Three time Grammy Award winner and three time Grammy nominated Indian performer Ricky Kej is among those invited to attend Prime Minister Narendra Modi's White House arrival ceremony during his first state visit to the US.
"An invitation from the White House, for me :-) Super excited.. this Thursday :-)" he tweeted along with the picture of the digital invitation.
A musician and an environmentalist, Mr Kej has performed in 30 countries, including at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva.
Speaking to NDTV, he said he was in New York for a performance at the United Nations General Assembly Hall on the 16th when he received the big invite from the White House.
Recalling his first meeting with the PM, he said it was after he won his first Grammy Award in 2015.
"We had this beautiful one-hour long conversation. And during this conversation he realised that I was a very strong environmentalist and I used to do a lot of work when it comes to climate change, lots of work with the United Nations. And that is when he had suggested that, you know, I should stop all forms of commercial music and just concentrate completely on living the life and also creating music for environmental consciousness and social impact," he said.
Narrating how PM Modi influenced his journey, he said he left the meeting with a strong resolve that, "this is exactly what I'm going to do with my career, and that's exactly what I did".
"I'm really happy doing what I'm doing because I'm only making music on the things that I feel strongly about and topics that actually move me personally," Ricky Kej said.
He said there's a lot of buzz in the US around PM Modi's much-anticipated visit.
"I was doing an interview at Times Square yesterday and as soon as they saw that I was an Indian person, and there were Indian media people, people started asking that is this for the Prime Minister's visit. And there was a crowd that actually gathered over there." he said.
On November 21, at the lawns of the United Nations, he said he will do yoga led by Prime Minister Modi even though he hasn't regularly done it.
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