About

By the time I was in Class VIII, I was becoming aware of politics, the propaganda way, thanks to my father’s fascination with radio and his die-hard support to the Congress party. Impressed by my answers in a General Knowledge session, my teacher, Kailash Chandra Sharmaji made a prophecy in the class that I would grow up to be a well-known man. I would hover around the Physics, Chemistry and Biology labs during intervals, with a sense of awe. However, the sight of dissected frogs jumping just before dying, put me off Biology and when the fork of Mathematics-Biology finally arrived, I had no second thoughts.  

In November 1966, Reita Faria was crowned Miss World – the first Indian woman to win this title. All beautiful girls now began to be called Reita Faria. My father took me to see ‘Phool Aur Patthar’ and I instantly became a fan of Dharmendra. I was warned by my mother once again when I was singing ‘Sheeshe Se Pee Ya Paimane Se Pee’ and dancing to it on the terrace and she landed there unannounced. My maternal uncle, Jagat Prakash Sharma, declared that ‘Do Badan’ was a vulgar film not to be seen by children and perhaps my father took the cue and never took me to watch the movie. I wondered how a film with a beautiful song like ‘Naseeb Mein Jiske Jo Likha Tha’ could be bad.

I developed a keen interest in cricket, mainly fuelled by the lucid commentary of Jaswant Singh. In January 1967, the West Indies team came to India. Nawab Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi captained India and Garfield ‘Garry’ Sobers led West Indies. There was a great buzz when Anju Mahendru, the girlfriend of film star Rajesh Khanna, got engaged to Garry Sobers. In the third test match played in Chennai, Farokh Engineer and Chandu Borde hit centuries. India would have won the match, but for the valiant innings of 76 not out by Garry Sobers. The match was eventually drawn with West Indies still needing 52 runs to win and three wickets left.

Class IX, Section B, brought me in contact with children from affluent families. They wore expensive dresses (there was no uniform in DN College) and even sunglasses. They also feasted in the college canteen. I learnt early on that such things were not for me and felt neither temptation, nor envy. I started taking a   little longer but better route to reach college, passing by the iconic red-bricked Ghantaghar (clock tower). My route would also take me past the movie theatre, Menaka. There used to be a painter there, making large boards for new films. I would spend many hours watching him complete the giant poster of the film ‘Milan’ and the faces of Sunil Dutt and Nutan appearing out of his pencil diagrams and different layers of colours.  

A civil defence movement started in those days, giving training to young and able men to carry out duties at the time of calamities. My father joined Home Guards and got a uniform with brass badges and combat leather shoes that I would enthusiastically polish. Deeply inspired, I also joined PSD (Pradeshik Shiksha Dal) in college, a student wing, parallel to National Cadet Corps (NCC), only to realize that it was not my cup of tea. I got blisters on my feet the first time I wore the big shoes, and the dummy rifle given to us for the drill was too heavy and cumbersome. However, I dragged myself through this for some time and opted out as soon as the academic year completed. But, this experience brought me into contact with Ganga Sharan Sharmaji, the chief of PSD. A man with a stern face, he had a kind heart and indeed loved my misplaced enthusiasm rather than ridiculing or pitying me.

Our Board exams were in Class X. The results of the Board exams were published in newspapers that would arrive only late in the night, causing commotion in every street. In my neighbourhood, the number of students who had failed was more than the number of students who had passed. The only academically respectable person living in our mohalla was Kailash Chandra Sharma, MA, (his qualification being appended to his name inseparably). He would ride a bicycle with metallic rings on his trouser legs so that they would not get stuck in the chain of the bicycle. He would also wear a hunter’s hat, for whatever fancy. He was also the only person who would read an English newspaper and listen to the BBC.  

There were two other younger ‘intellectuals’ in our mohalla. Satish Rastogi, a teacher at Nanak Chand Anglo Sanskrit (NAS) Intermediate College and Shyam Bharose Kaushik, the owner of Gyan Sagar Press, the epicentre of our locality. In the Municipal Board elections, they both contested against each other and lost. Later, Satish ‘Chachaji’ decided to do a doctorate in Political Science and Shyam Bharose ‘Bhaisaab’ sunk himself into Ananda Marga, a cult of the synthesis of Vedic and Tantric philosophies. He would subscribe to PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory) newspaper and do the Tandav dance. My father maintained his distance from both archetypes, who, I would later identify as right and left ideologues. He considered politics ‘a maze from where no one would ever return alive’ and cautioned me against ever entering into it.

My father’s income no more sufficient, my mother, in an act most rebellious in those days, joined a private school as a teacher for Rs. 50/- per month. She also decided to attend classes for a Basic Training Certificate so as to become a ‘regular’ teacher. My grandmother was furious and mocked her. My father seethed in silence, his male chauvinism crushed against reality. I did assignments for my mother and was in tears when she failed the exam. Her indomitable spirit emerged with this failure and she appeared for the exam again the next year and passed. She joined Arya Samaj Intermediate College for girls and served there till her retirement.

My younger brother, Varun, replaced me as my grandmother’s favourite. She was not very comfortable with my rebellious ways of not being party to her schemes and plots against my mother or grabbing the attention of my father. Now earning, my mother brought us some comforts. All four children got new dresses. My father and grandmother however, never accepted a rupee from her, more out of their misplaced pride. I don’t now how she handled my father in private, but their petty quarrels continued unabated. My sister turned a favourite of my father. She would meticulously wash and iron his office clothes. I gradually slipped out of the centre of attraction in my family.  

One day, a parrot with broken wings fell over our house and perforce became a pet. We had wanted to bring a puppy earlier, but father declared that we siblings were enough and that there was no room for another pet. He however accepted the injured parrot. All four siblings went together to a mechanic’s workshop to get a cage made for it, to secure the bird against a possible cat attack with the five rupees that my grandmother gave away most generously for this ‘noble cause’. We sat for more than two hours watching the cage being made from scrap iron strips and returned with it as a prized trophy.

Then arrived Television! In every locality, a rich family would have one, with a 20 feet antenna on their terrace, often disturbed by monkeys. I would go to one such family every Friday at 8 p.m. to watch ‘Chitrahar’, a half-hour show of the latest film songs. My father never liked my doing this, but he did not stop me either. One day, my father caught me standing captivated near the poster of Dev Anand’s film ‘Jewel Thief’ near Ghantaghar and gave me a tight slap followed by an even more scathing look. “If you do not study, you will become a shoe thief!” he said.

High school was tough and my stress, palpable. I had my first migraine attack a day prior to my Science practical exam. No one was at home and I was sitting beside the parrot. The next day, I got to set up a circuit proving Ohm’s law and answered viva questions confidently. Our examination centre was Faiz E Aam Inter College. The sight of the principal coming with his dog to see if any one was copying was indeed scary! The last exam was of Technical Drawing where I opted to draw a kamdal model, an oblong water pot made of dry gourd, used by ascetics to carry water, using crayons on black paper, much to the amazement of the invigilator overseeing the examination, as there were regular and simpler options available. “Are you mad?” he could not stop himself from asking. His uncharitable comment gave me my first maverick moment, the first clue that I was going to grow into an independent-minded person.

