Introduction

APJ Abdul Kalam is a renowned Indian scientist who went

on to become 11th President of India (2002-2007). He is
very well known across India and is a recipient of India’s
three highest civilian awards – Padma Bhushan, Padma
Vibhushan and Bharat Ratna. Wings of Fire is an
autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam written jointly by Arun
Tiwari and Abdul Kalam. It covers Kalam’s life before he
became president of India and in 2013 another
autobiography titled
“My Journey: Transforming Dreams into Actions" was
released.

Wings of Fire is an autography of APJ Abdul Kalam covering

his early life and his work in Indian space research and
missile programs. It is the story of a boy from a humble
background who went on to become a key player in Indian
space research/Indian missile programs and later became
the president of India. The book has been very popular in
India and has been translated into multiple languages. I
recently picked up a copy and read it in a couple of days. It
was very engaging initially, but tended to drag a bit towards
the end with lot of technical details and procedural
information of his space research and missile projects.
I loved the initial chapters of Wings of Fire since it gives a
vivid picture of our country during 1930 – 1950s. Kalam was
born in Rameswaram, a southern religious town in
Tamilnadu. The initial chapters provides an interesting
glimpse of religious harmony which existed before India’s
partition,
The famous Shiva temple, which made Rameswaram so
sacred to pilgrims , was about a ten-minute walk from our
house. Our locality was predominantly Muslim, but there
were quite a few Hindu families too, living amicably with
their Muslim neighbours.
……
The high priest of Rameswaram temple, Pakshi Lakshmana
Sastry, was a very close friend of my father’s. One of the
most vivid memories of my early childhood is of the two
men, each in his traditional attire, discussing spiritual
matters.
……
One day when I was in the fifth standard at the
Rameswaram Elementary School, a new teacher came to our
class. I used to wear a cap which marked me as a Muslim,
and I always sat in the front row next to Ramanadha Sastry,
who wore a sacred thread. The new teacher could not
stomach a Hindu priest’s son sitting with a Muslim boy. In
accordance with our social ranking as the new teacher saw
it, I was asked to go and sit on the back bench. I felt very
sad, and so did Ramanadha Sastry. He looked utterly
downcast as I shifted to my seat in the last row. The image of
him weeping when I shifted to the last row left a lasting
impression on me. After school , we went home and told our
respective parents about the incident.
Lakshmana Sastry summoned the teacher, and in our
presence , told the teacher that he should not spread the
poison of social inequality and communal intolerance in the
minds of innocent children. He bluntly asked the teacher to
either apologize or quit the school and the island. Not only
did the teacher regret his behaviour, but the strong sense of
conviction Lakshmana Sastry conveyed ultimately reformed
this young teacher.
Kalam in younger years wanted to be an officer in air force,
however he couldn’t clear the interview. He met Swami
Sivananda after this failure and I found his words to Kalam
interesting and in a way prophetic,
Accept your destiny and go ahead with your life. You are not
destined to become an Air Force pilot. What you are
destined to become is not revealed now but it is
predetermined. Forget this failure, as it was essential to lead
you to your destined path. Search, instead, for the true
purpose of your existence. Become one with yourself, my
son! Surrender yourself to the wish of God,

In the book we learn how Kalam started his career in

Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) and was
involved in the design of a hovercraft. Later he moved to
Indian Space Research which was the brain child of Vikram
Sarabhai. In 1963, Kalam went to NASA facility in
Maryland(USA) as part of a training program on sounding
rocket launching techniques. There he came across a
painting which depicted Tipu Sultan’s rocket warfare against
the British,
Here, I saw a painting prominently displayed in the
reception lobby. It depicted a battle scene with a few rockets
flying in the background. A painting with this theme should
be the most commonplace thing at a Flight Facility, but the
painting caught my eye because the soldiers on the side
launching the rockets were not white , but dark-skinned,
with the racial features of people found in South Asia. One
day, my curiosity got the better of me, drawing me towards
the painting. It turned out to be Tipu Sultan’s army fighting
the British. The painting depicted a fact forgotten in Tipu’s
own country but commemorated here on the other side of
the planet. I was happy to see an Indian glorified by NASA
as a hero of warfare rocketry.
The book covers a lot of "behind the scene" information and
technical details about India’s satellite and missile program
(SLV-3, Prithvi, Agni, Thrisul, Akash and Nag). This might
interest technically inclined readers but is sure to put off
readers who bought the book to get to know Kalam or to
know his principles/ideas. Space and missile programs are
huge complex projects and managing them is extremely
challenging. The book does give a glimpse of the
participatory management technique adopted by Kalam, but
at the same time it doesn’t go into details.
Wings of fire covers Kalam’s personal life only briefly which
is strange for an autobiography. For example, we don’t know
why he decided to remain single or his activities outside
space research (even though we can conclude in the end that
he was married to science and technology).
Kalam is a poet and is a huge fan of poems. The book
contains many of his own poems and his favorite poems.
Here is an example,
Do not look at Agni
as an entity directed upward
to deter the ominous
or exhibit your might.
It is fire in the heart of an Indian.
Do not even give it
the form of a missile
as it clings to the
burning pride of this nation
and thus is bright.
Through Wings of Fire, we come across some brilliant
people who worked behind Indian space research  such as
Vikram Sarabhai and Dr. Brahm Prakash. The book also
contains about 24 photos and I found the ones from the
early days of Indian space program very interesting. This
alone is worth the price of the book!
One of the things that stands out throughout the book is
Kalam’s positive thinking. He held many high ranking
positions in various organizations. Yet in the book he rarely
mentions anything about lethargy/corruption of
bureaucracy or politicians. The secret to his success seems to
be his ability to ignore negative things around him. The
book also gives a clue to his popularity in India. Kalam is a
simple, secular, inspiring humanitarian.

