Great Books Born out of Great Minds by Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

 Great Books Born out of Great Minds by Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

About the Author

Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s full name is Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam. He was the recipient of the prestigious award ‘Bharat Ratna’. He was the eleventh President of India. He was born and brought up in Rameshwaram in Tamil Naidu. Before becoming the President of India, he worked as an aerospace engineer with Defence Reseach and Development Organisation (DRDO and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) He is popularly known as the ‘Missile Man of India’.

About the Essay

This essay has been taken from his speech delivered on Dec 07, 2013 at Lucknow Literature Carnival. The speech is highly motivating and inspirational for young authors and budding writers.

By A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Dr. Abdul Kalam begins this essay by addressing the readers as ‘Friends’. He explains the importance of reading in life. He advises the readers that they should develop reading habit from the very young age. It enables them acquire knowledge through books. It further makes human beings appreciate multiple aspects of human life. In this way they all will develop a regular reading habit.

Culture of Excellence

After that, the author proceeds to explain culture of excellence. He says that excellence in culture cannot be achieved all of a sudden. It is a continuous process. People make continuous efforts to better themselves.

 First they set their performance standards and focus on their work to mature their dreams. They also remain prepared to take calculated risks. Sometimes they face failures in life, but failures do not deter them from achieving their goals. They strive to work according to their potential. The author calls it unending life-cycle phenomena. People should know that they are not in competition with anyone else, but they are in competition with themselves to achieve the culture of excellence.

 

The Author Inside

Now, the author proceeds to explain that every individual has an author inside. Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam says that he has met 16 million young men so far. While interacting with them, he has found that it was an experience as if he lived in the world of stories. The author says that everything is a story for children. They want to become astronauts, pilots, soldiers, doctors, sailors, and so on. They live in their beautiful make-believe world of fantasies. As they grow up, after watching films, plays and reading novels, they add some more fantasies to their make-believe world. The author says that even sporting events and criminal trials also open up stories for them.

The author says that, after living for 82 years, he realized that he was also living a story. He justifies it by adding that they all are giving words to their ideas and everyday events. At the same time, they are adding something to their reality by their imagination to make it more beautiful.

The author says that stories are very helpful for all of us to understand life and also to solve its complex problems. Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam quotes an example of flight simulators. They prepare pilots for difficult situations.

Imagination plays a very important role in story-telling. It helps people to teleport mentally into alternative worlds. Imagination provides us with magical power to experience what we do not actually express in real life. Imagination is a tool with measurable utility rather than an object for aesthetic admiration. “Attention is the reward that listener bestow on the story teller.”

After that the author says that story-telling has a darker side also.

“It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements and narratives about ourselves that are more ‘truly’ than true. Everything is in the eye of the beholder. Right, wrong, sin, good, duty, responsibility, love, hate—all of these depend on who is looking. New forms of stories generate their own new sets of problems which require yet more solutions. Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are interactive networked narratives that use the real world as a platform and uses trans-media story telling o deliver  a story that may be altered by participants’ ideas or actions. The author again lays emphasis on the fact that story telling should be taken seriously and they should remain authentic human experiences.

The author further talks o great minds of the past. They wrote great books. Goethe wrote Faust, the great German epic. Shakespeare wrote great plays in which he could see the past, the present and the future. The great epic master Valmiki wrote the story of the Ramayna that also stands for the past, the present and the future. The author read from the biographies of Goethe and Shakespeare that they were able to write such great books because their minds were inspired by the Life Force. They claim that every human being has intellectual energy. Very few people utilse their inspiration. Usually it gets lost and diluted with the passage of time. Mehrishi  Valmiki says that a divine force helped him to write the Ramayana. Finally the author gives a message, particularly, to the young authors, “You have the mighty force within you: assemble it, concentrate and use it for imagination and create great worlds.”