With no indoor games or pastime amenities or places to visit, summer vacations were scary to me. Meerut turns extremely hot in May and till the rains arrived in late July, there would be no reprieve. My father introduced me to Tilak Library in the Town Hall, constructed by the British. After independence, it became Loyal Library. I would go with my father to the library every day, which was adjacent to his workplace, and return with a book. It was the summer of 1969 that opened the windows of my mind. I read the entire ten-volume set of Sachitra Vishwakosh (illustrated encyclopaedia). I learned about zodiac signs and how to locate Dhruv Tara (Polaris) from Saptarishi (Ursa Major) and connect it to Ursa Minor and would regularly watch it while sleeping on the open terrace in the hot summer. Sometimes when I woke up in the night, I could see that while all other stars had moved from their positions, the Polaris Star remained at true North.

When the results were declared in late June, as usual, in the middle of the night, I found that I had secured first division in high school, leading to happiness all around. My father, most pleased, took me along with a sweet box to every relative; he never visited them otherwise. Later, two older boys who looked like ruffians approached me and asked to see my mark sheet. They told me that they had betted about whether I would secure more marks than another boy who went to an elite school, the prestigious Government Inter College (GIC). They gave me two rupees from the money they had won. I didn’t ask how much they made, and they didn’t reveal the figure. Embarrassed that I was treated as a contestant in a cockfight, I never dared to share the story of my first income with my parents and dropped the red colour note in the mandir daanpatra.

The onset of adolescence brought with it its own hormone rush. I dared to walk to Begum Pul alone to see the Diwali lighting and saw an English film –‘Lawrence of Arabia’ walking five kilometres to Palace Picture Hall in Meerut Cantonment. Understanding not even a word, I laughed when others laughed and clapped when others clapped. Pulp fiction written by Om Prakash Sharma, Ved Prakash Kamboj and Surendra Mohan Pathak gradually got replaced by literary books I would borrow from Tilak Library. I was deeply moved by ‘Shekahar Ek Jeevani’ by Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Ajneya’. I was fascinated by reading a story in a non-linear narrative, past, present and future all jumbled up, and learnt rather early in my life from this book that the three basic instincts — sex, fear and the pursuit of self-interest — indeed drive human life; not fate, not conditions, not luck, and not even hard work!

On 20 July, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on the moon. Everyone was excited. Armstrong and Aldrin walked around on the moon for three hours, picked up bits of moon dirt and rocks and installed a U.S. flag on the moon. Their colleague Mike Collins sat in the Lunar Module taken there by the Apollo 11 rocket. All three astronauts came back to Earth safely. I felt bad for Mike Collins and wondered why he hadn’t come out. Shyam Bharose told me a week later on authority of some Russian newspaper that the moon landings had never actually happened and that it was a fake event.

I slipped in my academic performance and did not get the usual 60 per cent or more in Class XI, a constant with me throughout my school years. The distinction in Mathematics, marked by more than 75 per cent marks, also slipped away. My father was worried, but didn’t say anything. He provided money for my tuitions, which helped, and six months of focussed effort under the tutelage of Ishvar Singh Sir, my Science teacher at DN College, started after the Diwali of 1970. His tuitions added to my confidence if not intelligence. Unsure of the adequacy of my preparedness and mindful of the liberties I had taken with my studies, while walking to Faiz E Aam College, once again the examination centre, I would stop by the Hanuman temple in front of my father’s office midway for God’s blessings to patch up the holes in my tattered preparations.

My grandmother passed away in May 1971 of old age peacefully at home. Her body was taken to Garhmukteshvar. With great sadness, I watched her being cremated. Although, we were estranged for few years, Varun replacing me as her toy-child years ago, I could never forget her obsessive but most real love that one can give to another. To invite my mother’s elder sister Mithilesh Mousi, for my grandmother’s thirteenth day ceremony, I walked to their house in Civil Lines area. She was not at home, but her husband Jagat Prakash Sharma, an English teacher at GIC with ‘An authority in English Teaching’ board adorning his house, received me with affection. He enquired what I planned to do after Intermediate and when I said I wanted to do a diploma in the local Polytechnic School, he disagreed and said that I was meant for a better career. He searched for old newspapers and gave me a cutting of an admission notice issued by GB Pant University where his son, Anurag Vashishta was a faculty member. It took many days for me to share this with my father, as I was unsure if he could afford sending me to University. However, when I showed him the advertisement, he readily accepted the proposition. A month later, when the Board Examination results arrived, I passed in the first division, but had barely managed to get 300 out of 500 marks. A single mark less and I would have lost my ‘Honours’ tag. On July 17, 1971, I got the admission letter from the university for B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering. I had made mechanical engineering my first choice on my own innate calling while applying and had got it.

The next day, my father and I boarded a bus. It was our longest journey until then, of 200 kilometres. We arrived at the home of Anurag Vashishta, a bachelor. I got admission to the College of Technology in the University. My father had decided that I would stay with Anurag Bhaisaab in his house, and not in a hostel, without even consulting him! My father stayed for two days and had a feel of the sprawling University campus. Even he had not seen anything like it earlier. It was time for him to return to Meerut. When Anurag Bhaisaab asked my father if he had checked all his belongings and had left nothing behind, he said, “I am leaving my son!”

My decision to study engineering as a day scholar, while staying in Anurag Vashistha’s house, with the intention of saving on hostel expenses, was outright impractical. I became disconnected from my batchmates. As I had studied in the Hindi medium till then, I had a serious problem comprehending what the teachers were speaking, let alone getting to the subject matter. Pantnagar University, which had been created with the active support of American funding, had faculty trained in the United States. Many of them spoke with an accent and had snobbish attitudes. The lush green campus with hills in the backdrop, was surreal, though. The Grade Point Average (GPA) system was complicated. I never really understood the difference between a lecture and a tutorial, thus messing up both. Though Anurag Vashistha accepted my staying in his house with no apparent qualms, he was unaware of the tribulations that I faced in my unsure early days.

Except for Engineering Drawing, of which I had some idea as I had studied Technical Drawing in High School, all other courses were alien to me, especially Elementary Biology and Economics. My Biology teacher was superciliousness personified. When my Economics teacher wrote on the board, ‘Demands vary with supply’, I wondered if he was writing the spelling of ‘vary’ right, as the only spelling I knew of the word was ‘very’. In fact, I wondered who had designed the curriculum and what these courses had to do with Engineering. Two months into the course term, I had an emotional breakdown. I wrote a letter to my mother at her school address, pleading to be rescued. My father arrived in a few days, ready to take me back, but asked if I could come home after appearing for the trimester exams, just to make sure that I was not cut out for this course. I could sense the pain of my father on finding that his son was going to fail. He was desperately calling to me make one last attempt before giving up. I realised that no matter what I failed at, failing my father was not something I would allow to happen. I worked hard and to my pleasant surprise, I found that I had passed all the courses.

In the meantime, Anurag Vashistha moved to another house, from where walking to college was strenuous and time-taking. So, my father brought me a bicycle. I transported it from Meerut to Pantnagar on the roof of a bus. But barely a month had passed where I could enjoy this comfort, that my bicycle was stolen from outside the College of Basic Sciences and Humanities (CBSH), where I had parked it to attend a class. Crestfallen and hesitant to share the loss with my father, for weeks, I walked kilometres, cursing my fate. Arun Prakash, a faculty in Mechanical Engineering and a native of Meerut, emerged as a strong support. Handsome, urbane, with a good command on the English language, and above all, supportive in every little way, he indeed steadied my baby steps. His wife, Mridula, fed me malai toasts most generously whenever I visited their home.

