‘I Dream Of An India Governed By Noble Leaders, I Dream...’

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: On an autumn afternoon less than a year ago, Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabhudin Abdul Kalam was on his way to the steel city of Bokaro, when the helicopter carrying him and two other passengers crashed shortly before landing. Dr Kalam picked himself up from the debris, shook hands with the two dazed pilots and went on to keep his commitment at the Ramakrishna Vidyalaya, where he was scheduled to address students.

We know today that the astounding mind that will now dwell at Rashtrapati Bhavan belongs to no ordinary man, but physicians being physicians were not quite convinced on the evening of September 30, 2001. They insisted that Dr Kalam take tranquillisers at bedtime to tide over the shock. That night, Dr Kalam had a dream.

The dream inspired a mission and the mission inspired a book. “The helicopter mishap of September 30, 2001, made me realise that the time to jettison the third stage had arrived,” Dr Kalam writes in Ignited Minds—Unleashing The Power Within India. The “third stage” is a reference to Dr Wayne W Dyer, who classifies the periods in a man’s lifetime as the athlete stage, warrior stage, statesman stage and spirit stage in his book Manifest Your Destiny.

For Dr Kalam, the first two stages were the periods during which he was chairman of the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) and principal scientific advisor to the government of India. In the statesman stage of his life, Dr Kalam chose “technological strength with institutional partnership” as his mission.

In his dream, Dr Kalam has a tete-a-tete with Emperor Ashoka, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Caliph Omar and Albert Einstein, all transported to a sandy desert on a moon-washed night, defying time and space as dreams tend to do. Einstein says, “You know, in the West, we have built a large, beautiful ship. It has all the comforts in it, but one thing is missing: it has no compass and does not know where to go.”