the year in which Kalpana Chawla left India for the USA to pursue her master’s in aerospace engineering. In that very year, J.R.D. Tata did something special that inspired millions of Indians. He piloted the flight commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of India’s very first commercial flight, which he had himself flown in 1932 from Karachi to Mumbai. In 1932, that inaugural mail flight had launched India’s civil aviation industry but at that time J.R.D. was a strapping young man. Now, in 1982, J.R.D. Tata was seventy-eight years of age, and yet he was determined to go ahead and pilot the
...more
