Burning Photos Set 17-Year-Old Modi on Path to India Premiership

Before heading to India’s snow-capped Himalayas to study Hinduism at age 17, Narendra Modi burned family photos, discarded most of his clothes and bent to touch his mother’s feet to receive a blessing.

“He treated his departure like a monk would, as though he was leaving to become an ascetic,” his brother, Prahalad Modi, 62, said in his cement-block tire shop in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western state of Gujarat. “He had been told by his guru that he must shed all material possessions to be devoted to the cause of Hindu nationalism.”