God's Own Man

The reason why he wrote his autobiography, Abdul Kalam says with typical modesty in this memoir published in 1999, is to demonstrate that if he could make it, there’s hope for the poorest child in the most obscure corner of India. But in fact, this son of a poor boatman who sold newspapers as a schoolboy and turned vegetarian simply because he couldn’t afford meat, seems to have been singularly blessed by good fortune. How else can you explain being born at a time (1931) and in a place (the island town of Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu) where his best friend was the son of the orthodox head priest of the Rameswaram temple? And the only time he faced communal prejudice was at the hands of a new teacher who was sternly repressed by the head priest threatening to sack him and kick him out of the temple town unless he stopped "spreading the poison of communal intolerance in innocent children"? Or being born into a family so rich in wisdom and spirituality (his father, a devout Muslim, was a sort of pir for both Hindus and Muslims of their neighbourhood) that it not only made up for their lack of formal education and creature comforts but left Abdul Kalam with the abiding conviction that his "was a very secure childhood, both materially and emotionally"? Or having Brahmin teachers so dedicated that apart from the hours they spent instilling the love of science into Kalam, they also insisted on breaking caste barriers and inviting him home for meals? And as if this wasn’t enough, Allah in his munificence also granted the young Abdul Kalam a friend, Ahmed Jallaluddin, 15 years older than him, who walked with him along Rameswaram’s beaches and temples, "talking mainly of spiritual matters". Jallaluddin instilled moral and spiritual values in the young Abdul that stayed with him all his life, along with a disdain for worldly rewards like wealth and prestige.

Just how deep Jallaluddin’s influence ran is evident in Kalam’s autobiography written over 50 years later: this autobiography is less about his life and the events surrounding it than about the spiritual lessons he learnt. Every obstacle he faced in life, especially in his long career in rocketry, yields its spiritual truth, often trite, sometimes wise but always sincere.

Abdul was not a particularly bright student, but he was the only one of Jainulabdeen’s five children to be sent to high school in the district headquarters at Ramanathapuram. His father hoped he would become a collector someday. At the Schwartz High School in Ramanathapuram, and even later, at St Joseph’s College in Trichi, Abdul’s run of good luck persisted: he found a series of extraordinarily dedicated teachers who transformed the shy homesick boy into a self-confident young man, determined to make something of his life. And when he was admitted to the Madras Institute of Technology for a course in aeronautical engineering, it was his sister (now married to his childhood mentor, Jallaluddin) who provided the funds, by pawning her gold bangles and chain.

His first major adversity in life—or at least what the relentlessly positive Abdul recognised as an adversity—came soon after his graduation from the Madras Institute. In order to realise his lifelong dream of flying planes, the 27-year-old Abdul applied for a job in the air force, but was rejected. Possibly, as Kalam points out, because he lacked both the physique and the personality for the job. He was so demoralised by this rejection that he trekked up to Rishikesh to meet Swami Sivananand. The Swami reassured him, saying, "You are not destined to become an air force pilot. But your destiny will reveal itself in time."

Kalam was consoled, but not content. "There is always the danger that a person with my kind of background will retreat into a corner and remain there struggling for bare existence...," Kalam writes. "I knew I had to create my own opportunities." He did: by undertaking to build an indigenous hovercraft in garage-like conditions in Bangalore’s newly-created aeronautical development establishment. The hovercraft project was eventually shelved but not before it brought Kalam a job as a rocket engineer in the Indian Committee for Space Research. The best thing about his new job, according to Kalam, was the opportunity it gave him to work with a visionary like Vikram Sarabhai. Almost everything Kalam was to do in subsequent years like developing the slv-3 and the guided missile programme, he attributes to the training and vision he learnt from this "Mahatma Gandhi of Indian science". For Kalam, his career in rocket technology was his path to spiritual enlightenment, taking him back at every stage to the spiritual texts he revered like the Quran, Bible and Gita, and even Kahlil Gibran. It was also "the struggle to become a person". And the person who emerges at the end of the book is a simple man, almost naive, but astute in his judgement of people and with tested leadership skills, at home with prime ministers and schoolchildren alike, but with no desire to please anyone but his God.