Soon, Anurag Bhaisaab got married and there were guests at home every evening. I got distracted in multiple ways and before I could realize my fall, I had failed in the Electricity and Magnetism course, taught by an archaic teacher. He spoke English in a dialect that only the gods could decipher! With a ‘C’ in all other courses, I could not compensate for the ‘E’ in this course and was put on Academic Probation. This meant that I would not be allowed to register for more than four courses in the next semester. Finally, it dawned upon me that hostel expenses were no longer avoidable. My father readily consented, eager to take any measures to ensure that my grades improved. It was perhaps the worst period of my youth – I had left home, but was lost in transit!

My academic advisor, as allotted to every student enrolled in the university to be an overall guide through out the degree programme, was a communal man, busy building a mosque on the periphery of the university, rather than focusing on his job of teaching about engines and advising the students under his care. Instead of helping me out, he ridiculed me for failing in a course. Here too, Arun Prakash held my hand. Instead of creating a monster out of the course I had failed in, he advised me to exorcise it right away by dropping an engineering course, and enrolling for it immediately in the next trimester.

This time, the course that I failed was taught by Prof. K.G. Shrivastava. Sauvé in manners and smoking a pipe at times, Prof. Shrivastava made the course an easy and interesting affair. I not only scored ‘A’ grade with more than 90% marks, but also finally found my bearings. In the next trimester, I took up the course I had dropped earlier. Also, Arun Prakash taught me Machine Drawing. This bagged me another ‘A’. In the next trimester, the Kinematics course taught by him ensured that I scored another ‘A’, and never looked back thereafter.  

With the Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics courses all done, I started scoring mostly ‘A’s and ‘B’s. I even took up extra courses and cleared my backlog well before the final year, contrary to the general practice. Two ‘A’s in Structural Engineering and Engineering Design were the cherry on the cake. My personality changed. Meerut was dead; a rebel had sprung up inside me even before I realized it. I gelled well with my batchmates, Preet Pal Singh, Indu Bhushan Sharma, Dipankar Biswas, Gyanendra Kumar Sharma, and Pradeep Kumar Shah. Towards my final year, Manhar Sameer Agarwal, a year junior to me in Engineering but a science graduate already, and Suresh Patel, pursuing graduation in Agriculture, became my fast friends.

In March 1975, I developed high fever and was admitted to hospital. I was given treatment for malaria and typhoid, which took a toll on my health, and I had to drop the final trimester, thereby delaying my graduation. Those were very painful days. My colleagues came to say goodbye and I offered them a fake smile. I spent a month in Meerut recovering, only to realize that I didn’t belong there anymore. To add to my unease, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on June 25, 1975, I loathed it but my father rejoiced. I was an ardent fan of Jayprakash Narayan, and was fully convinced of his assertion that even after 27 years of freedom, the Indian people were racked by hunger, rising prices, corruption, oppressed by every kind of injustice, and that, “It is a Total Revolution that is needed, nothing less!” My father called it rhetoric. “There is nothing total in this world, and revolution happens with guns and not speeches,” he would say.

I returned to Pantanagar to complete my coursework, with a tinge of melancholy. With all my batchmates gone, I spent my free time with books. I read Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ and followed it up with ‘Atlas Shrugged’. In my teacher, Prof. Ajai Dron, I found a friend and we spent some good times discussing the human side of engineering. He had a deep knowledge of horticulture and maintained a bee farm at his residence. By the time I completed my graduation in December 1976 with a Cumulative GPA of 4.125 out of 5, I was a confident, carefree and even impish young man.   

Prof. Ashok Kumar Dhol, Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department, read well my innate nature and insisted that I pursue post-graduation and take up a career in design engineering rather than taking up a field job available to graduates in the government and private industries. He gave me the job of a Teaching Associate almost immediately after I completed my courses, and I took up a Master’s programme in the department that indeed shaped my career. There were days when I conducted exams for my students in the forenoon and wrote mine in the afternoon. It was a great grounding in reality and my juniors and students truly loved and admired me.

Without deliberate effort and almost unconsciously, the purposeless rebel and brashness in me gave way to sobriety. I started spending a good amount of time in the library. There I read ‘The Life Divine’, Sri Aurobindo’s principal philosophic work, a theory of spiritual evolution culminating in the transformation of man from a mental into a supramental being and the advent of a divine life upon earth. While appreciating the power of the subtle over the gross, and the mind over the body, I started seeing science as the foundation of all engineering.

Transcending my own subjects, I was attracted to the philosopher-scholars Dr. Muktipad Chaudhary, Dean and Professor of Electrical Engineering; Subir Kumar Ray, Professor of Electrical Engineering; Dr. Sarat Chandra Malviya, Professor of Physics and Dean, College of Basic Sciences and Humanities (CBSH); and R. Ramachandran, Professor of Library Sciences and Chief of University Library. Indeed, I became an expert on the Dewey Decimal System of library classification and could correctly assign a number to any book given to me. There was a separate section for post-graduate students, housing bound volumes of journals. Spending long hours there, I learnt well the fine art of making literature reference cards, something not many engineers would know.

I even dared to register for an elective course in Tensor Methods in Continuum Mechanics in the Department of Mathematics, only to realize how difficult mathematics could be for students outside this field. Prof. S.K. Sharma, sensing my discomfort, even cautioned me not to trespass the boundary of Engineering.  “The lure of science is not only deceptive, it sucks you in at times,” he warned me. The rebel in me, however, took up the challenge, learned Matrix Algebra from my juniors and scored a ‘B’. Further, as if to prove a point, I took up the topic of ‘Stress-Corrosion’ for my Masters’ thesis. I sought the help of Prof. N.K. Singh, my Chemistry teacher in the B. Tech. first year. He went out of his way to assist me in setting up the experiment. Prof. Dhol would bring every visitor to the department in those days and proudly show my experiment work. “Engineering is all about ‘doing’ things,” he would tell them.

Unfortunately, good faculty was regularly leaving the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The void created by the exit of Arun Prakash, S.C. Thapa and R.C. Paliwal could never be filled up. They were replaced by mediocre people. Some of the teachers, naming whom would be improper, were actually caricatures, with neither the requisite subject knowledge, nor a trace of magnanimity that was the mark of a good teacher. As if this were not enough, the campus turned into a political battleground between three groups. The faculty and students from the nearby hills, Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Western Uttar Pradesh joined hands in setting up an irreversible destruction process. I saw the scooter of Prof. S.K. Sharma, parked outside the college building, being singled out and set on fire by a group of students, the International Guest House being vandalized, and cattle being driven into the college corridors by miscreants to defecate. Distressed to see our beautiful campus ruined, I joined some volunteers in cleaning up the stinking mess in our college.

Meanwhile, R.K. Yadav, my junior and a fine gentleman hailing from Gorakhpur, joined me as a Teaching Associate. We would spend time laughing over the world around us, never sparing even our own selves. Mridul Gautam, son of the then ICAR Director General, joined as a student. He had studied abroad and had mannerisms different from the lot. We developed an instant bonding. Many bigwigs in the Agriculture College would woo him with offers of ‘homemade food’, but he maintained a distance. He excelled in academics and became famous as a singer of K.L. Saigal songs. In one of our cultural festivals, I directed a satire, ‘The Hiranyakashyap Murder Case’, and we made a great cameo, breaking the faculty-student barrier.

