The race is on. The new President is to be elected soon. I hope by the time this article appears in print, if it does, the new incumbent would already have been declared elected. I am thousands of miles away lecturing but, did manage to see an Indian paper which said that our missile expert A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, Bharata Ratna, and the veteran freedom fighter, Mrs. Lakshmi Sehgal, are the two in the race. Either of them would fit the bill well. Feeling the political winds blowing in Delhi, I think my good friend Abdul Kalam would be the next tenant of the Rastrapathi Bhavan. Good for him and good for the country. I must hasten to congratulate the Prime Minister for deviating from the usual convention of having an ageing and inconvenient politician or a burnt out bureaucrat, the two classes that must be kept away from this very important constitutional post, as the President of the country. It is better if the same rule applies to the gubernatorial posts as well. Politicians and bureaucrats have had their innings if ever they wanted to help the common man. If they have not been able to achieve that during their active life they will only be a burden on the taxpayer after retirement if parked inside those large posh buildings, called Raj Bhavans-an anachronism in a democracy. I strongly feel that these important offices should be occupied by intellectuals who could see beyond the tip of their noses and be prepared to put their noses to the grinding stone for the good of the future generation of this great country, which had a hoary past.

Most politicians, if not all of them, can never look beyond the next elections. Bureaucrats could only look after their safety and the interest of their class in general. I also do not see any substance in the argument put forward by some people that non-politicians will not have opinions about matters of interest to the country. Far from it. Such people, who have the good of the people at heart, have better opinions about matters of concern to the poor man. I could quote Queen Victoria’s sayings after the coronation, when she became the Queen of the British Empire at a time when the sun never used to set on the empire. She was very young and immature. She said, after being crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury: “I am young, I am immature, I do not know what is it like to rule an empire, but I can assure all of you that I do know very well what is good for my people!” I am sure both Abdul Kalam and Ms. Sehgal know that.

No human being is apolitical in the strict sense of the term, but these two are not politicians in the present meaning of the word. “ Actions of men” wrote John Locke, “are the best interpreters of their thoughts”. One could, therefore, judge the thoughts of our illustrated politicians these days from their actions-or the absence of them. For them to say that non-politicians have no opinions about matters of interest to the country makes a mockery of the truth. Politicians are all the same in whichever outfit they are in. They are all friends and have the same goal of making hay when the sun shines; rest of their proclamations are for public consumption. When their interests are being discussed inside the legislatures they are all one without any difference at all. The agenda to enhance the perks of the elected representatives was an example of this and there are many more. I shudder to think of the day when politicians become good human beings. This world would then become heaven indeed! George Orwell did not write the famous book Animal Farm for nothing. Every word of what he wrote holds good about the politicians even to this day. Rather I sometimes wonder how this class of inhuman beings came into existence in the first place! So far so good and let us thank the PM for giving us a non-political President.

Be that as it may, now onwards I write with the presumption that Abdul Kalam would be our next head of state. Having known the man very intimately I would like to assure the readers that he would do well and acquit himself admirably at the end of the day. He would, however, be judged by the people at the end of five years. It is also a good tradition to have a time limit of one term for any President, if not for all political functionaries. Being a technocrat, many believe he may not be a good President. On the contrary, any one with great ability in one area would be able to do well under all other circumstances as well.

“Great ability develops and reveals itself-----
increasingly with every new assignment.”
--------------------Baltasar Gracian.

