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Abdul Kalam - "I have three visions for India"
Wednesday, November 18, 1998
> An excerpt from APJ Abdul Kalam's editorial
>
> I have three visions for India. In 3000 years of our history, people from
> all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered
> our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Portuguese, the
> British,
> the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was
> ours.
>
> Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered
> anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and
> tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the
> freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I
> believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started
> the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and
> nurture and built on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
>
> My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a
> developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We
> are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10
> percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling, our
> achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the
> self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self reliant and
> self assured. Isn't this right?
>
> I have third vision. The india must stand up to the world. Because I
> believe that unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us.
> Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military
> power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand.
>
> My good fortune was to have work with three great minds. Dr. Vikram
> Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded
> him,
> and Dr. Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have
> worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great
> opportunity of my life. I see four milestones in my career:
>
> ONE: Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the
> project director for India?s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one
> that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my
> life of Scientist.
>
> TWO: After my ISRO years, i joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of
> India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its
> mission requirements in 1994.
>
> THREE: The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership
> in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss.
> The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving
> to
> the world that India can make it. That we are no longer a developing
> nation
> but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we
> have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have
> developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon.
>
> FOUR: One day an orthopaedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical
> Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so
> light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There
> were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing
> over
> three kgs. each, dragging their feet round. He said to me: Please remove
> the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor Reaction
> Orthosis 300 gram calipers and took them to the orthopaedic center. The
> children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. load
> on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in
> their
> eyes. That was my forth bliss!
>
> Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to
> recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation.
> We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them.
> Why? We are the second largest producer of wheat in the world. We are the
> second largest producers in rice. We are the first in milk production. We
> are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
>
> Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a
> self-sustaining, self driving unit. There are millions of such
> achievements
> but our media is only obsessed with the bad news and failures and
> disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper.
> It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had
> taken
> place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the
> picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert
> land into an orchid and a granary.
>
> It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details
> of
> killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among
> other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.
> Why are we so negative?
>
> Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things?
> we want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.
> Why this obsession with everything imported? Do we not realize that
> self-respect comes with self-reliance?
>
> I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me
> for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is: She replied: I
> want
> to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to built this
> developed India. You must proclaim.
>
> Abdul Kalam
>
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