How do you spin yarn on a charkha? The video above shows that it needs two hands, as Mahatma Gandhi, for one, knew only too well.

But not, evidently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose videos and photographs at the spinning wheel replaced Gandhi’s on the Khadi and Village Industries Commission calendar and diary, sparking protests and controversy as well as a photo-shopping spree.

As the comprehensive tutorial above makes it clear, both hands are required, one to spin the wheel, and the other to pull the thread being spun out of the cotton, which must also be held in the hand. Gandhi and the women behind the prime minister follow this method, while Modi is merely spinning thread and not converting it into yarn. But then, it was only a photo-op.

A one-handed photo-op was the furthest thing from Gandhi’s philosophy: “I can only think of spinning as the fittest and most acceptable sacrificial body labour. I cannot imagine anything nobler or more national than that, for say one hour in the day, we should all do the labour that the poor must do, and thus identify ourselves with them and through them with all mankind.”