A. P. J. Abdul Kalam missed becoming a fighter pilot by one place
Only eight Indian Air Force pilot places were on offer, and the young engineer Abdul Kalam finished ninth. Missing his dream pushed him into rocketry instead. Decades later the newspaper boy from a poor island family had led India's first satellite launch and become the country's first scientist president.
Kalam was born in 1931 in Rameswaram, a pilgrimage town on Pamban Island in what is now Tamil Nadu. His father, a boat owner and imam at a local mosque, ferried Hindu pilgrims along the coast. The family had once been prosperous traders, but after the Pamban Bridge linked the island to the mainland in 1914, their ferrying and trading business collapsed, and by the time Kalam was born they were poor. As a boy he delivered newspapers to help out. Teachers remembered an average student who was bright, hardworking and willing to spend hours on mathematics.
Pressure shaped him early. Studying aerospace engineering in Madras, he was warned by the dean that he would lose his scholarship unless a lagging class project was finished within three days. He delivered, and the dean later admitted he had been testing him with a deliberately harsh deadline. After graduating in 1960, Kalam joined India's defence research organisation, working on small hovercraft, then moved to space research under Vikram Sarabhai.
At the Indian Space Research Organisation from 1969, he directed India's first satellite launch vehicle, which placed the Rohini satellite in orbit in July 1980. He later led a programme to build several missiles at once rather than one after another, earning the nickname Missile Man of India. With the cardiologist Bhupathiraju Somaraju he also developed a low-cost heart stent in 1998, and in 2012 a tablet computer for rural health workers.
In 2002 he was elected India's 11th president with backing from both the ruling alliance and the main opposition, winning 922,884 electoral votes. No scientist had held the office before, nor any unmarried man, and people called him the People's President. Afterwards he returned to teaching and writing. He collapsed while giving a lecture at IIM Shillong and died on 27 July 2015, aged 83.
Source: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
