Akshay Kalbag
Return if possible, Missile Man!
At 7:45pm Indian Standard Time on July 27, 2015, India bid adieu to an icon. He was the country’s most respected aerospace scientist, a noted author, and an eminent educationist. Moreover, he wasn’t just the former head of state, but also the reason every Indian can walk with his/her head held high.
Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen (A P J) Abdul Kalam was born in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, on October 15, 1931. By no means were the ferry-owner’s son’s formative years smooth-sailing, but the firm believer in the adage ‘Knowledge is power’ was as much a seeker of the former as he was an abhorrer of the latter.
An alumnus of St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirapalli, and the Madras Institute of Technology, he would go on to render yeoman service at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for four decades upon graduation from the latter.
Dr Kalam’s commitment to the country’s civilian space program, and the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology, earned the 1997 Bharat Ratna [literally (and in his case, aptly), the Jewel of India] awardee the sobriquet The Missile Man of India.
His ‘reluctant politician’ tag appears to be ironic, given the fact that in addition to the organisational and (obviously) technical roles he played in the Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, he played a political role in the same.
July was, in fact, a red-letter month in Dr Kalam’s life – it was on the 25th of that month, in 2002, that he succeeded K R Narayanan as India’s president. Five years to the day, he was succeeded by Pratibha Devisingh Patil.
The eleventh person to hold the post, his candidature was backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC). Affectionately known as The People’s President, he donated his presidential salaries and savings to his trust, Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas (PURA).
Dr Kalam returned to his first love – education – after his stint at Rashtrapati Bhavan came to an end. He became a member of the visiting faculty at three Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) – Shillong (where he collapsed shortly after he’d commenced his lecture on Creating a Livable Planet Earth), Ahmedabad and Indore.
He was an honorary fellow of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; the chancellor of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, and a professor of aerospace engineering at Anna University.
Dr Kalam taught technology at the last of the aforementioned universities and Banaras Hindu University, and information technology at the Intenational Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He launched the What Can I Give Movement, a programme for the youth. It was aimed at defeating corruption.
Besides his book, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, he penned Wings of Fire: An Autobiography in the late 1990s, and has chronicled his spiritual journey in his last tome, titled Transcendence: My Spiritual Experiences with Pramukh Swamiji.
Dr Kalam asked for a regular chair instead of the ceremonial one at a Defence Food Research Laboratory function in Mysore in 2012. At a event at the Lakshmi Vidya Sangham earlier this year, the former president, who was fond of kids, preferred the student’s chair to the the large one on the dais.
The 83-year-old bachelor was a vegetarian, an early riser and a late sleeper. He lived frugally, and was a firm believer in hard work. Among his possessions were a few articles of clothing, books, a veena (a stringed instrument), a CD player and a laptop. They went to his oldest brother, who is 99.
Concerned about the differently-abled, he and his team developed prosthetic limbs from composite heat material used for rockets. These were about ten times lighter than the artificial limbs they used (which weighed 4kg).
Dr Kalam’s home state announced that his birthday would be observed as Youth Renaissance Day, and instituted an award in his name, which consists of a gold medal weighing eight grams, a certificate and Rs 5,00,000. It would be awarded on August 15 every year.
It wouldn’t be inappropriate for youngsters, who constitute a sizable chunk of India’s burgeoning populace (and to whom he was an inspiration), to expand the acronym RIP. While referring to him, it could well be, “Return if possible”. Dr Kalam, aapko dil se salaam (a salute straight from the heart!)
Connect with Akshay Kalbag on Twitter @gablak13
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