In the 1977 general elections, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her powerful son, Sanjay Gandhi, both lost their seats. My father could not believe it when the news was announced on the radio on the night of March 22, 1977, and went to sleep with his head covered with a chadar. Later, every time leaders in the new government would squabble over petty issues, my father would say, “I told you, these leaders are only good to be in the opposition.” When the Janata government forced IBM and Coca Cola to cease trading in India by charging them with foreign exchange violations, my father termed it as nonsense. He refused to even sip ‘77’, the new national substitute for Coca Cola.

On the personal front, my sister’s wedding was fixed with Satya Prakash Sharma. She was hesitant about the alliance, but a five-minute talk with her made her drop all her reservations. We performed her marriage on May 10, 1979, from our home instead of hiring a wedding hall, as my father wanted his daughter to cross the doorstep of his ancestral house after her marriage, something that had not happened since it was constructed a hundred years ago. The next day after the wedding, I had to return to Pantnagar to prepare for my exams that were looming large. My father lamented as to why I was in such a hurry. He asked if I could not stay back for a few more days to settle the bills of the large list of vendors. In my hurry, I did not even listen to him properly, little realizing that this was to be my last meeting with him.

On June 25, 1979, I wrote my last exam and boarded the bus to Meerut. Midway, I disembarked at Moradabad to spend few hours with my friend Sameer. I found Sameer tense. He told me to leave for Meerut immediately, as my brother Varun had informed him over the telephone that my father was unwell. Anxious, I followed his instructions and arrived at my home to find the narrow Baniya Para lane filled with people overflowing on to the main road. I did not need to be told that my father was no more.

My mother, only 42 then, was wailing that her neglect of my father had resulted in his death. My siblings were dumbfounded. I was shocked; I could neither cry, nor enquire as to how this calamity had befallen us. I touched my father’s feet and came out of the house within minutes. The barber came to shave my head as per the practice. Someone suggested that as there had recently been a wedding in the family, the entire head should not be shaved; a token hair offering would suffice. A sobbing barber followed the instructions. He refused to take his service charges, saying that in the death of my father, he too had lost a father. The ‘Antim Yatra Vahan’ bus of Shri Ganga Motor Committee took us all to Garhmukteshvar. I cremated my father on the banks of the Ganga River a little before midnight. The next morning, I came to know that my father had suffered a heart attack on 16 June and had been admitted to the Meerut Medical College. Later, when I returned to Pantnagar, his letter, written on 19 June was waiting for me. “I had some problem, but will be okay soon. Write your exam well and return.” It was only then that I let the dam of my tears burst. With time, we all came to terms with the loss created by my father’s untimely death.

Uncomfortable about answering people who approached her for my wedding alliance, my mother insisted that I marry soon. She even went with her sister Mithilesh, mother of Anurag Vashistha, and met a would-be-wife for me. Daughter of Beg Ram Sharma, who had migrated to Meerut from Baraut and worked in the Meerut Court, Anjana was the fourth daughter in the family and was pursuing her Ph. D thesis in Biochemistry at LLRM Medical College, Meerut. I visited them with my brother Varun to formally confirm the alliance, and we were married on February 18, 1980. There was a total solar eclipse on 16 February, causing darkness at noon. It was the first total solar eclipse of the century and there would be no total solar eclipse in my lifetime. However, my mother did not allow me to view the eclipse and I meekly consented. In fact, Doordarshan had telecast Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film, ‘Chupke Chupke’, so that people would not go out to see the eclipse. I was indeed laughing hilariously, relishing the crispy dialogues of Gulzar and the brilliant comedy of Dharmendra, forgoing the rare celestial event happening outside.

Within a week of our marriage, Anjana and I were in Pantnagar. On the first weekend itself, we went to Nainital. I borrowed 500 rupees from my friend, Joshiji, just in case our expenses overflowed the budget. When we came back, Anjana rejoined her post-doctoral courses at CBSH. This was the most beautiful phase of our life. We felt that we were living in a heaven created by God for Adam and Eve. Within a few months, Anjana conceived, and delivered a son on July 26, 1981, at Susheela Jaswant Rai Hospital, Meerut. Together, we named him Aseem Anand, as we felt that he was truly a bundle of boundless joy for us. We lovingly called him Jonu-Monu and returned to Pantnagar with our month-old son.

By that time, my Masters was done with and I had been selected by the Union Public Service Commission to work at the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO). I would wait daily for the postman to deliver the appointment letter, which took many months. On January 28, 1982, when I was walking back to my college after the lunch break, Rahman, the elderly postman, unkempt, bearded and wearing thick glasses, called me from behind, saying that everyday, I asked for my letter and that when he had actually brought it, I was walking on, oblivious to him. I opened the envelope, stamped with government insignia, right there and joyfully gave him the 20 rupees that were in my pocket. He said, eyes filled with tears, “God bless you always! No one ever gave me more than two rupees till date, as people feel that a postman is worth only that much.”

It was time to leave Pantanagar. Ten long years there had made a man out of a confused boy. My father never returned to Pantnagar after his trip in 1971 to take me home as I wished, but he subtly guided me to stay back. That day, while leaving Pantnagar, I remembered him intensely. I had passed the exams and reached where I had because I did not want to fail him. In a quickly organized farewell, Prof. Dhol said, “I have nothing to stop you here. Education is all about living up to the tasks, as they appear, and to keep learning always. Go ahead and bring glory to your teachers, who prepare students to take up challenges in their lives.” My father-in-law came to supervise our winding up. Mridul Gautam helped us put our luggage in the taxi. Leaving Anjana and Aseem in Ghaziabad at Anjana’s elder sister Krishna’s place, I boarded the Andhra Pradesh (AP) Express at New Delhi station on February 1, 1982. More tired than excited, I slept off soon after the train rolled out of the station.

Getting into a Central Government job was a big achievement in those times. A written exam, followed by an interview at the Union Public Service Commission, Dholpur House in New Delhi, and a long wait for the appointment by the Ministry, made the candidate feel really special upon selection. I arrived at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL), Hyderabad, without a clue about where I had landed. After a few days of sitting in the Technical Information Centre, the euphemism for a library in the setup, I was presented before the Director, S.L. Bansal, an unassuming man who looked more like a professor. He asked me some general questions and posted me to the Structures Division, perhaps based on my Masters’ thesis on Stress Corrosion, which he was browsing through while talking to me. The entire meeting lasted less than five minutes.

Colonel V.J. Sundaram headed the Structures Division. I was overawed by his persona. Never before had I met an Army Officer, and his booming voice, warm manners and precise words made me a fan of his at first sight. He assigned me the task of finding out in depth about the aluminium alloys used to make missile airframes, starting with the Russian surface-to-air missile, ‘Kavadrat’. It was like beginning from scratch for me. My search took me to the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) and Dr. C.R. Chakravorty. He was very kind and granted me access to specialized books on aluminium alloys used in Aerospace. With nothing much to do, I loved that period of learning the finer aspects of aluminium metallurgy – the role played by copper, magnesium and zinc in bringing about different structural properties – strength, flexibility, corrosion resistance, and so on

Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam joined DRDL on June 30, 1982. Already famous as the Project Director of India’s first Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-3) and decorated with the Padma Bhushan award, his arrival created a buzz. Though I saw him from a distance a few times, my first interaction with him took many more months. One day, a messenger (the use of the term, ‘peon’, had been discontinued by that time) came to escort me to the Director’s office. When I asked Col. Sundaram to escort me there, he chided me, saying that this was neither a kindergarten school, nor a parent-teacher meeting. When I reached the Director’s office, in about ten minutes from the time I received the message, his secretary, Dikshit Madam, further rattled me by saying, “Where were you? The Director has been waiting for you for half an hour!”

