By K Datta, IANS
As the charges and countercharges flew thick and fast and the muck-raking intensified in the weeks before India elected a new president, one was left wondering if it was worth going through all the mud-slinging for the right of tenancy of a piece of real estate which is a relic of a colonial past the republic has left behind.
If only we could have found some way to enable Avul Pakir Jainalabdin Abdul Kalam to stay on, as most of us Indians – barring the contentious politicians who could not persuade themselves to see eye to eye – wanted, we would have been spared the unbecoming and avoidable acrimony.
Even those who criticised Kalam for signing the Bihar assembly proclamation in the middle of night while he was on a state visit in Moscow no longer hold the aberration against the man, such is the hold he has gained on our minds during his presidency. It was all part of a learning process, or something to that effect, Kalam himself is reported to have said later.
This “people’s president”, yours and mine, will be remembered for the way he struck a rapport with all those he came in contact with, not excluding the fifty thousand or so children he went out to meet and whose minds he kept trying to ignite, whom he exhorted to think big, for “thinking small is a crime”.
There was a time Mahatma Gandhi saw in the ‘charkha’ (spinning wheel) the way to economic emancipation of the masses. Kalam, the “missile man”, a Bharat Ratna and principal scientific advisor to the prime minister before he was sworn in as the 11th president July 25, 2002, sees science and technology as the means to achieve his dream of making India a developed country by 2020.
After he left Rashtrapati Bhavan, lugging the two suitcases he entered the place with, and honourably clearing any personal expenditure bills that might have been standing against his name, will anybody care to carry on his mission of igniting minds with the same infectious enthusiasm and passion?
Not to worry. If no one else does, then he has created enough goodwill among the masses to see that his ideas will be remembered, not just his well-oiled silver locks. There is at least one school this writer knows of in Delhi which has laid out a herbal garden, something dear to the heart of the Kalam.
The lecture theatres of various far-off universities will be the scenes of action of the scientist ex-President. No grudging him that pleasure, for it will keep the workaholic Kalam happy. But why couldn’t the babus at the government’s estate office find him a place in the Asiad Village he once was part of and where he spent countless happy mornings at the Delhi Development Authority’s sprawling sports complex in the company of a nature-loving walking group, lovingly feeding birds in pauses during their marches? Those birds at the Asiad Village and the Panwars, Prabhakars and Bajajs and others of the walking group would have preferred to see Kalam among them once again.
Why allot Kalam a place in the Lutyens Zone of the capital? How thoughtless and inappropriate to set the simple boatman’s son from Tamil Nadu among the snooty sahib log, ministers and others who make it such a prestige issue to flaunt an address in the exclusive elitist zone!
After all, all that the man had asked for was a floor where he could keep the precious books he is in love with. He had not hoarded any gifts, for he did not accept them in the first place.
(K. Datta can be contacted at : [email protected])