At eight, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam ran beside a moving train in Rameswaram, catching bundles of newspapers for his first wages. He grew up to send India’s first satellite into orbit, and spent his last years in classrooms. Along the way, the people who believed in him knew exactly when to step aside.
A boy, a train and a bundle of papers
The train that stopped stopping
In 1939, when Abdul Kalam was eight years old, the Second World War reached even the small island town of Rameswaram. Its first casualty there, as he later wrote, was the train halt. Trains stopped stopping at Rameswaram station. As a result, the newspapers had to be bundled and thrown out from the moving train onto the road between Rameswaram and Dhanushkodi. Someone had to be there to catch them.
A cousin who needed a hand
That someone was a small boy. Kalam’s cousin Samsuddin distributed newspapers in the town, and with the papers now arriving by the roadside, he needed a helping hand. He chose his young cousin. In Kalam’s own words, “Samsuddin helped me earn my first wages.” It was a modest job, and the boy could hardly have known what it would come to mean to him.
Pride that lasted fifty years
Decades later, by then one of India’s most celebrated scientists, Kalam wrote that he could still feel the surge of pride of earning his own money for the first time. Half a century had not dulled it. A bundle of papers caught at the roadside had taught him that his own effort was worth something.
A home with little money and a great deal of wisdom
A father without schooling
Abdul Kalam was born on 15 October 1931 in Rameswaram, in a house of limestone and brick on Mosque Street. His father, Jainulabdeen, had neither much formal education nor much wealth. Yet Kalam described him as a man of great innate wisdom and a true generosity of spirit, who avoided every inessential comfort. His mother, Ashiamma, fed so many people that Kalam could not count them. He was certain, though, that far more outsiders ate at their table than members of the family.
What he took from each
Kalam was precise about his inheritance. From his father, he said, he took honesty and self-discipline. From his mother came faith in goodness and a deep kindness. Neither parent could give him the education he went on to have. What they gave him instead was the character he carried into it.
The teacher who went to the seashore
A bird on the blackboard
The moment that set Kalam’s course came in the fifth standard. His teacher, Sivasubramania Iyer, was explaining how birds fly. As Kalam told students many years later, he drew a bird on the blackboard, with its wings, tail, body and head. At the end of the lesson, he asked the class whether they had understood how a bird flies.
“I did not understand”
Kalam put up his hand and said that he had not. Plenty of teachers would have repeated the explanation, or moved on to the next chapter. Iyer did something else. He told the class he would take them all to the seashore, and he did. There, the children watched sea birds flying in formation, ten and twenty at a time. Then he asked them where a bird’s engine was, and how it was powered.
A decision made on the sand
Kalam remembered that evening for the rest of his life. From that day, he said, he knew that his future lay in the science of flight. What strikes me most is the order of events. First, a fifth-standard boy was honest enough to admit he had not understood. Then a teacher answered that honesty with a better lesson rather than a sharper one. A child who can say “I did not understand” without fear is a child who can still learn, and adults decide whether that sentence is safe to say.
Leaving home to grow
A seagull without a nest
To keep studying, Kalam had to leave Rameswaram for the district headquarters at Ramanathapuram. He asked his father’s permission. His mother hesitated, as any mother might. His father, however, did not. “Abul! I know you have to go away to grow,” he said, and asked whether the seagull does not fly across the sun, alone and without a nest. Then he quoted the poet Khalil Gibran to his wife: “Your children are not your children.”
The hardest kind of support
Letting a child go is a form of support that looks, from the outside, like doing nothing. In fact, it asks a parent to stay close while stepping back, a balance When to Push Your Child and When to Let Go explores at length. Jainulabdeen found it in one sentence, and his son walked out of Rameswaram carrying it.
From Tiruchirappalli to Madras
The road ran on from Ramanathapuram. Kalam graduated from St Joseph’s College in Tiruchirappalli, and then studied aeronautical engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology. That is the MIT campus in Chromepet, which Chennai families still know well. The boy who had watched sea birds at Rameswaram was now learning how aircraft fly.
