Delhi: It's the Modi Express – literally.
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At 8.30pm on November 16, 220 fervent admirers of India's new Prime Minister Narendra Modi will depart Melbourne's Southern Cross Station on a chartered overnight train bound for Sydney in time to see him appear live in front of 16,000 people at the Allphones Arena the next evening.
The train will be specially catered, with food cooked in the style of Mr Modi's home state of Gujarat in India's north-west.
"The response was beyond our expectation as people were very excited about the whole concept," said Ashwin Bora from the Indian Australian Community Foundation (IACF), who helped to come up with the idea of chartering the train.
"We received over 100 bookings within two hours of this announcement. Even though we have a much larger number coming from Melbourne, we could only accommodate 220 in the 'Modi Express' of four carriages," Mr Bora told Fairfax Media.
Event organisers in Sydney say that more than 21,000 people have already registered through their local community organisations to attend the event in Sydney, which can only seat 16,000.
Another 20,000 people are expected to register from Monday onwards, when organisers open a number of seats up for allocation by lottery.
According to IACF spokesman Balesh Singh Dhankhar, organisers have been overwhelmed by the response from Australia's Indian community.
"Not only is this the first time in 28 years that an Indian prime minister has come to Australia, but I think a lot of the Indian community here have been inspired by Modi and have very high hopes for what he can achieve for India."
When Mr Modi's staff initially planned the trip, they thought the visit to Brisbane for the G20 conference, an address to the Australian Parliament in Canberra, and a 1000-plate banquet at the Melbourne Cricket Ground hosted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be enough.
"It was only after an huge expression of interest from people in Sydney that the Prime Minister's Office understood that Modi had to come to Sydney," said Mr Dhankhar.
At the banquet in Melbourne, organisers are planning a presentation of new historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence pointing to human migration from the Indian subcontinent to Australia around 5000 years ago.
"It shows that the links between the two countries are much deeper than many people may have realised," Mr Dhankhar said.
