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.”
