VK Saraswat | Vijay Kumar Saraswat

                                      A great man is always willing to be little. This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson couldn’t hold truer in the case of Dr. Kalam.  It’s in the most unexpected of circumstances that the most unlikeliest character traits often manifest themselves. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. We all knew Dr. Kalam to be the strong visionary and impeccable leader that he was. Our interactions with him on a daily basis though, pleasantly let us in on the humble greatness of this legendary soul. An incident from the first launch of the Prithvi missile comes to mind… The reviews and safety considerations were planned from SHAR.  As was the norm, the range authorities had to clear the mission from safety considerations before the final check.  During a review by the SHAR team, some concerns...

All of us have good days and bad days. Some days things just don’t go as planned and we end up losing our cool and our temper. Professionally though, this is definitely going to be frowned upon. In the real work space, we are expected to be courteous, disciplined and polite, losing our temper is not something that goes well with our peers and our superiors. A true leader or manager then, is one who gets the best out of his team, without letting them feel any lesser about themselves. Dr. Kalam was regarded as a father figure by all.  His style was never confrontational and he had a vast reserve of patience.  He always worked towards building a consensus rather than ramming down decisions.  He rarely lost his cool.  If someone upset him, all he would say were terms like “Funny Guy” / “Who is the hero?”  and “ Get me that famous mechanic.” On the days that he did end up being displeased, his style of showing it was unique.  The Prithvi-03 flight h...

Almost every achiever is asked at least once who his/her inspiration or role model is. We often look up to someone for their admirable qualities and look to inculcate the same in our lives.   Dr. Kalam often told that he had three Gurus, namely, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, Dr. Sateesh Dhawan and Dr. Brahm Prakash.   He always acknowledged their contribution in his growth.   I remember him saying he learnt the importance of having a vision from the Dynamic Dr.Sarabhai. From the no-nonsense Dhawan he fathomed how to convert a simple vision into a mission and evolve fail-safe systems.   And from the soft spoken Brahm Prakash, the first Director of VSSC, he learnt the art of converting the mission on hand into achievable goals. It just goes to say dreams aren’t enough; dreams that become goals are what matter. All these qualities made Dr. Kalam an outstanding manager of technology – a rare quality . But the most important quality his mentors taught him was, how to ha...

Success is never a one-step goal. It takes years of hard work, sleepless nights, earlier mornings than everyone else, it means rising up with the sun even though you need to keep working long after the sun has set. For those who believe in the glory of their goals though, the sun never sets. Today’s post features Dr.Kalam and Liquid Propulsion technology. While his reservations about liquid Propulsion technology were first witnessed by me during his visit to DRDL in 1973 as a member of the team lead by Prof. Satish Dhawan to review the  SAM-2 (Devil) project, I faced the same when he first reviewed the configuration of Prithvi Missile in 1983 after taking over as Director DRDL and Programme Director, IGMDP.  By this time, we had already static tested the Boiler Plate Version of Propulsion Stage of Prithvi.  Dr. Kalam felt that the LP System was too complex and less reliable, and suggested  that we switch over to Solid Propulsion.  I had explai...

This is the second part of my series on my days with Dr. Kalam. As someone who’s spent a huge chunk of my career working with him on various of India’s missile missions , I have been lucky to know him, work with him and see him in action. October 15th was the first posthumous birth anniversary of Dr. Kalam, it was a nostalgic time for those of us who worked with him. He would never ask for any showy gifts or ceremonies on his birthdays, I remember. To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal, He would always say. That takes me back to our time at SHAR where we worked in Dr. Kalam’s team and learned Range Safety in the development of missiles. In this post I speak about lessons in Range Safety. Range Safety is an integral part of missile testing and is a prerequisite to the development of missile. During 1972-79, I had participated in many flight tests of Devil (SAM-2) missiles as part of the indigenous development of SAM-2 but was never expos...

Ever since the news of his sad demise during a lecture in Sikkim came out, I immediately felt the magnitude of the loss that was upon us - upon science, upon a nation, upon leadership, upon children of an impressionable age and adults alike, upon time … Dr. Kalam hadn’t been keeping well for quite some time. Age had taken its toll on his unbreakable spirit, and though he succumbed, he never lost. As he collapsed in the middle of a lecture, he was taken in the midst of something he had devoted his life to - science, learning, innovation and development. Looking back today, I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. As someone who’s spent a huge chunk of my career working with him on various of India’s missile missions , I have been lucky to know him, work with him and see him in action. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam was a true inspiration. He was a great scientist, an ideal citizen and a human being of impeccable character.  He made efforts to blossom young minds – full of ...

