Failure is a Teacher
A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM
Failure is a Teacher
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Foreword
Failure Is a Teacher
A Lost Scholarship
The Crash
Believe in Yourself
Do Your Best and Leave the Rest
Under Pressure
A Star is Born
A Letter to You
A Mother’s Dream
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
Failure is a Teacher
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (1931–2015) was one of India’s most distinguished scientists. He was responsible for the development of India’s first satellite launch vehicle, the SLV-3, and the development and operationalization of strategic missiles. As chairman of the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council, he pioneered India Vision 2020, a road map for transforming India into an economically developed nation by 2020, focusing on Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) as a development system for countrywide implementation.
Kalam held various positions in the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Defence Research and Development Organisation and became principal scientific adviser to the Government of India, holding the rank of a cabinet minister.
The President of India between 2002 and 2007, Kalam was awarded honorary doctorates from thirty-eight universities and the country’s three highest civilian honours—Padma Bhushan (1981), Padma Vibhushan (1990) and Bharat Ratna (1997).
Kalam authored fifteen books on a variety of topics that have been translated into many languages across the world. His most significant works are Wings of Fire, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, Target 3 Billion and Beyond 2020: A Vision for Tomorrow’s India.
Also in Penguin by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Mission India: A Vision for Indian Youth
Reignited: Scientific Pathways to a Brighter Future
Foreword
It is a difficult and rare honour for me to write a foreword for a book authored by my guru, the teacher of teachers—Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (1931-2015). His ideas are far too vast and his vision too deep to be summarized or qualified in a small stretch of pages by this humble student of his. However, writing these words brings a wave of memories tinged with colours of intense emotion to my heart and mind. I am reminded of all those thoughts that my guru sparked and how each thought made me learn, evolve and transform. It makes me so proud that I shared many years, working so closely, with one of the greatest human beings who ever lived.
My journey with Dr Kalam began in September 2008, when I first saw him as a teacher. During my second year at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, he was my professor for a course on nation building. On my final day with him, 27 July 2015, he remained a teacher, this time at the other end of the country, as a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, conducting taking a course on creating a liveable planet.
Between 2008 and 2015, I have seen the infinity of his wisdom and the sensitivity and humility with which he lived his life. I have attended countless lectures of his, travelled extensively with him, listened to the numerous thoughts he’s shared. I have shared walks and lunch-and-dinner conversations, and heard him call me a student, a friend, a co-author and often just ‘funny guy’. In each of these associations, he ignited new thoughts, encouraged new actions and taught me that all failures, howsoever immense, are only temporary.
Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s greatest legacy is the generations of Indians he has inspired to dream, excel and rise. The story of a newspaper boy rising to become a space scientist, rocket engineer, missile expert and eventually the eleventh President of India has given his countrymen the hope that hard work and talent do pay off in the long run. It has also shown millions of Indians that the choices and effort one makes in life can conquer any odds or disadvantages of birth. I remember a professor in Australia once introducing Dr Kalam to his class saying, ‘Even in his eighties, for the youth of India, he commands the respect of a sage and the charisma of a rock star.’
Dr Kalam had a special affinity with the youth. I remember him saying many a time, ‘Up to the age of seventeen, the mind of a youth can be shaped. Beyond that it becomes difficult.’ Hence, he dedicated a large part of his time, during his presidency and after that as well, to shaping the mind of the Indian youth. He wanted them to have three traits—righteousness, creativity and courage. He even gave it the form of an equation, which he called the ‘Knowledge Equation’, where knowledge is defined as the sum of these three traits. And of course, he famously said, ‘Knowledge makes you great’. With four simple words, he outlined the pathway to greatness. Such was the simplicity of Dr Kalam.
I was a part of the creation of many of Dr Kalam’s speeches covered in this book. Each piece was intensely researched, composed, rejected and then re-composed before it came to its final form. Dr Kalam would sit across the table with the computer, as the text of the speech was projected on a wall of the small office. We would debate every single idea and thought that would go into the speech. Version after version would come up and in some cases, we’d have more than twenty versions of a speech!
Dr Kalam was very particular about his audience and he would always ask, ‘Is this lecture going to inspire all the listeners? Will it be interesting for the people present?’ These carefully selected words would then be delivered with craftsmanship by Dr Kalam, igniting the audience’s dreams every single time. He had a way of engaging his listeners and making them all feel important and capable of contributing to a cause rather than merely being the audience at a speech.
Each chapter in this book brings alive a precious memory for me. The extract titled ‘Birth of a World Leader’ captures how Dr Kalam saw the life of Gandhiji in South Africa, and was amongst the first lectures I heard him give back in 2008, when I was a student. He told me about his experience in Kibutu in Arunachal Pradesh (in the extract ‘Jai Hind’) during one of our dinner discussions in Raj Bhawan, Itanagar, while looking on at the Himalayas. This became a prominent story in one of the books we co-authored—Target 3 Billion.