Inside the office, another gentleman was sitting on a side chair. Dr. Kalam offered no introductions; instead, addressing me, asked ‘if he could take the suggestion of ‘this gentleman’ to replace missile air bottles made from 15CDV6 steel with titanium.’ Flabbergasted was the word that could best describe my mental state at that moment. I knew nothing about 15CDV6 steel air bottles or titanium. Nor had I a clue about ‘this gentleman’, who was handsome, fair complexioned, and appeared sagacious and very intelligent. Being street-smart, I answered, “I think it is a good idea.” Dr. Kalam’s eyes flashed with anger and his lower jaw dropped at my stupidity. “What is your age?” he asked. “Twenty-seven years, Sir,” I answered. “Funny fellow! At the age of twenty-seven years, I was expecting you to ask for an opportunity to try out the idea.” I withstood that moment of shakiness and answered, “I am from UP, Sir. My English is not good. This was exactly what I wanted to say.” The frown on his face turned into a faint smile and he said, “Go and do it then.”

I was dismissed from the room. When I returned to the department, all my colleagues were waiting to hear why the Director had called me, a rookie. When I narrated the entire story, not only did they display no excitement, but a very uncomfortable silence filled the large room, which eight of us scientists shared. When I asked what a missile air bottle actually was, one of my senior colleagues, who I am sparing the ignominy of identification, told me, in black humour, that when all the whisky was consumed from a bottle, all that was left over in the bottle was air, and this was called an air bottle!

The gentleman sitting with Dr. Kalam was Dr. G.J. Gururaja, Chief Engineer (R&D) of Bharat Heavy Plates and Vessels Limited (BHPV), a public sector engineering company at Visakhapatnam. Dr. Gururaja not only treated me with affection, but also made me learn all about titanium – a very special metal, named after the Greek god Titan – as strong as steel but half its weight, extremely resistant to crack propagation, but very difficult to form, forge or machine. Two years under his tutelage, I became the man who developed India’s first Titanium Air Bottle, and flew into the Aerospatial Test Facility, Bordeaux, France, where such bottles were tested for structural integrity and flight worthiness.

In the meantime, my second son was born on November 27, 1983. We named him Amol Anand and split the Monu from Jonu-Monu as his nickname. I started feeling the pressures of work life. I would have sudden bouts of migraine. I underwent treatment for the same, although it was mostly ineffective. Though the joy and enthusiasm of work always overweighed the stress, the migraine refused to leave me permanently. Ravi Kumar, a co-rider in my bus and an engineer-MBA working with Bharat Dynamics Limited, introduced me to Gestalt Therapy and the dream work that it prescribed. Getting involved in the present moment rather than mulling over the past or worrying about what would or would not happen in the future was a new learning and it worked wonders for me. Gradually, I got rid of my migraine. From then onwards, I became an avid reader of psychology and self-help books. Over the years, I read every single book written by Dr. Wayne Dyer, Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. There was a roadside book stall in front of the General Post Office (GPO) in Abids, from where I would buy the books cheap.

DRDL had a special category of people like Colonel Sundaram. They would come from the Army, Navy and Air Force to work there as scientists. They even wore uniforms on certain days. Usually occupying senior positions, they had the best of both worlds – the civilian freedom of working informally as well as enjoying the privileges associated with their ranks. In 1983, Dr. Kalam rolled out the Integrated Guided Missile Programme (IGMDP) and I was assigned the task of designing the TRISHUL missile airframe. A young M.S.R. Prasad joined me as my junior and together we loved our work, which we viewed as play rather than a chore. Commodore S.R. Mohan, a Naval Officer and Project Director, TRISHUL, developed a special fondness for me. He even visited my small rented ‘portion’ in the Nallakunta area in his grand naval uniform and smoked while chatting with my wife. Aseem, five years old at the time, told him not to smoke. Only children can call the emperor naked!

K. Rama Rao, a co-student of Dr. Kalam at the Madras Institute of Technology, and an aristocrat, took over the reins of the Structures Group, now renamed as Flight Vehicle Directorate, from Brigadier Sundaram (by now promoted) as Project Director, PRITHVI missile. Rama Rao Sir posted me to the AKASH missile project under Prahlada, the young Project Director and blue-eyed boy of Dr. Kalam. By this time, Colonel R. Swaminathan had begun noticing me and started involving me in management policy-related work. I wrote a book with him called ‘Super Vision’, my first one, based on Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s theory of leadership styles that was in vogue in those days. It was published by The Defence Scientific Information and Documentation Centre (DESIDOC) and released by the erstwhile Defence Minister, K.C. Pant, when he came with the then President, R. Venkataraman, to inaugurate the Research Centre Imarat (RCI) on August 27, 1988.

As I child, I used to feel palpations in my heart. The fast-paced rhythm would subside on its own after a few minutes. However, it was never noticed as an illness. On January 29, 1986, while giving a talk in the DRDL auditorium, I had a tachycardia episode and it did not go away. I was taken to the CGHS dispensary, where Dr. Srinivas sensed the urgency of this serious electrophysiological disorder in the heart muscles and organized an ambulance to take me to the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences. Dr. S. Jaishankar managed my tachycardia in the ICU and the next morning, I was shifted under the care of Dr. B. Soma Raju. Ten days passed and there was not much improvement. I had several such episodes in the ICU. On February 8, on his way to the Begumpet Airport, Dr. Kalam came to the NIMS, and right in front of him, I had a severe tachycardia.

Dr. Kalam told me a story of two Tamil saints. The younger one wanted to write a book on grammar but was hesitant to start due to his advanced age, as the project would take around ten years to complete. The elder saint told him that he must start writing immediately. If his work was worth being done, God would keep him alive. After all, it was in His interest that the world would become a better place. Dr. Kalam kept his hand on my head and said, “You will do many great works and nothing will happen to you.”

As suggested by Dr. Soma Raju, Dr. Kalam made extraordinary efforts to import Amiodarone HCL, the medication that had just arrived in the West to treat certain types of serious, and possibly fatal, irregular heartbeats. He personally spoke to the High Commissioner of India in London, got a prescription written and had the medication flown in by the next flight of Air India from London. This chance meeting of Dr. Soma Raju and Dr. Kalam later led to the development of India’s first coronary stent. However, like a seed that takes years to become a tree and bear fruit, it would take many more years to become a reality in 1995.

I played an active role in the first two flight trials of the AKASH missile. AKASH was a surface-to-air tactical missile defence system with mid-span fins to enable manoeuvres to hit fast-moving enemy aircraft. As in all other missiles, the aerodynamics of Russian missiles was adopted. Here, the parent was 2K12, called ‘SAM 6’ by NATO. One of the sections of this missile had to be in a magnesium casting. With the scientists at the in-house foundry at DRDL throwing in the towel, we got it done at the Foundry and Forge Division at HAL, Bangalore, bringing me close to an accomplished engineer, P.K. Sengupta. I spent many weeks at HAL, eating in their canteens, where soup was served in paper cups and ‘officers’ stood in a queue to get their fills. I also became close to P.K. Biswas at the DRDL, a veteran engineer with a very sharp eye for detail. At times, when these two gentlemen talked to me in their Bengali-accented English with unmistakable loving kindness, I felt like I was in the presence of my teacher, Prof. A.K. Dhol.

