How Growmg up APJ ABDUL KALAM
Kalam's father was widely respected as a religious man in his small community. He believed in the inherent goodness of all religions. Not surprisingly, his close friend was the high priest of Rameshwaram temple. Kalam claims that he inherited honesty and self-discipline from his father and faith in goodness and deep kindness from his mother. He describes how his father taught him that true reality was to be found in the spiritual realm and how knowledge could be gained only through inner experience.
Abdul Kalarii had three close childhood friends. They were all orthodox Hindu Brahmins. One of them Was the son of the high priest of the Rameshwaram temple. Remarkably, their religious differences never came in the way of their friendship.
Among the bedtime stories that his mother and grandmother told him, were tales from the Ramayana. So it was a truly secular upbringing that Kalam enjoyed. But one incident that happened at the Rameshwaram Elementary School was rather upsetting to him. He was studying in the fifth standard then.
One day a new teacher came to the class. Kalam and his friend, Ramanadha Sastri, the priest's son, always sat together in the front row. Seeing the Muslim boy with his trademark cap sitting next to the Brahmin boy, the teacher was offended and asked Kalam to go sit in the back row. Kalam obeyed the teacher's instructions, but when the two friends returned home, they told their parents about it.
The priest, Lakshmana Sastri, summoned the teacher and cautioned him not to spread communal
intolerance in the minds of innocent
children. The teacher was made to apologize to the children as well. The chastened teacher mended his ways thereafter.
But it was a different experience he had with his science teacher, Sivasubramania Iyer. Though an orthodox Brahmin, he was something of a rebel. One day he invited Kalam to his house for a meal. His wife was horrified at the thought of a Muslim boy dining in her ritually purified kitchen and refused to serve Kalam.
So Iyer serve his student himself and sat down with him to eat his meal. When Kalam was leaving, he invited him again to his house the next weekend. He told Kalam that once they had decided to change the system, one should learn to confront such problems. The next time he went to Iyer's house, he was delightfully surprised to see the teacher's wife serve food in the kitchen without any qualms.
After leaving the elementary school, Kalam was enrolled at the'Schwartz High Schooi, Ramanathapuram. Here he found a great mentor and teacher in Iyadurai Solomon who raised his self-esteem and convinced him that if he had faith in himself, he could change his own destiny. At Schwartz, his mathematics teacher who had once caned him for entering another class mistakenly, predicted that Kalam would bring glory to his school and teachers, when he scored full marks in mathematics.
By the time he left the school, he had become a self-confident boy who was determined to succeed in life.
After completing his schooling at Schwartz. he went to T‘iruchirapalli for his higher studies. By this time he had matured into a self-confident boy who was determined to succeed in life. He joined St. Joseph's College in Tiruchi for a B.Sc. degree in Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry in 1950. Kalam wanted to do aeronautical engineering after finishing his B.Sc. He was selected for admission at the Madras Institute of Technology but couldn't pay the admission fee as his father was not in a position to shell out the princely sum of one thousand rupees.