Two failures, and what came after them
Ninth, when there were eight places
Kalam’s dream at the end of his studies was to fly. He wanted to be a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force. He went for the selection and finished ninth, when there were only eight places. Long afterwards he wrote about it plainly, as a dream that had failed. He did not pretend the disappointment away. Instead, he took up the work that was open to him, first in the defence ministry’s Directorate of Technical Development and Production, and from 1962 as a rocket engineer with INCOSPAR, the committee that grew into ISRO.
A rocket in the Bay of Bengal
By 1979, Kalam was project director of India’s first home-built satellite launch vehicle, the SLV-3. On 10 August that year, the rocket lifted off from Sriharikota. The first stage worked beautifully, he recalled, but the control system in the second stage failed. Instead of reaching orbit, as he put it later, the whole rocket system plunged into the Bay of Bengal.
A leader who took the blame
What happened next stayed with Kalam for decades. Satish Dhawan, who led India’s space programme, took him to the press conference at Sriharikota. There, in front of the country’s reporters, Dhawan announced that he took responsibility for the mission’s failure.
And then handed over the credit
Less than a year later, on 18 July 1980, the SLV-3 flew again, and this time it placed the Rohini satellite in orbit. There was another press conference. This time Dhawan put Kalam in front, to tell the story of the success himself. Kalam told this story more than once in later years, to students and to business schools alike. When failure came, he said, the leader owned it; when success came, the leader gave it to his team.
A dream that waited fifty years
The Air Force dream had not died either. On 8 June 2006, at the Lohegaon air base near Pune, Kalam, then aged 74, took to the air in a Sukhoi-30 fighter for about half an hour. When he landed, he said simply, “My lifelong dream to fly in a fighter aircraft has finally come true.” The young man who finished ninth had waited half a century, and had not stopped wanting it.
Thrive Tip
Kalam’s life turned on a single honest sentence: “I did not understand.” This week, notice what happens in your home when your child says it, about homework or anything else. If it brings a sigh or a lecture, it will soon stop being said. Try answering it the way Sivasubramania Iyer did, with a better explanation, a walk, or a trip to see the thing for real. A child who is safe to admit confusion keeps learning.
From the Missile Man to the classroom
The work most people remember
The rest of Kalam’s career is the part most Indians know. He went on to lead India’s guided missile programme, which developed the Agni and Prithvi missiles and earned him the name “Missile Man”. He served as scientific adviser to the defence minister, and in 1997 he received the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian honour. On 25 July 2002, he became the eleventh President of India, and served a five-year term.
A professor before he was a President
Yet one role had begun just before the Presidency, and it outlasted it. In 2001, he joined Anna University in Chennai as a professor. There, according to a later account, students waited outside his lodgings every morning to walk with him and ask him questions. He let them. A scientist who had once needed a teacher to take him to the seashore now spent his mornings walking beside the young.
The last lesson
He never really stopped teaching. On 27 July 2015, Kalam travelled to Shillong to speak to students at the Indian Institute of Management. Minutes into his lecture, he collapsed and died. He was 83. The man who had begun his working life at a roadside in Rameswaram ended it in front of a room full of students.
What the newspaper boy carried
The people who stepped aside
Look back over Kalam’s story and a pattern appears in the adults around him. His cousin trusted a small boy with real work. A teacher answered his confusion with a walk to the sea. His father let him go, though it cost the family something. And Satish Dhawan took a failure on himself, then handed Kalam the success. Each of them believed in him, and then did something harder: they stepped aside so that he could grow.
What was drawn out of him
None of them poured Kalam’s gifts into him. They noticed what was already there and made room for it, which is the argument at the heart of this site’s essay on what it truly means to educate a child. Abdul Kalam supplied the rest himself: the pride in honest work, the honesty to say he did not understand, and the persistence to want something for fifty years. The newspapers he caught at eight were the first things anyone ever trusted him with. He spent the rest of his life making sure that young people were trusted too.
