Indian scientist and statesman (1931–2015)
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (15 October 1931 – 27 July 2015) was an Indian aerospace scientist who served as the 11th president of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace engineering.
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In 1991, while looking forward to his retirement and planning to open a school for underprivileged children, he started writing down his memoirs. He had always written poetry and was an avid reader from his days as a student in Madras. The book he wrote began with his childhood days and ended somewhere after the launch of Agni. Called Wings of Fire,
The next book that I would like to mention is called Man the Unknown by the Nobel laureate and doctor-turned-philosopher Alexis Carrel. In it, he talks about how humans can be healed when both the body and mind are treated together. His description of the human body — how it is an intelligent, integrated system — is explained clearly and brilliantly. I think this work should be read by everyone, in particular those who aim to study the medical sciences.
mistakes and failures are a part of every project, particularly in ones like ours where we work on a number of systems and various teams are responsible for different stages, where even a small error at one stage can put to waste years of hard work. Dr Sarabhai used these mistakes as gateways for innovation and the development of new systems. He had the ability to look beyond the specific error and read what lay behind it. He kept room for errors and instead tried to analyse how we could make them manageable, so that we ruled the project, and not our fear of failure.