Working on AKASH brought me into contact with some truly great engineer-scientists. Dr. R.R. Panyam and Dr. B.S. Subhash Chandran, Propulsion Engineers, and Dr. G. Satheesh Reddy, Missile Guidance Engineer, were the three most notable. I was influenced by their ‘intellectual stubbornness’. Amongst colleagues, D.V. Subba Rao, G. N. Rao and A.D. Rane were world-class in their work and yet, unpretentious. Though they would meekly accept the orders of the superior officers, some unreasonable, some even wrong, through the fine art of passive resistance, they never allowed any compromise in the quality of their work. The four years from 1986 to 1990 were perhaps the golden years of my life. Nothing that I did could go wrong. I developed the AKASH Airframe, vibration isolators, pressure probes, and fins out of low weight-high strength 7075 aluminum alloy, developed for the first time in India.

Slowly but unmistakably, the work culture at DRDL started changing. With the creation of the RCI, affluence entered the system. Everyone used hired taxis to commute. Office rooms now had expensive furniture, senior scientists were always on tours and the emphasis shifted, maybe not intentionally, but instinctually, towards contract work and the import of sub-systems, rather than developing them with components and devices. The heavy investment on test facilities and the shift towards ‘integrating’ rather than ‘developing’ appeared paradoxical to me. Junior scientists would mock their high-flying seniors ‘stopping over at workplaces once a while’. In 1992, I published my second book with Colonel Swaminathan, ‘Broken Bones Never Kill, Broken Hopes Do’, subtly observing and recording the paradigm shift. Dr. Kalam wrote the foreword and Wiley Eastern published it.

Around this time, Dr. Kalam left DRDL to become the Director General of DRDO and moved to Delhi. He offered me the position of his staff officer, but when I expressed my preference to continue in Hyderabad, he graciously agreed and did not ‘order’ my posting. He also remained in active contact. In December 1992, Dr. Kalam called me to Delhi and when I requested for an air ticket, I was sanctioned only an onward passage by air. I had to take a train on my return journey. On 6 December, Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya and most of north India was engulfed in communal violence. Dr. Kalam showed no interest in how I would return and I did not have enough money to buy an air ticket myself. I was the only passenger in the AC coach of the Dakshin Express. The TC bolted the compartment from inside, fearing an attack. This experience left a permanent scar on my heart. You are important only to the extent that your work is important; the rest is all Vanity Fair.

Dr. Kalam survived a coup in the DRDO headquarters, thanks to the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao. He was initially made to accept the position of Vice-Chancellor of Madras University so that someone could replace him in DRDO, but this was overruled by the Prime Minister, who wrote in the file, ‘term extended till further orders’. Now, with a long innings ahead of him, Dr. Kalam decided to roll out a programme to benefit people by making use of the advanced technology that was already invested for defense purposes. Dr. Kalam tasked me to use my ‘acquaintance’ with Dr. Soma Raju to explore the possibilities of developing civilian spin-offs from Defence Technology. Without realizing the drift, I had strayed away from my core area of missiles and gone into interdisciplinary R&D. My work saw the Society for Biomedical Technology (SBMT) being created, formalizing a structure for such work in India.

Towards the end of 1992, the once life-saving Amiodarone HCL led to severe hypothyroidism in me and I lost a quarter of my 60 kg weight in just two weeks. Back in the ICU again, Dr. Soma Raju decided to perform an angiogram to locate if there was any narrowing of my artery triggering the electrophysiological disturbances. He was absolutely right. My left anterior descending (LAD) artery was 90% blocked right at the opening. The lesser diameter of the artery was probably congenital and made an otherwise normal thickening of the arterial wall dangerous. Dr. Soma Raju performed an angioplasty and I had a miraculous recovery.

Inspired by a new lease of life, I started working closely with scientists from the other laboratories of DRDO. I was in for a cultural shock. There was so much ‘nothing to do with defense going on in the DRDO laboratories! I failed to understand the development of well-established industrial products like gravitational suits for pilots, and climate acclimatization devices, all in the name of self-reliance. The outcome of all this effort and expenditure was doomed from the day these tasks were undertaken. On one hand, we were ‘integrating’ weapon systems rather than ‘developing’ them, and on the other, we were ‘developing’ standard commercially available products. It looked to me like a case study in organizational schizophrenia. I also found that the laboratories of Department of Science and Technology (DST), a partner in SBMT, were configured more around a few patron scientists and their direction of research rather than the pressing needs of the society. It was not a great experience for whatever count!

Dr. Kalam admired my writing skills and tasked me to write a few of his speeches. In 1993, I wrote his convocation address, to be given at the Roorkee University, narrating how Colonel Thomson, a Revenue Officer with the East India Company, trekked the flood-prone basin of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers on horseback and designed a canal system. He then wrote to his British bosses that ‘to accomplish a project of this magnitude, we need to teach the natives the science of engineering’, thus paving the way for the creation of Asia’s first engineering college at Roorkee. Dr. Kalam thundered, “The very same natives now have their own satellites in orbit, launched by their own rockets”, to a standing ovation. I later wrote his iconic speech at the Indian Science Congress in Jaipur, “Let my brain remove your pain”, presenting his theme of using strategic technology for the good of ordinary people.

The successful development of India’s first coronary stent created a sensation. Coronary stents, newly arrived on the scene, cost about 75,000 rupees, whereas the cost of balloon angioplasty, where the stent would be additionally used, was around 50,000 rupees. Dr. A. Venugopal Reddy and Koneru Bose at the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL) successfully developed an austenitic stainless steel version, removing even traces of delta-ferrite so that the metal would not corrode in the oxygen-loaded blood in the heart. I did the running around involved with the animal trials and regulatory approvals. We patented the stent as the ‘Kalam-Raju’ stent. When Dr. Kalam asked me where my name was in the patent, I answered, “I am the dash between Kalam and Raju.”

Created much earlier at the initiative of the World Bank as a development financial institution for providing medium-term and long-term project financing to Indian businesses, the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation (ICIC) arrived in India as ICICI in 1995. I wrote a proposal to them for financing the creation of an R&D facility that would take forward the manufacture of low-cost stents. It was a solo dream that no one believed in. But like the proverbial shot in the dark, it precisely hit the target. ICICI surprised me by offering an unsecured loan of 6 crores at 1% notional interest. We created the Cardiac Research and Education (CARE) Foundation to receive the funds, with Dr. Soma Raju as its Chairman. He asked me why I was ‘wasting my time’ in a ‘neither here nor there’ situation. Recognizing the truth in his statement, after much introspection, I resigned from my government job at the age of 42, with no entitlement to pension or other terminal benefits, and took over as the Secretary of the CARE Foundation and the Director of the ICICI-funded Cardiovascular Technology Institute (CVTI), Hyderabad.