About the author:

Malgudi Days “by R. K. Narayan” that realization dawned on me. Rasipuram
Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami is abridged as R. K. Narayan.

R. K. Narayan was born in 1906 in Madras, and later graduated from Maharaja’s
College in Mysore. He published his first novel Swami and Friends in 1935 at the
age of 29, and subsequently went on to publish numerous novels, five collections
of short stories, two travel books, four collections of essays, a memoir, and some
translations of Indian epics and myths.

Malgudi Days is widely considered to be R. K. Narayan’s most prominent and

popular book, though many of his literary contributions are instantly recognized,
widely acclaimed and genuinely adored. “R. K. Narayan” is a household name in
most Indian families all over the world.

The highly illustrious and famous cartoonist R. K. Laxman is the author’s brother.

Malgudi days is a collection of 32 short funny and witty stories. The

stories happen in malgudi an imaginary town located somewhere on the
banks of Sarayu (a river in South India).
Even though it is common to call malgudi is an imaginary town, I didn’t
felt it is imaginary while reading the book. You can trace it as any village
in south India if you have travelled there. The stories carry the scent and
sounds of these villages and one can instantly blend into the situations
in the stories.

In this quarantined lockdown isolated period I started to read few old

books and it is one of them.
Malgudi days book, most of us know the stories in some way or the
other. It was adapted to a TV Series when we were growing up and we
got hooked up to it back then. The children and adults both had the
same amount of interest.
After a long time I am able to get my hands on the book that the Series
was based on.

There was everything in Malgudi that a proper city should have: a little post office,
a grocery shop, Town Hall Park, a vendor selling fried groundnuts, an astrologer
with his cowrie shells and paraphernalia, the Vinayak Mudali Street with four
parallel streets, City X-Ray Institute at Race Course Road etc. Even as you read
through the stories in Malgudi Days, you can actually picture yourself transported
through the streets of a full-fledged city, making it difficult to shake off the feeling
that you have lived in this town.
Two collections of R. K. Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Days (16 stories) and Lawley
Road (8 stories), and eight new stories, were merged to produce a collection of 32
short stories consequently titled Malgudi Days.

In all there are 32 stories and all the stories revolve around a town in
south India called Malgudi (it’s a fictitious town as mentioned earlier so
don’t look it up in the map). The characters in each story are so well
crafted that we can identify them with the few people around us, they
are pretty ordinary characters but then again they are extraordinary in
their manners.
I would even commend the TV Series in this regard that they did a pretty
decent job with the book as the people still remember a lot many
characters from that Series still.
All the stories are excellent, it’s hard to pick a few but a few I liked and
important to mention are The Missing Mail, The Doctor’s word, The blind
dog, Such Perfection, Engine Trouble, Forty-Five a month, The Axe,
Lawley Road, A willing Slave, Leela’s Friend, Mother & Son, Selvi,
Second Opinion.
In “The Missing Mail” a village postman’s emotions with a household are
displayed when he doesn’t deliver a bad mail to the house until the
daughter of the house is wedded.
In the “Doctor’s Word” it shows how a doctor’s word is considered to be
God’s word and just by listening to a lie how the doctor’s friend cruises
through a bad disease which almost killed him.
In “Forty-Five a Month” a man’s tussle with the love for his child and
fighting with the financial reality is depicted where he wants to take his
little daughter for the movie after promising her but he has to slog in the
office every day and the result he gets is a five rupee increase.
In “Mother & Son” the relationship of mother and son is beautifully
shown when after getting angry with his son she says some harsh words
to him and later she becomes restless when her Son doesn’t come back
late in the night. The love and relationship are beautifully depicted.

Each story is unique and touches some or the other part of our everyday
life and as Mr. Narayan mentions in the beginning that the characters of
Malgudi can be found anywhere in the world and the stories have
universal appeal.
None of the stories are interrelated or even influenced by each other.

There is a quote on the back cover of the book by Francis King which I
liked and totally agree with he says, “The hardest of all things for a
novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human
happiness…Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhow: a few bring it off. Narayan
is one of them”.
This pretty much summarizes the entire book. If we are looking for some
obvious humor, laughs, mystery, drama, love stories, etc. then this is not
what we will get from it. The book will leave no impression on us when
we finish any story (it’s a collection of short stories) but then when we
will be off the book each story will leave a lasting impression on us. The
beauty of the stories as King aptly says is the extraordinary
ordinariness.
Very few authors can capture the human emotions in such a beautiful
way.
I enjoyed “Malgudi days” thoroughly and this has re-kindled a wish to
watch the entire TV Series again, so may be I will try to find out some
you tube links showing the episodes.