AHMEDABAD: Around 4.30pm on October 30, 2009, a press conference was being addressed by top industrialists and bureaucrats who had returned with chief minister Narendra Modi from Russia.

The press conference had just ended when this journalist got an SMS stating that Modi had been detected with swine flu. Apparently, the blood sample was broken into two and sent to Civil Hospitals in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Both tests were positive but hardly anyone knew this was Modi's blood — the test-tubes were marked 'Rameshbhai'.