Bharat Ratna Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam
The
whole of India feels sad learning of the death of Dr. APJ Abdul
Kalam, former President of India.
Everyone
acknowledges that he was not only a distinguished scientist, but a
President who changed the protocol of being President and made ease
of access and doffing the vice-regal pomp of the office an essential
feature of his tenure. He spent his life with the same frugality into
which he was born in Rameswaram in a fishing village. He was the
complete Indian who lived and breathed and understood and studied all
the streams of life in India.
If
there is a small homage we desire to pay we can read some of the
speeches he gave on a variety of occasions. You can see them all
at
I
choose these four below as representative. I was first led to admire
him by reading this talk many years ago in 2007:
Dr Kalam Interacting with the Students of Sree Guru Sarvabhouma Sanskrit Vidyapeetam,
Mantralayam
He
is addressing students of a Sanskrit school and starts off
by reciting a mantra, which he translates into English in the next
few lines for the अनपढ (ignorant)
like me. Then he remembers his Sanskrit teachers. And launches
into something he has taken time to prepare and none could write but
him. He shames Presidents who have to depend on what a speechwriter
feeds them. In his case the wealth of personal
experience and learning gave him unparalleled access
to the knowledge out of which he could speak.
He
was ever a child, never grew out of the enthusiasms of a child, or
the curiosity, or the energy of a child. Everyone spoke of his
simplicity. He narrates an incident in the following address he gave
to students of a school in Bhuj (Gujarat) about an occasion when his
father thrashed him. It's quite instructive, as it certainly was for
him:
Dr Kalam meets the School Children of Bhuj, Kutch District,
Gujarat
A young student from a School in Bhuj, Kutch District, Gujarat who attended
In
the next event, a convocation Address he gave at the Women's Christian College, Chennai, Dr Kalam recalls the words of the Founder-Principal, Dr Miss Eleanor McDougall, who said, "We can do no better service to India, than to liberate the energies of wisdom and devotion which are latent in a woman." He goes on to tell the story of a conversation he had about the GDP index
with John Nash, the Nobel-winning economist; and talks about his
predecessors at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and how Dr Vikram Sarabhai met the Bishop of
Trivandrum to get land for what is now called the Vikram
Sarabhai Space Research Centre, which began life as the Thumba
Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in
1962:
Dr Kalam at the Annual Convocation of The Women's Christian College,
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
Here
is the last one I offer where Dr Kalam ponders on the advice of Lord Buddha
to the Sangha and how it felt to be sitting under the same Bodhi tree
2,500 years later:
Dr Kalam at the 2550th
Anniversary of Mahaparinirvana of Lord Buddha
Monks at the 2550th Anniversary of Mahaparinirvana of Lord Buddha, Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh
It
is when you read these talks you come to an understanding of what it
really means to live as an Indian. It is not tolerance of
differences, it is love of the other. This man embodied it and he was
not lazy to apply his mind to whatever came his way that required
understanding.
KumKum
and I visited his house in Rameswaram, when we were on a temple tour
of S India before going to the ex-IBMers gathering in Kodaikanal in
Feb 2014. The house is a kind of museum, with a street-front only
about 20 feet wide and you go up a narrow staircase to the first
floor and see rooms set out with Dr Kalam's awards,
books, plaques and honorary degrees. This house
belonged to him and his elder brother and stands on a narrow
street. The house is as unpretentious as the man himself was. Some of the garish borders are later add-ons; the original house was a light blue wash.
As
it turns out the only occasion when KumKum and I met him was
quite similar to the event where he took ill and died in
Shillong addressing students at one of the newer Indian Institutes of
Management. On Feb 4, 2008 KumKum wanted to hear Abdul Kalam,
for he was listed in the Kochi newspaper as speaking at the School of
Social Sciences at the 100-acre campus of the Rajagiri School of
Management in Kakkanad: http://rajagiri.edu/
Dr Kalam arriving at Rajagiri Institute of Management to deliver talk on 'Creative Leadership', Feb 4, 2008
The
former President was speaking on 'Creative Leadership.’ Obviously,
he cared for his audience and prepared. On the same day he was
speaking at three other places! Professionally, he was Mission
Director for some of the early Indian satellite launches. He combined
enthusiasms in several fields that made him lively and interesting.
He was a devout Muslim, but was as familiar with the writings of the
Hindu saints of S India as he was with the Koran. Indeed he quoted
one of them, Saint Thiruvallavar in Tamil during his leadership talk
on that day: “For those who do ill to you, the best punishment is
to return good to them."
So there he was, a
vegetarian Muslim, quoting a Hindu saint in Tamil to students in a
Catholic institution, with English as the necessary lingua franca to
get his message across – although by upbringing he was a fluent
speaker in at least three S Indian languages and could have got his message across in shudh Malayalam with the same ease, perhaps.
He emphasised the need for integrity everywhere he went, and
sometimes, with graduating students, he would make them recite an
oath after him to act with integrity, in whatever they did thereafter
with their lives.
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