How true? I shall quote a few personal anecdotes to illustrate how Kalam’s mind works in areas other than technology, as I am not competent to assess him in the former. We were sharing the same podium in the Indian Institute of Science and the occasion was a symposium on the future directions for Indian Science. I was to talk on Medical Care Vs Health Care and he on the Future of Our Science. In short, I told the delegates that health of the people does not depend on doctors and hospitals. Health needs four essential things in our country where even today 80% of the population lives in poverty. They are: clean drinking water, three square meals a day with food uncontaminated with human and/or animal excreta, toilet for every house to avoid hookworm infestation (in the year 2001 70% of Indian children in the villages have less than 50% haemoglobin in their blood-rest of it being sucked by hookworms!), and avoidance of cooking smoke coming into the house as this kills women in the village due to heart attacks and lung cancer and children below the age of five of pneumonia. The poor die unlabelled, unsung and unwept! They do not come into the medical statistics of the large city hospitals where the rich get labelled even when they do not have any problems. The poor in India pay for their poverty with their lives, although the rich-poor divide is there even in the industrialised western countries. This kind of inverse care- large numbers of hospitals and doctors in large metropolitan cities with diseases abounding in the villages, the inverse care law, operates to a lesser degree all over the world, unfortunately.

After having listened to my talk Dr. Abdul Kalam came to me to say that he almost had tears in his eyes as I was speaking since he could visualise the scenario in his childhood village in Rameshwarm of a similar picture. He wanted me to do something about it and he would help in any possible way. That was my first encounter. This gives me inkling into the man’s mind. In addition he was very affectionately talking to me in Tamil. It is only the one who has suffered pain that could understand other’s pain. People who are brought up in five-star culture living in the air-conditioned Delhi bungalows could hardly understand this. Of course, there are exceptions. We have many politicians that come from very poor background, but they quickly forget that when they are power drunk and see an opportunity to make it big quickly.

Next pleasant shock came to me when the Secretary General of the Indian National Science Congress, a fellow Vice Chancellor, came to request me to give a keynote address in their annual conference in Lucknow earlier this year. The gentleman was not aware of my existence till then. When I asked him as to how he could zero in on a VVIP (very, very insignificant man) like me, he gave me the reason. He said that Dr. Abdul Kalam, who was their mentor at that time as the scientific advisor to the Govt. of India, had asked him to have me to speak to the august gathering of scientists. Abdul Kalam had also shown him a Photostat of one of my articles that was kept under the glass covering of Kalam’s worktable in his office. The Vice Chancellor in question took a copy of the article from Kalam to read. I did speak to the gathering and the effect it had on them is anybody’s guess!

My point here is that a man of Kalam’s stature at that time could keep my article on his worktable and then take action on that shows the man’s concern for the poor and the underdog in this country. The main difference between Kalam and our politicians is that while the latter proclaim from housetops that they are for the underdog, in practice, they only follow the top dogs. Kalam, on the contrary, is a true infracaninophile-under dog lover. The article in question, which Kalam was keeping on his worktable, was my idea of the action plan for the next fifty years to make India a healthy nation.

My third encounter with him was very recent when both of us shared the dais on the annual day function of the wonderful free hi-tech hospital that Bhagvan Satya Sai Baba runs in Bangalore. He was the first speaker and I was the last and Baba himself was chairing the meeting. Even here his talk with me showed his deep concern for the health of the poor. He wanted me to keep in touch with him through his email address as his schedule at that time took him to the far corners of the country to talk to young men and women in schools and colleges-another of his life’s passions.

Our University had chosen to give Honorary Doctorates to three outstanding sons of India for the first time in its history some time ago. Interestingly two of them went on to become Bharata Rathnas in the next few months and the third became Padma Vibhushana. The basic yardstick for their selection was their authenticity. No one could question their credibility, their honesty and their humility-the three virtues of true Indian education. It gives me great satisfaction to see one of them becoming the President of India. May their tribe increase. I have not lost faith in mankind. God still has faith in man. The three great men that we chose to honour in our university had the right kind of total education that Adam Smith was talking about in the seventeenth century: “ a process that trains a man to act justly, skillfully and magnanimously under all times of war and peace.” The Rg Veda talks of this country as that where people of various religious beliefs and languages live and let live peacefully. This great country needs a true philanthrope as its President, Hope we have got one. Let us wish him Godspeed and good luck.

“All truth passes through three stages. -----------------------
First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”--------------
------------------------------------Arthur Schopenhauer.