The funding from ICICI, secured for setting up an institute was unheard of in those times. Dr. B. Soma Raju brilliantly used the resources to start his dream hospital. A loss-making hospital at Nampally was taken over and the Care Hospital was born. Loyal patients literally queued up and we started facing a space crunch. Soon the company, called Quality Care India Ltd., acquired a defunct five-star hotel property in Banjara Hills, and converted it into a ‘flagship hospital’. Dr. Soma Raju invited Dr. Kalam to join the board of the company. In 1997, the Care Foundation received the Defence Technology Spin-off Award from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for the development of a stent. It consisted of a cash component of Rs. 1 lakh, which Dr. Soma Raju handed over to me. I felt like a king, as never before had I possessed/handled so much money at one time.

In December 1999, the University Press published ‘Wings of Fire: An Autobiography’, that I co-authored with Dr. Kalam. The book received critical acclaim, with Bhawani Prasad Chattopadhyay calling it ‘a book worth its weight in gold’ in ‘The Statesman’. Prof. M.S. Mukunda at the Indian Institute of Science wrote in the ‘Resonance’, “There is something that everybody can extract from this book… the book is worthy of being read by every Indian.” When a reporter asked journalist and broadcasting executive M.V. Kamath – in an interview published in ‘The Asian Age’ – which book he would recommend for compulsory reading, he answered, “A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s ‘Wings of Fire’.”

In a ‘never before, never again/once in history’ kind of a moment, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee decided to refer Dr. Kalam as Presidential candidate. I was with Dr. Kalam at the Anna University in Chennai when the drama unfolded, with the Prime Minister calling Vice Chancellor Prof. Kalanidhi’s office to locate Dr. Kalam. When a surprised Dr. Kalam asked the Prime Minister for an hour’s time to think about his offer, it was given, on the condition that the reply should be a ‘yes’. Following a dream run of events, I sat through President Kalam’s swearing-in ceremony in the Parliament’s Central Hall, with Dr. B. Soma Raju by my side. In the afternoon, we attended high tea at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. When President Kalam greeted Dr. Soma Raju, he quipped, “Sir, we are here because you are here.” A frequent visitor to the Rashtrapati Bhavan thereafter, I got more involved in writing speeches for Dr. Kalam and joining his tours.

Stents soon turned into a commodity and I tried to make sense of my career by riding the tide of information and communication technology. President Kalam despatched me to Agartala to meet the Chief Minister of Tripura and seek his advice on what could be done for his far-flung state of Tripura. I found in Manik Sarkarji, a gentleman of impeccable manners. I also met V. Thulasidas, Chief Secretary. They both remain dear friends til today. I went to Kailashahar, the headquarters of the Unakoti district, traversing through the insurgency-afflicted highlands. We connected Kailashahar with Hyderabad using a hybrid of telecom and microwave technology to establish a telemedicine link to celebrate President Kalam’s visit to Tripura on October 4, 2002. Interestingly, the child patient from Kailashahar who interacted with Dr. Kalam was also named Abdul Kalam. He was diagnosed with a leaking heart valve and was later brought to Hyderabad for surgery. Technology can indeed be a great enabler of humanity and can deliver it from suffering.

On October 15, 2002, President Kalam decided to celebrate his birthday away from Delhi, at the Gaden Namgyal Lhatse Monastery in Arunachal Pradesh, which translates as ‘celestial paradise on a clear night’. The commanding view of the Tawang River valley, which comprises snow-capped mountains and coniferous forests from the monastery at an elevation of about 10,000 feet, was surreal. The state governor, Arvind Daveji, and the chief minister, Mukut Mithiji, developed a personal liking for me and I later visited the state with my family in January 2003.

In April 2003, Mridul Gautam, now Professor at West Virginia University, organized a fellowship for my son Aseem. In December 2003, I visited China with my wife and younger son Amol, and soon after our return, on January 6, 2004, I suffered a cardiac arrest while sitting with Dr. Soma Raju at the Care Hospital, Banjara Hills. I was successfully resuscitated. President Kalam and Manik Sarkarji flew in to see me. Sachin Tendulkar, on his visit to the Care Hospital, also dropped in by my bedside. Dr. Gopichand Mannan operated on me on February 5, 2004, and put in five grafts.

During his address to the Pan-African Parliament in Johannesburg in 2004, President Kalam mooted the idea of connecting the 54 member states of the African Union to India. We were the first to connect the Black Lion Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with the Care Hospital, as part of the Pan-African e-Network rolled out by the Telecommunication Consultancy of India Limited (TCIL). There was no state or union territory that I did not visit with President Kalam. Spending significant time with him during our travels, I co-authored two more books with him during his presidential tenure – ‘Guiding Souls’ (2004) and ‘You are Born to Blossom’ (2006), capturing his inner world and thought process.

I was invited to several state banquets, hosted for world leaders by President Kalam, giving me an opportunity to shake hands with President George Bush, President Vladimir Putin, President Hu Jintao, President Pervez Musharraf, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President Than Shwe and President Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov. Dr. Kalam would introduce me to these leaders with loving pride, calling me ‘our stent man’. I also had my moment of glory meeting the Nobel Laureates Sir V.S. Naipaul and His Holiness Dalai Lama, standing by the side of President Kalam. President Kalam took me on foreign tours twice. I accompanied him to Singapore, the Philippines and South Korea in February 2006 and then to Myanmar and Mauritius in March 2006. I would rate meeting ‘Sam Bahadur’ Field Marshal Manekshaw at the Military Hospital, Wellington, near Ooty, on February 24, 2007, as the most memorable moment among all these.

With the help of the Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata, which I visited with President Kalam, I organized specialized courses for the Care Hospital employees, and more than 500 nurses and paramedics received University diplomas, thus enhancing their skills and advancing their careers. For me, this was the converse of the ‘earn while you learn’ model of the G.B. Pant University. We were making our employees ‘learn while they earned’. We developed the course content and mobilized in-house faculty to carry out this biggest-of-its-kind educational activity. One hundred nurses joined from Manipur, following President Kalam’s visit there. This remains a very satisfying achievement for me during my career, where I was able to touch people’s lives in a positive way.

Inspired by Dr. Kalam after his visit to Tanzania in 2004 where he saw the desolate condition of children suffering from congenital heart defects, V. Thulasidas, now Chairman of Air India, flew in free of charge, a 50-strong contingent of child-patients, their mothers, nurses and doctors from Dar es Salaam to Hyderabad. They were treated free of charge and even boarding was provided by generous donors, notably by Mangi Lal, a grateful patient of Dr. Soma Raju from the Old City of Hyderabad. Later, two batches of doctors and nurses received their specialty training at the Care Hospital. One among them, Dr. Mpoki M. Ulisubisya, would later become the First Secretary, Ministry of Health, in the Government of Tanzania.

This act of generosity attracted great publicity. Requests for help started pouring in from local patients. Dr. Kalam and Dr. Soma Raju created a fund named ‘Little Hearts’, to help perform corrective surgeries on children born with heart defects, starting with a personal donation of Rs. 1 lakh from Dr. Kalam. We received more than Rs. 3 crores in donation, enabling us to treat more than 1000 children. One day, a father brought his eight-year-old son on his birthday, who donated Rs. 116 in the ‘Little Heart’ fund. When I shared this incident with Dr. Kalam, he said, “More important than being good yourself is to evoke goodness in others’ hearts.”

