval has occasionally berated the West for not weeding out Al Qaeda from the roots, a valid point. Al Qaeda has indeed mutated into several intractable bodies albeit with a single paramount objective of establishing the Khilafat of Islam.

Mr Modi will be reminded in Delhi how nearly a century ago a fellow Gujarati had rallied Indian masses, Hindus and Muslims alike, in support of the Muslim Khilafat. Another Gujarati, a Muslim, ironically enough, had opposed the idea as potentially mediaeval. India is often absurd, occasionally contrary and always poised to surprise those who claim to know it. Sadda Mian would agree.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2014