Indeed, for the rest of my life, like millions of youth of India, ‘Kalam sir’ will never cease to exist. Through his lectures and dreams, he continues to inspire us, ignite our imaginations and push us far beyond the boundaries our minds had perceived for our potential.

As I conclude, I would like to share a few words I came across while reading this book. A poem by the great Mizo poet Rukunga, titled ‘The World of Parting’, was sung to Dr Kalam by a group of children in Mizoram in 2005:

‘Now we part with a heavy and painful heart,

The world we live in, has been destined for parting,

By the heavenly father above . . .’

New Delhi

Srijan Pal Singh

November 2015

Failure Is a Teacher

‘Dr Kalam always said success was something to be celebrated, but he also believed that failure was something that you must concentrate all your energies on resolving. He believed that failure was a teacher. This was the kind of philosophical approach he brought to problem-solving.’

G. Madhavan Nair, Former Chairman, ISRO

A Lost Scholarship

Address to and interaction with the students of Delhi Public School, Aligarh

2 November 2010

Let me tell you about Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was a genius well ahead of his time. Born and raised in Erode, Tamil Nadu, he first encountered formal mathematics at the age of ten. He demonstrated a natural ability for mathematics and was given books on advanced trigonometry by S.L. Loney. He mastered these books by age thirteen and even discovered theorems of his own. He demonstrated unusual mathematical skills at school, winning many awards. By the age of seventeen, Ramanujan was conducting his own mathematical research on Bernoulli numbers and the Euler-Mascheroni constant. He received a scholarship to study at Government College in Kumbakonam. However, he failed his non-mathematical coursework and lost his scholarship.

Ramanujan lived only for thirty-two years and did not have formal higher education or a means of living. Yet, his inexhaustible spirit and love for his subject made him contribute to the treasure houses of mathematical research, particularly in number theory. Some of his theories are still under serious study and engaging all the available efforts of the world’s mathematicians to establish formal proofs.

Ramanujan was a unique Indian genius who melted the heart of the outstanding, if hardened, Cambridge mathematician Prof. G.H. Hardy. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that it was Prof. Hardy who discovered Ramanujan’s genius for the world. Once, Prof. Hardy rated various geniuses on a scale of hundred. While most of the mathematicians got a rating of around thirty with some rare exceptions reaching to sixty, Ramanujan got a rating of hundred. There cannot be any better tribute to either Ramanujan or to Indian culture.