Archive for March, 2010

Manmohan Singh – Successs story

Mar 19th

Posted by kamesh in News & Views

24 comments

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s secret of his professional success  is, “I am what I am because of my education.” He has often thanked his family for ensuring that he went right up to college and then had opportunities to win many scholarships that finally helped him get a PhD from Oxford University.

Manmohan Singh was born into a family of modest means in the village of Gah in Pakistan. For the first 12 years of his life he lived there, a village which had no electricity, no school, no hospital, no piped drinking water. He walked for miles every day to school and studied at night in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. When asked once why he had poor eyesight he confessed that it was because he had spent hours reading books in that dim light.

It was his hard work that enabled him to finish his schooling and attend college in Amritsar, where he lived after the Partition. He then won a scholarship to go to Cambridge University in England to do his Master’s in Economics. Another scholarship helped him complete his PhD. He won the coveted Adam Smith Prize in Economics for his outstanding academic record. He always stood first and was a brilliant student.

For all his brilliance, he was a very shy boy. He once told Mark Tully, the famous BBC correspondent in India, that throughout his stay in Cambridge he used to bathe with cold water because the moment hot water was available in the hostel all the other students would come in to bathe and he felt shy to show them his long hair. As the only Sikh student in the hostel he felt inhibited to remove his turban in front of others. It is this shy boy who became the darling of his teachers because he was such a good student. He returned to India to teach at his college in Amritsar. One day, his neighbour, renowned writer Mulk Raj Anand, took him to meet Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Panditji  asked him to join the government. But he had a commitment to teach at the college and so he could not accept that offer.

Later, when he was working at the United Nations under the famous economist Raul Prebisch, he got an offer to join Delhi School of Economics as a lecturer. He immediately accepted that invitation and decided to return to India. Dr Prebisch was shocked. So many brilliant economists would be delighted to get a UN job and this young man was giving it up to teach in India? “You are being foolish,” Prebisch told Manmohan Singh, adding, “But, sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish!”

Manmohan Singh returned home first to teach and then to work in the Government. He has held every important job in the field of economic policy making in India — Chief Economic Advisor to Government of India, Finance Secretary, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Union Finance Minister and now Prime Minister!

In 2005 when he visited Kaula Lumpur for the India-ASEAN Summit he was introduced at the ASEAN Business Forum meeting as “the world’s most qualified Head of Government”! That is what makes us all proud. No country in the world has a more qualified head of government and India has never had such a highly qualified Prime Minister.

Manmohan Singh’s life is a record of excellence and of merit being rewarded. His life will always be an inspiration to young people who want to work hard and achieve something based on their learning. No rich parents, no influential uncles, no wealth, no inheritance, no one to pull strings and ‘put in a word’ — it was always his merit, his hard work, his honesty, his intelligence and, above all, his deep love for India that energised him.

Every young Indian should feel inspired by the life of Manmohan Singh!

APJ Kalam

Mar 19th

Posted by kamesh in Famous Personalities

5 comments

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam  born 15 October 1931 in Rameshwaram, Madras Presidency, British India (now Tamil Nadu, India), usually referred to as Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam^, was the 11th President of India, serving from 2002 to 2007, he was elected during the tenure of the National Democratic Alliance (India) coalition government, under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. During his term as President, he was popularly known as the People’s President.

Before his term as India’s president, he worked as an aeronautical engineer with DRDO and ISRO. He is popularly known as the Missile Man of India for his work on development of ballistic missile and space rocket technology. In India he is highly respected as a scientist and as an engineer.

Kalam played a pivotal organisational, technical and political role in India’s Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974. He is chancellor of Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology(Thiruvanthapuram), a professor at Anna University (Chennai) and adjunct/visiting faculty at many other academic and research institutions across India.

With the death of R. Venkataraman on 27 January 2009, Kalam became the only surviving former President of India.

In his book India 2020 APJ Abdul Kalam strongly advocates an action plan to develop India into a knowledge superpower and into a developed nation by the year 2020. He regards his work on India’s nuclear weapons program as a way to assert India’s place as a future superpower.

It has been reported that there is considerable demand in South Korea for translated versions of books authored by him .

Kalam continues to take an active interest in other developments in the field of science and technology. He has proposed a research programme for developing bio-implants. He is a supporter of Open source software over proprietary solutions and believes that the use of open source software on a large scale will bring the benefits of information technology to more people

After graduating in Science from St. Joseph’s College in Tiruchirapalli, Abdul Kalam graduated with a diploma in the mid-1950s from Madras Institute of Technology specializing in Aeronautical Engineering . As the Project Director, he was heavily involved in the development of India’s first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III). As Chief Executive of Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP), he also played a major part in developing many missiles of India including Agni and Prithvi. Although the entire project has been criticised for being overrun and mismanaged. He was the Chief Scientific Adviser to Prime Minister and Secretary, Department of Defence Research & Development from July 1992 to December 1999. Pokhran-II nuclear tests were conducted during this period, led by him.

On Wednesday April 29, 2009, he became the first Asian to be bestowed the 2008 Hoover Medal, America’s top engineering prize, for his outstanding contribution to public service. The citation said that he is being recognised for making state-of-the-art healthcare available to the common man at affordable prices, bringing quality medical care to rural areas by establishing a link between doctors and technocrats, using spin-offs of defence technology to create state-of-the-art medical equipment and launching tele-medicine projects connecting remote rural-based hospitals to the super-specialty hospital. A pre-eminent scientist, a gifted engineer, and a true visionary, he is also a humble humanitarian in every sense of the word, it added.

On September 13, 2009, he was a recipient of the International von Kármán Wings Award .

The Government of India has honoured him with the nation’s highest civilian honours: the Padma Bhushan in 1981; Padma Vibhushan in 1990; and the Bharat Ratna in 1997 for his work with ISRO and DRDO and his role as a scientific advisor to the Indian government..

Kalam is the third President of India to have been honoured with a Bharat Ratna before being elected to the highest office, the other two being Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Zakir Hussain. He is also the first scientist and first bachelor to occupy Rashtrapati Bhavan.

After his tenure as the president he is now a visiting guest professor at JSS university, Mysore. He has agreed to deliver a minimum of four lectures every year.

His Writings

  • Wings of Fire
  • Scientist to President
  • Ignited Minds
  • India 2020
  • India-my-dream
  • Envisioning an Empowered Nation
  • Guiding Souls
  • Children Ask Kalam
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