'Work with intelligence...': What Heeraben told PM Modi on her birthday

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his tributes to his mother Heeraben who passed away on Friday morning two days after being admitted to the hospital, he remembered one thing that his mother taught him. 'Work with intelligence and live life with purity' -- PM Modi wrote in Gujarati and translated it to Hindi. Heeraben told this to PM Modi when he met her on the occasion of her last birthday. PM Modi was very close to Heeraben and on several occasions, PM Modi expressed what his mother meant to him.

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In his post on Heeraben on her birthday, PM Modi wrote Heeraben did not get her own mother's affection as she lost her mother at a very young age to Spanish Flu pandemic. Heeraben was so young that she did not even remember her mother's face. "She could not rest in her mother’s lap like we all do. She could not even go to school and learn to read and write. Her childhood was one of poverty and deprivation," PM Modi wrote.

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Being the eldest child of the family, Heeraben was forced to grow beyond he age and after marriage, she shouldered a lot of responsibilities.

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Heeraben Modi's early life as described by PM Modi

"In Vadnagar, our family used to stay in a tiny house which did not even have a window, let alone a luxury like a toilet or a bathroom. We used to call this one-room tenement with mud walls and clay tiles for a roof, our home. And all of us - my parents, my siblings and I, stayed in it," PM Modi recollected.

"Mother used to wash utensils at a few houses to help meet the household expenses. She would also take out time to spin the charkha to supplement our meagre income. She would do everything from peeling cotton to spinning yarn. Even in this back-breaking work, her prime concern was ensuring that the cotton thorns don’t prick us," PM Modi wrote in his blog.

How Heeraben felt after Narendra Modi became PM

As recounted by Narendra Modi, Heeraben said she was proud as any other person in the country that her son became the Prime Minister. "She says, 'I am as proud as you are. Nothing is mine. I am a mere instrument in the plans of God'," Narendra Modi wrote.

"When I became the Chief Minister in Gujarat, I wanted to publicly honour all my teachers. I thought that Mother had been my biggest teacher in life, and I should also honour her. Even our scriptures mention that there is no bigger guru than one’s mother - ‘Nasti matr samo guruh’. I requested Mother to attend the event, but she declined. She said, 'See, I am an ordinary person. I may have given birth to you, but you have been taught and brought up by the Almighty.' All my teachers were felicitated that day, but for Mother," PM Modi wrote.