🇮🇳 APJ Abdul
Kalam

The boy sold newspapers before school every morning. His father, Jainulabdeen, was a boat owner and imam of a local mosque in Rameswaram, a pilgrimage island at the southern tip of India; the family was poor, and every rupee counted. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam — born October 15, 1931 — walked four kilometres each way to the local school, helped his father with the boat, collected tamarind seeds and sold them, and studied by the light of a kerosene lamp. It would be difficult to imagine a more improbable starting point for the man who would design India’s first satellite launch vehicle, lead the nation’s nuclear weapons programme, and become the 11th President of the world’s largest democracy.

Kalam’s early education was shaped by an inspiring mathematics teacher named Sivasubramania Iyer, who noticed the boy’s aptitude and encouraged him with a rigour and warmth that Kalam remembered for the rest of his life. He scraped together the money to study physics at St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirappalli, then enrolled in aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology. He graduated in 1960 and joined the Aeronautical Development Establishment of the Defence Research and Development Organisation. A year later he moved to ISRO — the Indian Space Research Organisation — under the legendary space scientist Vikram Sarabhai. He was twenty-nine years old, trained, ambitious, and about to spend the next four decades reshaping Indian science.

Kalam’s defining achievement as a scientist was the SLV-III, India’s first indigenous satellite launch vehicle. He served as project director of the programme from 1969 and in July 1980 the SLV-III successfully deployed the Rohini satellite into orbit, making India the sixth nation capable of putting a satellite into space using a domestic rocket. The achievement was celebrated nationally; Kalam became a public figure overnight. He went on to lead DRDO’s Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme, which produced five indigenously designed missile systems — Agni, Prithvi, Akash, Trishul, and Nag — earning him the permanent title of Missile Man of India.

In 1998, Kalam played a central role in India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests — five nuclear devices detonated in the Rajasthan desert that established India as an acknowledged nuclear weapons state. The tests drew international sanctions but electrified domestic opinion. Kalam, already celebrated, became a national hero in the fullest sense. In 2002, despite having no political background, he was unanimously nominated by the ruling National Democratic Alliance as their presidential candidate and was elected the 11th President of India. He brought to the ceremonial office a radical informality: he visited schools, met thousands of students, answered their letters personally, played the veena in the Presidential palace, and insisted on being remembered not as a politician but as a teacher.

After leaving the presidency in 2007, Kalam did not retire. He taught at the Indian Institute of Management and other universities, wrote more books, delivered hundreds of lectures, and maintained a correspondence with young students that was, by any measure, extraordinary for a former head of state. He died on July 27, 2015, while delivering a lecture to students at the Indian Institute of Management Shillong. He collapsed at the podium and was dead within the hour. He was eighty-three. He died doing exactly what he said he most loved to do.

Kalam’s legacy is inseparable from the idea of aspiration. His autobiography Wings of Fire (1999) has sold millions of copies and is read in schools across India. His “Vision 2020” — a blueprint for transforming India into a developed nation by the year 2020 through science, technology, and education — influenced national policy for a generation. He received honorary doctorates from forty universities. October 15 is observed as World Students’ Day in his honour. What made Kalam unusual among men of his institutional stature was his insistence that science was not an elite pursuit but a democratic one — that a child selling newspapers at dawn on an island at the edge of the subcontinent was as capable of moving the world as any other.