With a pen protruding from his shirt pocket and his silver, shoulder-length hair glowing under bright television lights, the missile engineer who is set to become India’s next president coolly fielded questions about nuclear weapons and war with Pakistan during a recent press conference.
But when a journalist spoke out of turn, Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, better-known as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, leaned forward and shushed him with a sharp look and a jab of his index finger. In that instant, Indians saw a different side of the celebrated aeronautics expert who lately has become a self-appointed teacher, traveling to lecture thousands of schoolchildren about India’s potential for greatness.
“You raise a question, any question you want to ask,” Kalam told reporters. “You ask a question, I will register it in my brain. Who will start the first question? One by one, one by one!”
A complex character
Most Indians know Kalam, 70, as the chief architect of their missile program, a man who in the last several decades played a major role in turning this proud South Asian nation into a nuclear power. Since India’s governing coalition tapped him for one of the nation’s highest offices last month, other aspects of his complex, sometimes contradictory character have flared.
He is Kalam the student, who compares the pace of his political education in recent days to a satellite hurtling into orbit, and the motivating teacher whose Web site, abdulkalam.com, asks youngsters to e-mail their views on education.
Kalam is a Muslim, but his vegetarianism and knowledge of ancient India have won the support of some of the country’s most conservative Hindus. In his spare time, he plays a stringed instrument called the vina, which is associated with the Hindu god Shiva.
A hard-nosed engineer and project manager, he has written poems celebrating India’s missiles. He has spent his career building satellite launch systems and rockets with deadly capacity, yet he says his happiest moment came when he and other engineers found a way to use lightweight missile alloys to build portable medical devices for children with polio.
When India successfully launched its first intermediate-range ballistic missile in 1989, Kalam reportedly said the delivery system could just as easily be used to send a load of flowers to faraway targets as to launch a nuclear warhead. He considers India’s nuclear weapons a deterrent to war.
“You take 3,000 years of our history, we have been invaded, invaded, invaded,” he said recently. “Tell me, why was there not a king here who went to exploit any other nation? The reason, you’ll find, is the people who were coming, they had a gun, and [we] had a sword. . . . If we are not strong then security will not come.”
Many observers see the nomination of India’s most prominent missile engineer for the country’s highest office as symbolic, coming just weeks after India and Pakistan edged away from the brink of war.
The choice of a Muslim president is widely viewed as a political move by India’s right-wing Hindu-dominated government to allay domestic outrage in the aftermath of spring’s brutal Hindu-Muslim strife in the western Indian state of Gujarat. More than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed in weeks of mob violence.
Kalam’s nomination may also have paved the way for recent political maneuverings within the government, the most significant being the elevation last week of rightist home minister, L.K. Advani, to the post of deputy prime minister. The job cements Advani’s position as a likely successor to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
In the government, the president is a largely ceremonial figure chosen by an electoral college made up of parliament members and state officials. Kalam was nominated by the governing coalition and has been endorsed by the opposition Congress Party, so his election is practically guaranteed.
Poster achiever for India
His nomination was unexpected, but few politicians have openly opposed it. In a country that values indigenous achievement and religious pluralism, Kalam, who received all his scientific training in India with the exception of a six-month stint at NASA in the 1960s, is heralded as quintessentially Indian, an example of the triumph of determination and hard work over circumstance.
“He represents precisely the sort of thing that any Indian would be proud of,” said Bharat Karnad, a senior fellow in national security studies at the Center for Policy Research. “Look at his background and his achievements, he’s done it all on his own talents. He had no godfathers, no political strings to pull.”
Kalam was born in 1931 in Rameswaram, a Hindu pilgrimage town in southern India. His father, a spiritual leader in the Muslim community, owned a wooden boat, which he rented to fishermen and pilgrims.
Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully in Rameswaram, and Kalam’s closest childhood friends were Brahmins–high-caste Hindus. When a teacher made the young Kalam move to the back of the classroom because “he could not stomach a Hindu priest’s son sitting with a Muslim boy,” the Hindu boy’s father scolded the teacher.
Kalam’s family wasn’t rich, so when he wanted to go to a technology college in Madras, his sister pawned her gold bangles and chain to pay his tuition. He later joined the nation’s nascent space program, the Indian Space Research Organization, and from a base on the southern coastline helped build the country’s first rockets and its first satellite-launch vehicle.
In those days, there was little to do in the quiet town of Trivandrum, and Kalam and the other engineers sometimes went to see Hollywood movies in the evenings. Even then, Kalam had an earnestness that set him apart, said his friend and colleague R. Aravamudan, former director of the government satellite center in Bangalore.
“He took himself very seriously,” Aravamudan said. “The rest of us were very casual, but he always used to stay back and work hard at things. Later on when we all got married, he remained a bachelor, and that perhaps allowed him to pay more attention to his work. He didn’t have any distractions.”
Known for his simple lifestyle, Kalam will move into a 340-room mansion with a forest, a sports complex and a staff of 1,000 when he takes office, as expected, later this month.