Lost in the middle of a desert with nothing to count on, no GPS or maps to look to for help. What hope did we have ? After about half an hour of frantically looking through the deserted huts in the region, we spotted a Rajasthani shepherd woman standing under a neem tree along with a flock of sheep.  Our navigator and I struck some conversation with her and requested her to show us the direction to Delta sector.  Initially she was hesitant, probably because she didn’t understand our request clearly.  However, after some persuasion she agreed to lead us.  We requested her to sit in our Jonga/Jeep.  She refused politely and started walking in front of our Jongas. After walking for about 30 minutes in that heat, amidst the recurring sand-storms and hot winds, she led us to a dilapidated hut with mud walls and a thatched roof.  A torn rag cloth was hanging at the door of the hut. She requested us to come in.  While the navigator and I went in, ...

Making one’s way through the harsh deserts in the Indian subcontinent is no easy task. If the heat doesn’t get to you, your body’s grappling metabolism will.  It often takes the bravest of souls to battle it out in these tough conditions, where your biggest enemy is nature itself. My tryst with the desert happened several decades ago, when I was entrusted with the task of setting up a Land Range (to test Missiles where the launch Point and impact point of the missile are on land mass and the missile flies largely over land) for testing Prithvi Missile.) in my role as a young Deputy Project Director for Prithvi. In a country like ours which is densely populated, to identify such a large area with stipulated stringent safety regulations was a difficult task.  The Indian Army has been using certain areas in the desert of Rajasthan, namely, Pokhran, Mahajan etc., to test artillery firing ranges.  After a detailed study of the maps of these regions, we could conver...

Sustainability. This word has probably never been used as much before as it has been during this decade. We’ve had several conferences, debates, speeches and awareness programs to discuss the one pertinent issue of creating sustainable sources of food, water and various kinds of energy. Why is this so important? Put simply, the Earth has never been this ravaged before. An increasing number of trees are felled, animals reared, forests wiped off and streams and rivers that are either too polluted, or just plain dry. In the balance of nature, anything wrong with one part of it, automatically results in an imbalance elsewhere - pretty soon, there’s a threat to the whole ecological system. Our human population has been growing, so have our needs. Sometimes this reflects in the forests that must be cut down for excess land, leaving forest animals with no natural habitat, causing them to roam astray, creating an increasing number of endangered animals and a steady depletion in g...

When is it not wise to be impulsive? To jump right in and throw all caution to the winds? Politics is a huge game changer in a nation such as ours. Studying the rise of politicians often is a business study in itself that gives us an idea of probably the most important factor of being successful - dealing with people. I like to call it people management. It happens everywhere, all the time. You often watch an extremely interesting trailer but get let down at the movie, you are promised all sorts of benefits and hikes during a job offer and realize hidden red herrings later, you buy a house on a promising land and realize it isn’t that it isn’t really that promising after all, you get done in by sales guys, by newsletters, by email subject lines and sometimes, even by your own family and friends when you are made to watch a movie or go some place that isn’t really of your choosing. My point is, selling happens everywhere - in all situations, in all conversations, in al...

There’s a saying that goes, “Familiarity breeds contempt”. Familiarity is easy, it’s comforting, it’s simple - we know our way around things , we wake up to a certain way of going about our day, we eat the food that we’ve grown up on, we go to familiar places when we’re low because they bring us memories, we like spending time with friends from school and college because of the easy rapport we share, we listen to songs that lift us up when we’re low, we like to go down the same winding lanes, we sometimes re-read the same books, rearrange the same solved puzzle, rematch an old classic… My point is, familiarity has a strange solace that makes it easy to go back, tempting even. But it’s the uncharted territory that brave harts would rather follow. Take it from the achievers, the weird ones, the new breed of experimental scientists , the startup   gurus, the hackers, the bloggers, the marketers, the small business owners, the chefs, the artists, the authors - it isn’t ab...