Coimbatore: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's childhood bravado has made it to a class 1 textbook. Back in 2019 when the PM made an appearance in Discovery’s popular series ‘Man vs Wild’, he told host Bear Grylls how he, as a young boy, had once brought home a young crocodile.
"While bathing in a pond, I saw a baby crocodile and brought it home only to be rebuked by my mother who said it was a sin and that I should put it back in the pond," Modi told Grylls. A certain publication took a liking to it and decided to feature it in a school textbook. The class 1 book on value education by Barry O'Brien and Firefly publications taught in a private school in Tamil Nadu has incorporated the crocodile part to prove how 'brave' Modi was in his childhood.
Referring to the incident, the school textbook reads: "Narendra Damodardas Modi is the 14th and current Prime Minister of India. He was so brave in his childhood that once he caught a young crocodile and brought it home." The book, while teaching the usage of the word 'monitor', again brings in the Prime Minister. "The Prime Minister is like the monitor of the whole country".
The textbook is not the first one to feature PM Modi's childhood. A comic book 'Bal Narendra - Childhood Stories of Narendra Modi', by Rannade Prakashan and Blue Snail Animation has a list of stories narrating how 'brave' the PM was. In one of the stories, to the utter shock of readers, Modi was attacked by a crocodile while swimming in a crocodile-infested lake in Gujarat. He was in class 8th then and suffered nine stitches on his foot, reads the comic.
