(An interesting article got through chain mail)
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalaam's speech in Hyderabad
I have three visions for India
In 3000 years of our history people from all over the world have come and
invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander
onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British,
the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was
ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered
anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and
tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the
freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I
believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started
the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and
nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a
developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We
are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent
growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our
achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the
self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and
self-assured. Isn't this incorrect?
I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up with our own STRENGTH to the
world. Because I believe that unless India stands up to the world, no one
will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not
only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go
hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds.
Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who
succeeded him and Dr. Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was
lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the
great opportunity of my life.
I see four milestones in my career:
ONE: Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the
project director for India's first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one
that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life
of Scientist.
TWO: After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part Of
India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its
mission requirements in 1994.
THREE: The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership
in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss.
The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving
to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing
nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian.The fact
that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure,for which we have
developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon.
FOUR: One day an orthopaedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical
Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so
light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There
were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic callipers weighing
over three Kg each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please
remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor
reaction Orthosis 300 gram callipers and took them to the orthopaedic
centre. The children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a
three kg. load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents
had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!
Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to
recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation.
We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them.
Why? We are number one in the world in milk production. We are number one
in Remote Sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has
transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit.
There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in
the bad news and failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the
day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place.
The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper
had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed
his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring
picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings,
bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other
news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why
are we so NEGATIVE?
Another question:
Why are we, as a nation, so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign
TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.
Why this obsession with everything imported?
Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?
I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me
for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is: She replied: I
want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build
this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed
nation; it is a highly developed nation.
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