A P J Abdul Kalam - Rocket Man of India (15 Oct 1931 – 27 Jul 2015)

Excerpts from the Wings of Fire, the autobiography of A P J Abdul kalam.

“Big scientific projects are like mountains, which should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without urgency. The reality of your own nature should determine your speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become tense and highstrung, slow down. You should climb the mountain in a state of equilibrium. When each task of your project is not just a means to an end but a unique event in itself, then you are doing it well,”

To live only for some unknown future is superficial. It is like climbing a mountain to reach the peak without experiencing its sides. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the peak. This is where things grow, experience is gained, and technologies are mastered. The importance of the peak lies only in the fact that it defines the sides. So I went on towards the top, but always experiencing the sides. I had a long way to go but I was in no hurry. I went in little steps—just one step after another—but each step towards the top.

I visualized my team as a group in which each member worked to enrich the others in the team and experience the enjoyment of working together.

Many even called us a group of eccentric inventors in pursuit of an impossible dream. I, being the leader of the “navvies”, was a particularly inviting target. I was regarded as yet another country bumpkin… The weight of opinion against us buttressed my ever-optimistic mind. The comments of some of the senior scientists made me recall John Trowbridge’s famous satirical poem on the Wright Brothers, published in 1896:
. . . . with thimble and thread
And wax and hammer, and buckles and screws,
And all such things as geniuses use; —
Two bats for patterns, curious fellows!
A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows.

There is always the danger that a person with my kind of background— rural or small-town, middle-class, whose parents had limited education— will retreat into a corner and remain there struggling for bare existence, unless some great turn of circumstance propels him into a more favourable environment. I knew I had to create my own opportunities.

I often read Khalil Gibran, and always find his words full of wisdom. “Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man’s hunger,”—those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around. If you are a writer who would secretly prefer to be a lawyer or a doctor, your written words will feed but half the hunger of your readers; if you are a teacher who would rather be a businessman, your instructions will meet but half the need for knowledge of your students; if you are a scientist who hates science, your performance will satisfy but half the needs of your mission.

Desire, when it stems from the heart and spirit, when it is pure and intense, possesses awesome electromagnetic energy. This energy is released into the ether each night, as the mind falls into the sleep state. Each morning it returns to the conscious state reinforced with the cosmic currents. That which has been imaged will surely and certainly be manifested. You can rely, young man, upon this ageless promise as surely as you can rely upon the eternally unbroken promise of sunrise… and of Spring

To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal. Total commitment is a crucial quality for those who want to reach the very top of their profession. The desire to work at optimum capacity leaves hardly any room for anything else. he difference between an energetic and a confused person is the difference in the way their minds handle their experiences. Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success. All of us carry some sort of a super-intelligence within us. Let it be stimulated to enable us to examine our deepest thoughts, desires, and beliefs.

Once you have done this—charged yourself, as it were, with your commitment to your work—you also need good health and boundless energy. Climbing to the top demands strength, whether to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career. People are born with different energy reserves and the one who tires first and burns out easily will do well to reorganize his or her life at the earliest.

The pursuit of science is a combination of great elation and great despair. I went over many such episodes in my mind. Johannes Kepler, whose three orbital laws form the basis of space research, took nearly 17 years after formulating the two laws about planetary motion around the sun, to enunciate his third law which gives the relation between the size of the elliptical orbit and the length of time it takes for the planet to go around the sun. How many failures and frustrations must he have gone through? The idea that man could land on the moon, developed by the Russian mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was realised after nearly four decades—and by the United States, at that. Prof. Chandrasekhar had to wait nearly 50 years before receiving the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the ‘Chandrasekhar Limit’, a discovery made while he was a graduate student at Cambridge in the 1930s. If his work had been recognized then, it could have led to the discovery of the Black Hole decades earlier. How many failures must von Braun have gone through before his Saturn launch vehicle put man on the moon? These thoughts helped to give me the ability to withstand apparently irreversible setbacks.

By that evening, the news of India taking up the indigenous development of a device to help short run take-offs by high performance military aircraft, with myself heading the project, was made public. I was filled with many emotions— happiness, gratitude, a sense of fulfilment and these lines from a littleknown poet of the nineteenth-century crossed my mind:
For all your days prepare
And meet them ever alike
When you are the anvil, bear –
When you are the hammer, strike.

In his words: If four things are followed - having a great aim, acquiring knowledge, hard work, and perseverance - then anything can be achieved!