HVK Archives: Dream! Convert the dreams into thought, action
Dream! Convert the dreams into thought, action - The Times of India
John F Burns
()
May 26, 1998
Title: Dream! Convert the dreams into thought, action
Author: John F Burns
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 26, 1998
Among the Indian scientists who successfully detonated five
nuclear tests in the northwestern desert none seemed more visibly
delighted by the acclaim waiting in New Delhi than A P J Abdul
Kalam. An impish, shaggy-haired bachelor, Mr Kalam is widely
regarded as the central figure in India's drive to join the small
club of nuclear armed nations.
Mr Kalam, 66, has never hidden the passion for a powerful India
that has driven him since he was growing up in a poor family on
the coast of Tamil Nadu. Among colleagues a new word "kalamitous"
was coined to capture the outspokenness with which Mr Kalam
greeted each new delay in the tests, or in getting the money to
develop the missile to deliver nuclear bombs.
When he returned to New Delhi from the test site in Rajasthan, Mr
Kalam found himself a national hero, applauded and besieged for
autographs, though the tests drew widespread condemnation in the
rest of the world. "We must think and act like a nation of a
billion people and not like that of a million people," he said.
"Dream, dream, dream! Convert these dreams into thought and then
transform them into action."
Only a few years ago, Mr Kalam became so frustrated with a
reluctance of successive governments to approve nuclear tests
that he came close to quitting as the government's top scientific
adviser to become vice chancellor of the University of Madras.
When he appeared with other members of India's nuclear team at a
news conference, nobody was surprised when Mr Kalam stole the
show with his readiness to flirt with political issues.
In the middle of a baffling exposition on "subcritical
fissionable materials" and "electronic arming and fusing
subsystems," Mr Kalam turned to a favorite political topic - how
a nuclear-armed India will be free of the fear of foreign
invasions which have constantly remolded the ancient Hindu
civilisation as armies of Macedonians, Persians, Afghans and
Britons swept in. "For 2,500 years India has never invaded
anybody," he said. "But others have come here, so many others
have come."
For many Indians, the references to invasions, many by Muslims,
underscored an aspect about Mr Kalam that is almost as engaging
as his unguarded remarks, a biographical fact that is rarely
mentioned: Like the captain of the national cricket team, like
some of India's top generals and newspaper editors and diplomats,
like many of its top filmmakers and artists, Mr Kalam is one of
the 120 million Muslim in a nation of 700 million Hindus.
As India celebrated its arrival as a nuclear arms power, some
said Mr Kalam's role meant the world now has an "Islamic bomb"
but one that belongs to India - an India ruled by Hindu
nationalists. The term "Islamic bomb" describes the yearning
among some of the world's one billion Muslims for the development
of nuclear weapons by a Muslim country, most likely Pakistan,
India's archival, which is considering whether to respond to the
Indian tests with one of its own.
But though Mr Kalam is an observant Muslim, his attitudes and
tastes speak of his immersion in the broader culture of India. He
is an avid reader of ancient Hindu scriptures. He has published
poems in Tamil, his first language. And one of his pastimes in
his modest walk-up apartment in New Delhi is plucking a veena, a
stringed instrument with a curved musical box at each end.
According to one Indian biography, Mr Kalam knows by heart
sections of the best known Hindu sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita.
If so, this would give him another link to Robert Oppenheimer,
the physicist who led the team that tested the first American
atomic bomb in New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. According to
some accounts, after the predawn flash signaled the birth of the
atomic age, Mr Oppenheimer quoted a line the Bhagavad Gita. "Now
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
Before becoming the chief scientific adviser and leader of the
nuclear-weapons team, Mr Kalam was best known as a missile
engineer, working on the program that launched India's first
space satellites, and later as the head of the team that
developed and test fired missile designed to carry nuclear
warheads.
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was born on October 15, 1931,
on Dhanushkodi, an island off Tamil Nadu, where his father rented
a boat to fishermen who worked the narrow strait between India
and what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Some accounts have said
that Mr Kalam's affection for Hinduism developed when a primary-
school teacher separated him as a Muslim and placed him at the
back of a classroom, prompting tears from a Brahmin boy who was
his best friend. Later the Brahmin boy's father, spotting
scientific ability in the young Kalam, helped pay for him to go
to a Roman Catholic high school and to college.
Mr Kalam has said this ambition was fired by an article about the
Supermarine Spitfire, Britain's front-line fighter during World
War II, that he read as a small boy delivering a local Tamil
newspaper.
Later, he studied aeronautical engineering at the Madras
Institute of Technology but did not attempt a doctorate. (He has
since garnered many honorary degrees).
His only extended period abroad came when he was part of a five-
man Indian team invited to spend four months visiting space
research centres in the United States in the early 1960s, during
the first years of the American manned space programme.
Several of the Indian scientists who led the nuclear test team,
including Rajagopal Chidambaram, chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission did postgraduate studies in the United States, as have
many of the scientists who have worked on Pakistan's nuclear
programme.
But Mr Kalam has insisted that India has achieved its successes
in missile development and bomb building substantially unaided
apart from some early assistance in rocketry from the United
States and the Soviet Union. As for himself he says, "I am
completely indigenous!"
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