You Will Be Missed, Dr. Kalam

I had two absolutely polar, but extreme reactions to the same news today.

I had just started working on the day's work-plan in the lab, when I got a text message from my dad - 'Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam has passed away'. Unlike half of other Indians (or perhaps much like them), I sighed, put the phone back in my pocket, turned up the volume on some Daft Punk and quietly resumed work. I had a long day ahead of me and I definitely needed to get on with it. Moreover I had skipped coffee today morning as I was late to work.I'm not much of an amiable person without coffee in the morning.There are a lot of designations and honors that apply to Dr. Abdul Kalam. President of India. 'Missile Man of India'. Scientist. Writer. MTV youth icon (twice). Bharat Ratna. Many many more. This eminent personality passed away yesterday, owing to a massive heart-attack, while giving a lecture to students at IIM Shillong. Poetic, one would say. He passed away doing what he loved doing in his later life - inspiring the youth of the country.I've had two instances at least, as far as I can remember, where I met Dr. Kalam face to face - one, at my school for an occasion I don't even remember. It would be sometime in 2008 or earlier. He might have been the President of India still, or had just stepped down from office. Next time I met him - and this time, I was much closer to have touched his feet (something I do not much do naturally, much to my father's ire) - I was in IIT Bombay and he had come to inaugurate the new Biology Research building.One thing that I could tell this last time was that he was really comfortable among students, who thrived to catch a glimpse of this 80 year old man. To us, this grandfather of a man was the coolest dude alive in India! Ha-ha.. there's a weirdly healthy irony here. I stopped working for a while and smiled at myself as these thoughts passed my mind. The only Indian in my lab stepped in and asked me if I heard the news."Well, he was old. So it shouldn't come as a surprise, right?" I said, very much nonchalantly."I guess you're right.." she said quietly and got on with her work.I don't get so touchy with natural death. The 'circle of life' shit runs strong in my philosophy, as The Lion King is still my most favorite movie of all time. But something told me that I was borderline rude about it too. Before Kalam was the youth icon, he was one of India's success stories. Born poor, forced to work on his own much earlier in life, he was very much an average person like us - average marks, average progress, the dean threatening to revoke his scholarship if he doesn't improve - well like I said, just like us. The most important step in his career, like it would be in anyone's life, was the identification of Aerospace Engineering as his field of interest. There, he found great teachers and leaders in Dr. Vikram Sarabhai and Prof. Satish Dhawan and voila! he learned as much as he could from them to slowly, but steadily fast-track India's ballistics and missile program and be heralded as the Missile Man of India.If you think about it, most of everything that India has right now in DRDO's military missile technologies and ISRO's launch vehicle capabilities, it is due to the efforts of this man. He may or may not have been involved at the most technical level for all of them, but he played pivotal roles in organizational and more importantly, a political role in prioritizing them. Influencing the Prime Ministry into allocating secret funds into India's aerospace research projects, much against the discretion of the Union Cabinet is a big thing to achieve for a scientist in any country. This single-handedly showcases his influence in the 'push' that our defense system needed in the post-Independence era.His role has also been critical in pushing India towards becoming a fully-fledged nuclear state with the Pokhran-II tests. And boy, that was a whole new level of escalation! Many see his involvement in developing Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMDs for India as anti-human, but think of where we'd be in and after the Kargil war? Who would we be to have a say in the Indo-China sea Chinese conflict?This man will be missed. Not because he was a scientist, nor because he was later the President. It was because he lifted the country and put it on a modern world stage. India, along with China, became a major power in the subcontinent and certainly a major player in global politics. To every young blood in India, who takes even a minor interest in politics and political news of the world, Abdul Kalam became an icon overnight. How many politicians do you know who is really above corruption? How many personalities are so humble that they are globally loved?

Remember, Abdul Kalam, an old man, has been heralded as MTV's youth icon twice!Later in the day, when I came back home and finally took some rest, I thought back on dad's message and decided to send a reply to his message that he'll see in his morning. It was now that I started thinking about how Kalam was perhaps the last person who inspired the Indian youth to pursue science. Pure science. Kalam made science cool!Only a few years back, when I chose to pursue science and everyone else around me (well, not everyone) were giving their IIT-JEEs and state-level JEEs and medical entrance examinations, I was told by a lot of people - known or unknown - that I was making a mistake. That engineering was the way of life! Over the years, I've found the internet meme that proclaims that 'In India, people first become engineers, then think about what they want to do with their lives' to sadly be true. While we definitely need engineers and medical practitioners in the country, there's an increasing saturation that's abound in those fields and issues like unemployment, unsatisfactory job expectations and aimless ambition are taking their toll.'

While more recently the prospects of start-up projects and ideas have boomed, I wonder how much of this change is a direct result of the encouragements that eminent personalities like Dr. Abdul Kalam provide. His life and his speeches inspire the youth to listen to their heart and to never stop dreaming till they realize what they want to do in life and then go achieve it. With his death, those didactic inspirations will be heard no more.

We did not lose a President or a scientist, we lost a great teacher! At this note, I found myself extremely sad and felt really disconsolate - a feeling, I felt perhaps only when Sachin Tendulkar had retired.