A system to prevent the soiling of railway tracks by Madhav Pathak of Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh; Herbal pesticide tablets to be used in the storage of… - A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Beautiful hands are those that do
Work in earnest and brave and true
Moment to Moment
All day through

Let not thy winged days be spent in vain. When once gone, no gold can buy them back.’ It meant that the best days of our lives were now, when we were learning, and we had to make the most of this time. Once gone, the time would run like sand between our fingers and we would never get it back again. The words filled me with hope and expectations and also helped me put aside my homesickness and look forward to all that I would learn at this new school.

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.