Wings of Fire: An Autobiography (Digital Exclusive Edition)

by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

We are all born with a divine fire in us. Our efforts should be to give wings to this fire and fill the world with the glow of its goodness.

whole of the manifest divine Being. So why be afraid of difficulties, sufferings and problems? When troubles come, try to understand the relevance of your sufferings. Adversity always presents opportunities for introspection."

Every child is born, with some inherited characteristics, into a specific socio-economic and emotional environment, and trained in certain ways by figures of authority.

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts."

"To succeed in life and achieve results, you must understand and master three mighty forces— desire, belief, and expectation."

"Let not thy winged days be spent in vain. When once gone no gold can buy them back again."

"He who knows others is learned, but the wise one is the one who knows himself. Learning without wisdom is of no use."

Desire, when it stems from the heart and spirit, when it is pure and intense, possesses awesome electromagnetic energy. This energy is released into the ether each night, as the mind falls into the sleep state. Each morning it returns to the conscious state reinforced with the cosmic currents. That which has been imaged will surely and certainly be manifested. You can rely, young man, upon this ageless promise as surely as you can rely upon the eternally unbroken promise of sunrise... and of Spring. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear—How true!

I was quick to see at least a metaphorical connection between a hovercraft and an aircraft. After all, the Wright Brothers made the first aeroplane after fixing bicycles for seven years!

once your mind stretches to a new level it never goes back to its original dimension.

I would enter the assembly shop leaving my other problems outside, just as my father used to enter the mosque for prayer, leaving his shoes outside.

I was almost immediately struck by Dr Sarabhai's warmth. There was none of the arrogance or the patronising attitudes which interviewers usually display when talking to a young and vulnerable candidate. Dr Sarabhai's questions did not probe my existing knowledge or skills; rather they were an exploration of the possibilities I was filled with. He was looking at me as if in reference to a larger whole. The entire encounter seemed to me a total moment of truth, in which my dream was enveloped by the larger dream of a bigger person.

One of the important functions of prayer, I believe, is to act as a stimulus to creative ideas. Within the mind are all the resources required for successful living. Ideas are present in the consciousness, which when released and given scope to grow and take shape, can lead to successful events. God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us to tap and develop these powers.

What makes life in Indian organizations difficult is the widespread prevalence of this very contemptuous pride. It stops us from listening to our juniors, subordinates and people down the line. You cannot expect a person to deliver results if you humiliate him, nor can you expect him to be creative if you abuse him or despise him. The line between firmness and harshness, between strong leadership and bullying, between discipline and vindictiveness is very fine, but it has to be drawn.

As soon as I returned from NASA, India's first rocket launch took place on 21 November 1963. It was a sounding rocket, called Nike-Apache, made at NASA.

Sounding rockets are normally used for probing the near-earth environment, including the upper regions of the atmosphere. While they can carry a variety of scientific payloads to a range of altitudes, they cannot impart the final velocity needed to orbit the payload. On the other hand, a launch vehicle is designed to inject into orbit a technological payload or satellite. The final stage of a launch vehicle provides the necessary velocity for a satellite to enter an orbit. This is a complex operation requiring on-board guidance and control systems. A missile, though belonging to the same family, is a still more complex system. In addition to the large terminal velocity and onboard guidance and control, it must have the capability to home onto targets. When the targets are fast-moving and capable of manoeuvring, a missile is also required to carry out target-tracking functions.

Very many individuals with myopic vision questioned the relevance of space activities in a newly independent nation which was finding it difficult to feed its population. But neither Prime Minister Nehru nor Prof. Sarabhai had any ambiguity of purpose. Their vision was very clear: if Indians were to play a meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems. They had no intention of using it merely as a means to display our might.

"Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger,"—those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

I was aware that the best work required more ability than I possessed and therefore I needed help that only God could give me. I made a true estimate of my own ability, then raised it by 50 per cent and put myself in God's hands. In this partnership, I have always received all the power I needed, and in fact have actually felt it flowing through me. Today, I can affirm that the kingdom of God is within you in the form of this power, to help achieve your goals and realise your dreams.

it was a quotation from George Bernard Shaw. The gist of the quote was that all reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Only a few unreasonable ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All progress in the world depends on these unreasonable men and their innovative and often non-conformist actions.

For all your days prepare And meet them ever alike When you are the anvil, bear - When you are the hammer, strike.