The Care Hospital promoters, mostly friends of Dr. B. Soma Raju, attempted to make it a listed company and opened various branches in Bhubaneswar, Nagpur, Raipur and Surat, even unknown to Dr. B Soma Raju and in his absence. The Initial Public Offering (IPO), however, never happened and the cascade of outside investment necessary to maintain the expansion kept diluting the equity of Dr. Soma Raju and his team, and with it, the culture of the organization. My role in the hospital was significantly marginalized and to keep myself purposefully busy, I started taking an interest in issues related to agriculture and finding technological solutions to help mitigate the problems of people living in rural areas.

I developed a camaraderie with Dr. William Dar, Director General of The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), whom I met during President Kalam’s visit there. He facilitated my visit to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Laguna, in the Philippines. Later, I would co-author two books with him, ‘Feeding the Forgotten Poor’ (2012) and ‘Greening the Grey’ (2014), creating awareness about the interests of small holder farmers and cautioning about the problem of feeding 10 billion people, the estimated population by the year 2050.

In 2007, after relinquishing the Presidency, Dr. Kalam went to the United States. I accompanied him to CISCO Systems in San Jose and met the legendary John Chambers. He was waiting in the lobby to receive Dr. Kalam. I knew of John Chambers for his annual salary of twenty million dollars, and was thus pleasantly surprised at his simple demeanour and engaging manner. He exhibited a complete absence of the airs and attitudes that are so common in the Indian business world. Later, we visited the Stanford University and met its President, John Hennessey, one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., who had been dubbed ‘the godfather of Silicon Valley’.

On May 27, 2008, Dr. Kalam visited my mother’s home in Meerut. He descended on my humble ancestral home with the usual motorcade and security arrangements, which was incongruous with the sleepy small-town ambience of Meerut outskirts. The entire population of the suburb emerged from their homes and abandoned their work to witness the spectacle of this great man’s visit. He told my mother, “Your son is a good guy.” He ate the kheer she had prepared and happily mingled with my siblings – my sister Seema and brothers, Varun and Salil – and their families. That day, I understood the meaning of Saint Augustine’s saying, “It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.” As my mother later said, “God in human form has visited my house today.”

In 2011, I met Dr A.V. Mohan Rao, Chairman, Spectrum Renewable Energy Private Limited. A doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, in 1970 and with an experience of about three decades at GE in the field of green energy, I found in him the person I wanted to be, but could never become. He set up India’s first bio-CNG plant at Warna, Maharashtra, producing bio-CNG from press-mud, a sugar industry waste. This was, however, not done for profit, as Dr. Mohan Rao was already very rich. He did it to prove the feasibility and usefulness of his design, using his personal money and travelling tirelessly every month from Hyderabad to Warna by road and living at the factory site even in his seventies. This is perhaps an apt example of a Karma Yogi in action.

On January 9, 2011, I got a grandson from Aseem and his wife, Deepa. I named him Agastya, after the Vedic Brahma Rishi. In May 2013, we had a family vacation, facilitated by Aseem’s posting at Wipro, Cologne, Germany. The seven of us, my wife and I, our sons, their wives and our grandson travelled to Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Holland. The seamless and hassle-free travel across national boundaries and the efficiency of the railways and other civic systems was an eye-opener. During this trip, I travelled with Aseem to Munich and wandered around the 1972 Olympic Games infrastructure, now used as a business centre, the BMW Museum being the most prominent amongst the companies present there.

The renowned scientist, Prof. D. Balasubramanian, released on June 30, 2013, my fourth book with Dr. Kalam, ‘Squaring the Circle: Seven Steps to Indian Renaissance’, before an audience of 200 academicians, journalists, scientists, engineers and medical professionals. Prof. Balasubramanian compared the dialogue format of the book to ‘The Phaedrus’, written by Plato as a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, an interlocutor. The event also celebrated the milestone of the book, ‘Wings of Fire’, which has sold in excess of one million copies all over the world, and has been translated into thirteen Indian languages and six foreign languages, namely, Chinese, Russian, Korean, French, Thai and Arabic.

My fifth book with Dr. Kalam was ‘Transcendence: My Spiritual Experiences with Pramukh Swamiji’, based on his 13-year-long fellowship with the Chief of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Sanstha (BAPS), Pramukh Swamiji. On June 20, 2015, I accompanied Dr. Kalam to present the book to Pramukh Swamiji at Sarangpur, Botad, in Gujarat. Little did I know that this was to be my last meeting with Dr. Kalam. On July 26, 2016, he called me over the phone regarding his lecture the next day at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong. This was our last conversation. The next day, I received the shocking news of his death. I flew in a C-130 aircraft carrying Dr. Kalam’s mortal remains from Delhi to Rameswaram. Throughout the journey, my mind kept traveling into the past and the memorable times I had spent with him. How does one come to terms with the loss of someone who has been such an integral part of one’s life? That’s when I decided to live practicing his ideals for the rest of my life.

As a tribute, I wrote a more than 500-page tome on the life of Dr. Kalam, recording all the important events of his life – his thoughts, the feelings he shared with me and the ideals that he lived by. I wrote about the three fundamentals of human life that I learnt from him – imagination, piety and faith in God. These three fundamentals, when practiced diligently, develop in one, righteousness, integrity and courage. Such lives are meant for the good of others and not as self-centred consumption machines.

BAPS literally took over Dr. Kalam’s role in my life and embraced me as his spiritual successor. The book, ‘Transcendence’ turned out to be a modern-day classic, selling a million copies and being translated into six languages, namely, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. Pramukh Swamiji passed away on August 13, 2016. The new spiritual guru of BAPS, Mahant Swamiji, blessed me and the protective umbrella continues to safeguard me.

In 2018, I published ‘A Modern Interpretation of Lokmanya Tilak’s Gita Rahasya’ to bring back the pride among the youth regarding our lost civilization. The book got a grand release in Lucknow at the hands of Yogi Adityanathji and Devendra Fadnavisji, the Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra respectively, to mark the 101st year of the Lokmanya’s famous declaration made in the city, “Swarajya is my birthright and I shall have it!” The Marathi version of the book was released on February 15, 2019, at Pune by Mahant Swamiji Maharaj.

Dr. Soma Raju remains my guide. I have fast friends in Dr. Girish Sahni, a microbial scientist; Dr. Vilas Tonapi, a millet researcher; Dr. S. Chandrasekhar, a renowned plant medicine chemist; and Mahesh Patel, founder of ETG and Afro-India Technology and Societal Transformation Foundation (AITST), working to promote Indian technology to help improve the living conditions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. The TCIL has invited me as an Advisor to the Pan-Africa eNetwork Project – Phase II for the implementation of the e-Vidya Bharati and e-Aarogya Bharati (e-VBAB) Network Project between India and Africa. M.S.R. Prasad is now Director General, Missile Systems, at the DRDO. G. Satheesh Reddy is the Chief of DRDO. S.G. Prasad, who has been with me since 1996 at Care Hospital, Ram Gopal Shukla, Gopi Krishna Reddy and M. Ramakrishna who came into contact with me later, in that order, are my close associates in my societal work. Otherwise working in their own systems, they have given their best support, sometimes following me, sometimes guiding me, but never leaving my side.

I have recently completed ‘A Modern Interpretation of Goswami Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas’ for Sakal Publications and ‘India 3.0: Rising of A Billion People’ for HarperCollins. I plan to write in 2019, ‘Continent on The Other Shore’, aimed at introducing the rise of Africa to the Indian people, and ‘Enduring Edifice for Character’ with Dr. B. Soma Raju, to present the insights of his five decade-long career in medicine and scholarship to the aspiring youth.