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 worked 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 a 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
around. 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 fourth 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 of 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, for
you, we will _have_ to built this developed India। You must proclaim.
Abdul Kalam.
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