The extract ‘Kidney Chain’ reminds me of the exact manner of how Dr Kalam reacted and how deeply he was touched when he learned that the well-known industrialist Shri Kochouseph Chittilappilly donated his kidney to an unknown ailing driver. The conversation between Dr Kalam and Shri Chittilappilly indeed had a significant impact, not only on both Dr Kalam and Chittilappilly but also on everybody else who learned about this incident through Dr Kalam’s lectures.
Most poignantly, the hymn ‘Righteousness of the Heart’ in the extract ‘Happiness of the Whole’ were the exact words Dr Kalam was about to say standing at the lectern at IIM Shillong when he left us.
People often ask me now, ‘Was Dr Kalam ever worried about the state of the nation? Was he worried about how corruption hampers growth or how pollution degrades human life?’ The answer is an unequivocal ‘Yes, of course.’ But at the same time, he was a perennial optimist and had an unflinching faith in the ability and intent of the Indian youth to overcome every single problem the nation faces. He trusted the youth to think of fresh ideas and generate innovations and create a brand of integrity in all their actions.
This book, a collection of his thoughts, largely focused on the youth and articulated at different moments of his life, is indeed an important milestone in motivating and energizing the youth to the position to which they truly belong—as the foremost nation builders.
Today, Dr Kalam is not with us in a mortal form. But great personalities never perish; they just transform from human form to powerful ideas. Dr Kalam as an idea is and will always be alive with us, and My India: Ideas for the Future is a commendable effort towards it. I commend Puffin India and the team for their diligence in bringing this book out, despite the difficult times following Dr Kalam’s sudden passing.
I am confident that this book will help young readers understand Dr Kalam much better and give them the confidence, motivation and courage to continue on the path he showed us all. I am also confident that they will work towards fulfilling many of Dr Kalam’s yet-to-be completed dreams, which include creating an economically developed India by 2020, ensuring that rural areas develop, bringing transparency and integrity in all walks of life and establishing India as a knowledge superpower.
In August 2015, a week after Dr Kalam’s sudden demise, I was in Chennai, where I was talking to a small group of children from a government school. I asked them, ‘When you grow up, what would you like to be?’ They all spontaneously raised their hands and cheered, ‘Kalam!’ Such was his effect on the youth of this nation.
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.
Ramanujan’s works cover vast areas including prime numbers, hyper-geometric series, modular functions, elliptic functions, mock theta functions, even magic squares, apart from serious works on the geometry of ellipses, squaring the circle, etc. One of the tributes to Ramanujan states that ‘every integer is a personal friend of Ramanujan’s. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918.
Ramanujan used to say, ‘An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God.’ For him, the understanding of numbers was a process of spiritual revelation and connection. In his investigations into pure mathematics, he drew extraordinary conclusions that mystified his colleagues, but were eventually proven to be right. He opened a universe of theory that till today is reaping applications. The landscape of the infinite was to Ramanujan a reality of both mathematics and spirit and his love for numbers led him to number theory. Despite chronic health problems, he was consumed by mathematics throughout his short life without failure ever deterring him.
The Crash
Public lecture and interaction at the DMC Auditorium, Darbhanga
23 December 2012
When you set out on difficult missions, they often bring difficult challenges that may sometimes produce temporary setbacks. The test of humanity is accepting failure and continuing to try until you achieve success. Managing failure is the ability that is the essence of leadership. Let me now share an experience in this regard from my professional life.
When I think of Prof. Satish Dhawan, many instances of his leadership come to mind. I was project director for the first experimental launch of SLV-3. On 10 August 1979, the vehicle took off beautifully at T-0 and the first stage went as predicted. The second stage was initiated but, within a few seconds, we witnessed the vehicle tumbling and we lost the flight in the Bay of Bengal. It was 8 a.m. The whole team—despite having worked all through the previous day and night, in addition to many preceding days of hard work—was busy collecting data and trying to establish the reason for the failure. Meanwhile, I was called by Prof. Dhawan to attend a press conference. Before the press conference, Prof. Dhawan told me that he was going to handle the situation, but that I should be present along with many of the senior scientists and technologists.
The room was full of people from the media and an atmosphere of gloom was prevalent. Many questions were asked, some very powerful and thoughtful and, of course, there was criticism. Prof. Dhawan announced, ‘Friends, today we had the experimental launch of SLV-3 to put the Rohini satellite in orbit. It was a partial success. It is our first mission with multiple technologies in a launch vehicle. We have proved many technologies in this launch but we still have to prove some more. We have stumbled but not fallen flat. Above all, I realize my team members have to be given all the technological support for the next mission to succeed.’ Subsequently, a failure analysis board established the cause and we proceeded with the preparations for the second launch.