Narendra Modi - a can-do PM with charisma

It's Tuesday, so it must be India - the last and in many respects the most interesting in this season of foreign leaders addressing parliament.

Britain, last Friday, is original family, totally familiar.

China, on Monday, is both a very big and slightly scary enigma and a cascade of dollars, cents and renminbi.

India is family and enigma. There's much in common and much, in its chaotic multitudes, that's utterly strange.

In Narendra Modi it has a new prime minister with a landslide election victory and a can-do reputation as chief minister of Gujarat state behind him.

Modi also has, at least in the eyes of Australia's boisterous Indian diaspora, pop star status.

Parliament's galleries were full of Indians, the saris providing splashes of colour, for his speech. They applauded continually, particularly at cricketing references.

At the end, as Modi was mingling with MPs, some leaned over the edge of the public galleries trying to attract his attention.

Tony Abbott, who in his welcoming speech spoke with awe of a PM who reaches 830 million voters, must be envious.

Modi brought out his artistic side. Abbott, who once spent three months backpacking around India, quoted a Gujarati poet and then Australia's second PM Alfred Deakin who wrote of "a land of wonders and extremes ... of contrasts and contradictions, of splendour and poverty, profusion and barrenness, vicissitude and adventure".

Bill Shorten ventured the Hindi greeting "namaste" and advanced a dubious story of Don Bradman plundering runs in England in the 1930s as an avenging angel for the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru.

He also quoted Modi's own equation IT+IT=IT (Indian Talent+Information Technology=India Tomorrow).

Modi opened with a tame joke about shirt-fronting and the compulsory cricket references - Bradman again, plus Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne.

But he was soon down to business, emphasising how India and Australia, with so much in common, could work together to build his country.

He saw Australia as a major partner in every sector - agriculture, food processing, mining, infrastructure, finance, technology. There was also "energy that doesn't cause our glaciers to melt", which is about as green a description of uranium as you can get.

Modi also saw the two countries working together against global curses like terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking and arms smuggling.

In some ways it was simply a businesslike speech from a visitor with plenty of self-interest in making a good impression.

But there were touches of the poetic, like "the new high tide of hope" in remote villages; and a dimension beyond the simply economic, like growth not just for the sake of growth, but to transform the quality of life of every Indian.

And it was all delivered in a rich, deep voice with a characteristic sub-continental timbre.

Modi may be a can-do PM. But he's can-do with charisma, which is rare.