Faced with a young son who spent all his spare time constructing rockets and spacecraft with his Lego blocks, my parents were advised to take him to meet “a man at the Defence Research and Development Organisation” by a visitor, who had been at the receiving end of a lecture. My brother took some of his more complicated rockets along. When they returned, my parents looked shell-shocked.
At the meeting, my father — horrified at his son’s audacity at questioning the expert — had tried to hush my brother.
After a few interventions, the annoyed expert asked my parents to leave the room while he spoke to the child. “He spent around two hours, explaining what would work and what wouldn’t and taking apart his toys and rebuilding it with him,” said my stunned mum. And my dad got this advice: “Never stop a child from asking questions.” After this, Dr. Abdul Kalam could do no wrong, as far as my parents were concerned.
Going through Srijan Pal Singh’s What Can I Give?: Life Lessons From My Teacher A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (Penguin, Rs.250) reminded me of this story. Srijan met Kalam as a student in IIM-Ahmedabad and turned down a job with a global management consulting firm in order to work with the former President between 2009 and 2015.
He was with Kalam in Shillong when the latter died and this past year, he says, has been very difficult. “There is a strange loss when suddenly someone you used to talk everyday disappears completely. But I noted down his missions for me. One was to spend more time with parents, so I shifted to Lucknow. He always said that every child should have access to quality books and promoted a library movement. This was one of his unfulfilled dreams. To actualise it, at least partially, I started the Kalam Library Project, a foundation to which all the proceeds from this book will go.”
Each chapter of the book is titled after a lesson that Srijan learnt from the former President. Asked what was the most important of them all, Srijan narrates how he went to meet Kalam after he graduated with a gold medal for Best All-Rounder. But Kalam’s reaction was, ‘Oh. So you got an IIM-A degree with great marks. Does this mean you got great education? And also you are talented?’ When Srijan answered in the affirmative; he said, ‘So, if you got the best of education, talent to perform exceptionally well and the appreciation of others, don’t you think you should use these three to change the society, the nation and the world?’ This question, says Srijan, changed the course of his life. “I had no answer. All my pride was washed away. I learnt a very valuable lesson; medals come with a bigger responsibility.”
A thread that runs through the book is Kalam’s interest in education. Srijan narrates how the former president pushed the people around him to study further and complete their schooling and graduation. So what did he think of the Right to Education Act and the ensuing fracas about admitting underprivileged children into private schools? “Right to Education should also lead to Right Education,” is Srijan’s reply. Kalam, he says, was more concerned about the need to upgrade government schools. “The admission of a handful of underprivileged children into high-end schools should not become a reason to ignore the much wider and larger problem of appalling standards in government and government-aided schools.”
It’s interesting how incidents that Srijan talks about in the book lead to a discussion of current events. Though Kalam was a vegetarian, Srijan says he would insist that his team got non-veg food. Often while travelling, thanks to stereotyping of their names, Kalam would be given non-veg food while Srijan would get the vegetarian fare. Reading all this led me to wonder what the former President would have had to say about our current obsession with what people are eating.
According to Srijan, Kalam followed and preached tolerance for diversity of opinion, faith and food habits. He mentions two factors to this approach: the need for tolerance to diversity and second, a need to respect mutual boundaries. Srijan recalls that, when they read articles showing how people came together in situations of disaster, Kalam would ask ‘Why does it take a flood or an earthquake to bring religions together? Why do they need to separate in times of peace?’ “He always maintained that religions need to be connected by the common bridge of spirituality and not separated by the islands of theology.”
Asked about the progress of the Kalam Library Project, which is to be funded by the proceeds from this book, Srijan says that around 25 libraries have already been established in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. “The first library was launched in IIM-Ahmedabad campus and local underprivileged children can walk in any time to read. The biggest is a mobile one operating from a moving bus in Kolkata. The library in Lilapur village (Gujarat) has already got a monthly footfall of over 1000 and is now going digital,” says Srijan proudly. “The Kalam Libraries are opened only when there is a demand from the community and the members decide to operate the library themselves. All libraries operate in either villages or urban underprivileged areas.”
Given that Kalam was active on social media — in fact Srijan managed his Twitter and Facebook accounts — I can’t help but ask about Kalam’s views on the quality of discourse. While Kalam believed in the power of the medium, he was disturbed at the violent reactions. “‘How can people use such language in virtual life which they would probably never use in real life?’, he would ask.”
