Tuesday, 28 July 2015

Rest in peace President Abdul Kalam

Today we bid farewell to Dr Abdul Kalam, India's 11th president, who collapsed and died, aged 83, on Monday evening while doing what he loved, addressing students.
Born in humble circumstances in a Muslim family in rural Tamil Nadu, a young boy who sold newspapers as a boy to help his family make ends meet, rose to the highest office in the land. And he did so not through the conventional route of a political career but through the dint of hard work as a scientist in government service. 
India's "missile man", as he was dubbed in the popular press, Abdul Kalam was a rocket scientist who rose to prominence as head of the country's successful civilian space and missile defence programmes. 
Combining idiosyncratic power-point presentations of his vision for India's future with instructional poems for children, lecturing on everything from solar energy to the importance of broadband connectivity for India's villages, Abdul Kalam "ignited minds", to use the title of one of his five bestselling books (he published 17 in all). 
He also touched hearts, as the outpouring of national grief at his demise has once again made clear.
As a Muslim steeped in Hindu culture, he was to many an oddity - a scientist who could recite classical Tamil poetry, who played the rudra-veena, a traditional South Indian instrument, and listened to Carnatic devotional music every day, but performed his namaz with no sense of incongruity. 
I shared a number of stages with him and marvelled at his range of expertise - space travel one day, corporate social responsibility the next, rural uplift the day after: it seemed he had an idea a minute. Every pronouncement of his was imbued with pride in the past and boundless faith in the limitless possibilities of the future.  Abdul Kalam was also, unusually for an Indian who occupied the high positions he did, a man of great modesty.
All one can say is In his life and his work, APJ Abdul Kalam embodied the best of what India can be.  India has never had a more beloved president. Active till the end, he left the world in mid-speech, as if to remind us that he still had something more to say. 
The shock of his sudden passing has left a nation bereaved. India and the modern world mourns his death, his life will not be forgotten.