Narendra Modi is the one of the most photographed politicians in the world, with more social media followers than most nations have citizens — and he remains, somehow, an enigma. His populist pragmatism, wrapped in a larger-than-life persona, refuses to sit neatly in any Western or traditional political box. The more he's seen, the less he's known. As Smriti Irani put it in one interview: no one is actually close to him.

People see wildly different men in him — from passionate hatred to something closer to worship. Citizens are practically obliged to light a diya on his birthday, and the world is duly informed. To some he's a firebrand regional leader; to others, a Hindu nationalist priest-figure; to still others, a technocratic moderniser or a humble servant of the public. Take your pick.

The enigma keeps everyone guessing — nowhere more than inside his own party. Nobody saw Nitin Nabin coming for the BJP presidency, and the chief ministerial picks in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh raised just as many eyebrows. Yogi Adityanath's elevation in as chief minister of UP stunned many. Only Assam's chief minister felt like a foregone conclusion. Every party worker nurses a private hope that fate might tap them next; they perform diligence for an invisible eye that is always watching. Nobody, however senior, gets to take their place in this party for granted.

It isn't just personnel where he loves a plot twist. Demonetisation blindsided the banking system itself. The abrogation of Article 370 landed the same way. Sweeping reforms arrive less like policy and more like plot devices.

One constant amid the enigma: his closest friends all happen to be Gujarati — Amit Shah, Gautam Adani, Mukesh Ambani. Pure coincidence, surely, and nothing to see here.

His social media machine is vast and disciplined, and it reliably converts a carefully built image into votes — parliamentary, state, even municipal. Modi's name alone moves the needle for the BJP. Mortality, though, is famously indifferent to approval ratings, even as he remains, at seventy-six, in visibly good form.

His gift for the unexpected hasn't deserted him. Just when the opposition figured he was on the back foot with Donald Trump — friendly with Israel, invoking "fatherland" for Indian-origin Jews there — he turned up at the 18th BRICS Summit cosying up to Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, while also finding a moment to wish Benjamin Netanyahu a happy Jewish New Year, quite publicly. Diplomatic acrobatics as a core competency.

No sooner had BRICS ended on a high than a fresh political storm broke: the government's new 0.4% Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on transactions above ₹2,000, effective October 15. The opposition has branded it the "Modi Tax," accusing the government of reneging on UPI's promise as a free public good and quietly siphoning money from the aam aadmi's pocket. Some go further, alleging the zero-MDR policy was scrapped specifically to hand American card networks like Visa and Mastercard a foothold against UPI.

The paradoxes keep piling up, and global commentators keep failing to file him neatly away. He champions aggressive cultural nationalism in one breath and global climate action in the next, mixing high-tech financial inclusion with old-school majoritarian politics. The Guardian calls him deeply polarising, a strain on pluralist traditions; his supporters call him a resolute defender of national pride and economic transformation. Whatever the verdict, his top-down style keeps absorbing political shocks that would sink lesser leaders — and somehow the electoral momentum never quite stops.

Seventy-six years old. Twenty-five years of running governments. Still, gearing up for a long innings. He is made impossible possible.