How good is a leader? No better than his people and their commitment and participation in the project as full partners!

I consider Prof. Sarabhai as the Mahatma Gandhi of Indian science —generating leadership qualities in his team and inspiring them through both ideas and example.

My day would start with a stroll of about 2 km around the lodge I was living in. I used to prepare a general schedule during my morning walk, and emphasize two or three things I would definitely like to accomplish during the day, including at least one thing that would help achieve long-term goals.

In all, the results accomplished were outstanding, but we still had a long way to go. I recalled a school poem: Don't worry and fret, fainthearted, The chances have just begun, For the best jobs haven't been started, The best work hasn't been done.

If you want to leave your footprints On the sands of time Do not drag your feet.

Most of the time, communication gets confused with conversation. In fact, the two are distinctly different. I was (and am) a terrible conversationalist but consider myself a good communicator. A conversation full of pleasantries is most often devoid of any useful information, whereas communication is meant only for the exchange of information. It is very important to realise that communication is a two-party affair which aims at passing on or receiving a specific piece of information.

The sovereign way to personal freedom is to help determine the forces that determine you. Be active! Take on responsibility! Work for the things you believe in. If you do not, you are surrendering your fate to others. The historian Edith Hamilton wrote of ancient Greece, "When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again". The truth is that there is a great deal that most of us can individually do to increase our freedom. We can combat the forces that threaten to oppress us. We can fortify ourselves with the qualities and conditions that promote individual freedom. In doing so, we help to create a stronger organization, capable of achieving unprecedented goals.

I had the privilege of spending a great deal of time with Prof. Dhawan. He could hold the listener enthralled because of the logical, intellectual acumen he could bring to bear on his analysis of any subject. He had an unusual combination of degrees—a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics, an M.A. in English Literature, B.E. in Mechanical Engineering, M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering followed by a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in USA.

Gradually, I became aware of the difference between science and technology, between research and development. Science is inherently open-ended and exploratory. Development is a closed loop. Mistakes are imperative in development and are made every day, but each mistake is used for modification, up gradation or betterment. Probably, the Creator created engineers to make scientists achieve more. For each time scientists come up with a thoroughly researched and fully comprehended solution, engineers show them yet another lumineu, yet one more possibility. I cautioned my team against becoming scientists. Science is a passion—a never-ending voyage into promises and possibilities. We had only limited time and limited funds. Our making the SLV depended upon our awareness of our own limits. I preferred existing workable solutions which would be the best options. Nothing that is new comes into time-bound projects without its own problems. In my opinion, a project leader should always work with proven technologies in most of the systems as far as possible and experiment only from multiple resources.

We learned the hard way that the biggest problem of project management is to achieve a regular and efficient interfacing between the different individuals and work centres. Hard work can be set at nought in the absence of proper coordination.

I asked this of von Braun who had become a cult figure in the States after creating the Saturn rocket in the Apollo mission which put man on the moon. "America is a country of great possibilities, but they look upon everything un-American with suspicion and contempt. They suffer from a deep-rooted NIH—Not Invented Here—complex and look down on alien technologies. If you want to do anything in rocketry, do it yourself," von Braun advised me. He commented, "SLV-3 is a genuine Indian design and you may be having your own troubles. But you should always remember that we don't just build on successes, we also build on failures."

"Total commitment is not just hard work, it is total involvement. Building a rock wall is back-breaking work. There are some people who build rock walls all their lives. And when they die, there are miles of walls, mute testimonials to how hard those people had worked." He continued, "But there are other men who while placing one rock on top of another have a vision in their minds, a goal. It may be a terrace with roses climbing over the rock walls and chairs set out for lazy summer days. Or the rock wall may enclose an apple orchard or mark a boundary. When they finish, they have more than a wall. It is the goal that makes the difference. Do not make rocketry your profession, your livelihood—make it your religion, your mission." Did I see something of Prof. Vikram Sarabhai in von Braun? It made me happy to think so.

Total commitment is the common denominator among all successful men and women. Are you able to manage the stresses you encounter in your life? The difference between an energetic and a confused person is the difference in the way their minds handle their experiences. Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success. All of us carry some sort of a super-intelligence within us.

