The past, somebody famously said, is a different country. I have now realised how wonderfully true that insight is. In fact, I have realised that the past is actually many different countries, many timelines, many personalities, and many, many life stories.

And why not? What kind of boring person has just one past to dig into at dinner parties and TV interviews?

Look and learn from our honourable Prime Minister who doesn’t limit himself to one past, one childhood, one youth. This is a many-splendoured man.

There’s the famous story of how as a kid he sold chai on a railway platform. Then he says he did tapasya for 45 long years to acquire the kind of image that the gangs of Wasseypur and Khan Market can never match. Then there’s the story of how he was too poor to buy mangoes but used to sneak them from a grove. In a fourth anecdote he says he’s never had any money, so he has never carried a wallet.

In a fifth variant, he has travelled around the world to over 45 countries long before becoming PM. In a sixth story dating to 1988, long before digicams and commercial email came to ordinary mortals, the PM already had a digital camera with which he took a picture of LK Advani that he then transmitted to Delhi. And, by the 90s, he says he already had a touchscreen notebook. He also says he has a large collection of cameras at home.

A colourful life story emerges, free of the fetters of tedious fact, where the same man is at once too poor to buy a mango but has a camera collection and even a touchscreen device long before anybody else in India.

But we must understand this correctly. The PM is actually talking of alternate realities.

To insist that a great and powerful man restrict himself to one reality is to expose our own limitations. This man has many lives in many parallel universes. And like Krishna he can be in the mango grove and in a Delta airline flight at the same time. It’s all maya.

And as good Hindus, this is exactly why we must stop asking so many questions. It’s foolish to ask exactly where an aircraft struck and how many people died when it’s all maya. Let’s not stress about the absence or presence of dead terrorists. It is immaterial — in one universe their bodies are missing but in another they have been killed in large numbers while in a third universe, where radars don’t penetrate the clouds, many fighter planes have landed on a dark and rainy night.

As with bodies, so with data. To crib that non-existent companies are in the GDP list is to miss the wood for the trees. We must not live so insistently in the present. What if these companies existed 10 years ago? What if they are going to come into being 10 years hence? Just because they don’t exist now doesn’t make them any less real. Just like mere videos of people breaking gates and smashing statues is no proof that any of it really happened. It’s all maya.

So stop stressing when the numbers show that auto sales have plunged to a 10-year low or that unemployment figures have risen to a 45-year high. This kind of vulgar obsession with facts is a sure sign that you’re not seeing the spiritual beauty of our economy, which is in the lotus-pink of health.

This is why I am so happy with the rash of intimate and jolly interviews the PM has been giving lately. From Akshay Kumar to Deepak Chaurasia to Peenaz Tyagi, nobody wastes time asking Mr. Modi about demonetisation or industrial growth.

And that’s how Akshay Kumar is able to extract the valuable nugget that Mr. Modi invented the short-sleeved kurta by cutting off the sleeves because they took up too much space in his bag. And that he drinks hot water and sniffs mustard oil to cure a cold. This is the kind of important information the nation desperately needs. Remember, even as we speak, there is a cold-cough epidemic raging in a parallel universe somewhere.

Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.