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September 8, 2002
REVIEWS: The missile man
“The bloodline of my great-grandfather Avul, my grandfather Pakir and my father Jainulabdeen, may end with Abdul Kalam....” These are the closing words of the autobiography of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the new President of India, whose full name includes his ancestry.
Born on October 15, 1931 in Rameswaram, a small town in South India, Abdul Kalam belonged to an orthodox Muslim family. His father owned a boat to ferry pilgrims to earn a living and to raise a family of four sons and one daughter in straitened circumstances. When Kalam was eight years old he helped his first cousin in his newspaper distribution agency, and recollects, “I can still feel the surge of pride in earning my own money for the first time.”
After his primary education in his hometown, Kalam went to Ramanathapuram for further schooling and to Trichinopoly to study for his BSc. Madras Institute of Technology (MIT) came next and his sister had to mortgage her jewellery to pay his admission fee at MIT. Having failed to gain entry into the Indian Air Force, he started his remarkable career in India’s defence research and development programme in 1958.
The autobiography gives the reader an insight into the author’s multi-faceted genius, as he emerges as a top scientist, a dynamic leader and a ‘welder of people’ in public life, and a loving, ascetic and God-fearing person drawing inspiration from the teachings of all great religions in private life.
The two aspects of his personality — a rocket engineer and a team leader — were finely rolled into one in his professional life. He excelled and made a mark in both. His greatest asset has been his unflinching devotion to work — a workaholic with an input of 18 hours a day. As related by him he would enter the workplace “...leaving my other problems outside, just as my father used to enter the mosque for prayers leaving his shoes outside”.
As a team leader he emerges as a textbook model. Having studied the works of modern management gurus and integrated their thinking into his day-to-day work as a project manager, he could coordinate with great efficiency the work and research of 500 scientists and university academics of the highest calibre, inspiring them to work to meet the set targets. He put India on the road to self-reliance in missile technology, which he describes as his “personal achievement” by motivating young people to put their heart and soul into their mission. Kalam is humble to the core and ascribes his success to the influence of his parents, teachers and mentors.
Eccentric in personal grooming and disorderly in his dress — he often moves about in slippers — finding the right attire for an occasion is his biggest challenge. When he was to meet Indira Gandhi after the successful firing of India’s first Satellite Launch Vehicle SLV3 in July 1980, clothes were his immediate problem. Prof Satish Dhawan quipped, “You are beautifully clothed in your success.”
When the launch of Agni was put off in April 1989 because of technical reasons and when the Indian press was up in arms and various interpretations were given, he calmly commented, “A great opportunity has been given to us.” The general mood of dashed hopes continued to prevail and Agni was caricatured as IDBM — Intermittently Delayed Ballistic Missile. But Kalam never gave up.
He does not claim to be a philosopher but he differentiates between science and technology. Science is individual research. Technology is a collective study and is not based on individual intelligence. “Technology is a group activity and we would need leaders who carry along with them hundreds of other engineers and scientists.”
He is not a ruthless achiever. For Kalam, science is spiritually enriching and leads to self-realization. In his lighter moments he practices the veena or listens to Bismillah Khan’s shahnai or writes poetry in English or in his own mother tongue, Tamil, in which he had won a coveted prize in his college days for his article, “Let us make our own aircraft”.
The ‘four basic factors’ he identifies as the secret of his meteoric rise are “goal-setting, positive thinking, visualizing and believing”. He looked ahead into the 21st century and visualized the future to shape the present.
On May 22, 1989 when Agni took off, the author records, “It was one of the greatest moments of my life.” Yet another momentous occasion awaited him on July 25, 2002, when he was sworn-in as the President of India.
The book under review was first published in 1999 but seems to have been mass produced recently and reprinted in haste to capture an international market. As a result there are grave grammatical mistakes in some places and the text is repeated and mixed up on others. An index would have been useful and acronyms should have been separately listed and spelled out.
Wings of fire: an autobiography
By A.P.J. Abdul Kalam with Arun Tiwari Universities Press (India) Ltd. Hyderguda, Hyderabad (AP)
ISBN 81 7371 1461
180 pp. + 24pp. of illustrations
Indian Rs200
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