Flow is a by-product of controlled creativity. The first requirement is to work as hard as you can at something that presents a challenge and is approved by your heart. It may not be an overwhelming challenge, but one that stretches you a little, something that makes you realise that you are performing a task better today than you did yesterday, or the last time you tried to do it. Another prerequisite for being in flow is the availability of a significant span of uninterrupted time. In my experience, it is difficult to switch into the flow state in less than half an hour. And it is almost impossible if you are bedevilled by interruptions.

Further in-depth analysis of the second-stage failure identified the reason as the draining of a good amount of Red Fuming Nitric Acid (RFNA) used as the oxidizer for the fuel power at that stage. Consequently, when the control force was demanded, only fuel was injected resulting in zero force. 'A solenoid valve in the oxidizer tank remaining open due to contamination after the first command at T-8 minutes', was identified as the reason for the draining of RFNA.

The pursuit of science is a combination of great elation and great despair. I went over many such episodes in my mind. Johannes Kepler, whose three orbital laws form the basis of space research, took nearly 17 years after formulating the two laws about planetary motion around the sun, to enunciate his third law which gives the relation between the size of the elliptical orbit and the length of time it takes for the planet to go around the sun. How many failures and frustrations must he have gone through? The idea that man could land on the moon, developed by the Russian mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was realised after nearly four decades—and by the United States, at that. Prof. Chandrasekhar had to wait nearly 50 years before receiving the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the 'Chandrasekhar Limit', a discovery made while he was a graduate student at Cambridge in the 1930s. If his work had been recognized then, it could have led to the discovery of the Black Hole decades earlier. How many failures must von Braun have gone through before his Saturn launch vehicle put man on the moon? These thoughts helped to give me the ability to withstand apparently irreversible setbacks.

Within the next two minutes, Rohini was set into motion in a low earth orbit. I spoke, in the midst of screeching decibels, the most important words I had ever uttered in my life, "Mission Director calling all stations. Stand by for an important announcement. All stages performed to mission requirements. The fourth stage apogee motor has given the required velocity to put Rohini Satellite into orbit". There were happy cries everywhere. When I came out of the Block House, I was lifted onto the shoulders of my jubilant colleagues and carried in a procession.

My hosts at the Nehru Centre were kind enough to arrange my ticket to Delhi, but I had a small problem. It had to do with my clothes. I was dressed casually as is my wont and wearing slippers—not, by any standards of etiquette, suitable attire in which to meet the Prime Minister! When I told Prof. Dhawan about this problem, he told me not to worry about my dress. "You are beautifully clothed in your success," he quipped.

I still recall quoting Ronald Fischer at one of the meetings, "The sweetness we taste in a piece of sugar is neither a property of the sugar nor a property of ourselves. We are producing the experience of sweetness in the process of interacting with the sugar."

The result of the forces I mentioned above, is motive. It is a force which is internal to the individual and forms the basis of his behaviour in the work environment. In my experience, most people possess a strong inner drive for growth, competence, and self-actualization. The problem, however, has been the lack of a work environment that stimulates and permits them to give full expression to this drive. Leaders can create a high productivity level by providing the appropriate organizational structure and job design, and by acknowledging and appreciating hard work.

I met my team members who were in a state of shock and sorrow. I shared my SLV-3 experience with them. "I lost my launch vehicle in the sea but recovered successfully. Your missile is in -front of you. In fact you have lost nothing but a few weeks of rework." This shook them out of their immobility and the entire team went back to retrieve the subsystems and re-charge them.

"Be more dedicated to making solid achievements than in running after swift but synthetic happiness," was my advice to the young audience.

Sun Tzu ruminated over 2000 years ago that what matters in war is not decimating the enemy army physically but breaking his will so as to make him concede defeat in the mind, he seems to have visualized the domination of technology in the twentieth century theatres of war.

Take this from me, the more decisions you can make avoiding external pressures, which will constantly try to manipulate you, the better your life will be, the better your society will become. In fact the entire nation will benefit by having strong, inward-looking people as their leaders. A citizenry that thinks for itself, a country of people who trust themselves as individuals, would be virtually immune to manipulation by any unscrupulous authority or vested interest. Your willingness to use your own inner resources to invest in your life, especially your imagination, will bring you success. When you address a task from your own uniquely individual standpoint, you become a whole person.

One feature common to all three establishments, is that the scientists and technologists were never afraid of failures during their missions. Failures contain within themselves the seeds of further learning which can lead to better technology, and eventually, to a high level of success.