Wings of fire - Sir APJ ABDUL KALAM Wings of fire | Page 16

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O
nce I settled down at the Schwartz High School,
Ramanathapuram, the enthusiastic fifteen-year-old within
me re-emerged. My teacher, Iyadurai Solomon, was an
ideal
guide for an eager young mind that was yet uncertain of
the possibilities and alternatives that lay before it. He made
his students feel very comfortable in class with his warm
and open-minded attitude. He used to say that a good
student could learn more from a bad teacher than a poor
student from even a skilled teacher.
During my stay at Ramanathapuram, my relationship
with him grew beyond that of teacher and pupil. In his
company, I learnt that one could exercise enormous
influence over the events of one’s own life. Iyadurai
Solomon used to say, “To succeed in life and achieve
results, you must understand and master three mighty
forces— desire, belief, and expectation.” Iyadurai Solomon,
who later became a Reverend, taught me that before
anything I wanted could happen, I had to desire it intensely
and be absolutely certain it would happen. To take an
example from my own life, I had been fascinated by the
mysteries of the sky and the flight of birds from early
childhood. I used to watch cranes and seagulls soar into
flight and longed to fly. Simple, provincial boy though I was, I
was convinced that one day I, too, would soar up into the
skies. Indeed, I was the first child from Rameswaram to fly.
Iyadurai Solomon was a great teacher because he
instilled in all the children a sense of their own worth.
Solomon raised my self-esteem to a high point and
convinced me, the son of parents who had not had the
benefits of education, that I too could aspire to become
whatever I wished. “With faith, you can change your
destiny,” he would say.
One day, when I was in the fourth form, my mathematics
teacher, Ramakrishna Iyer, was teaching another class.
Inadvertently, I wandered into that classroom and in the
manner of an old-fashioned despot, Ramakrishna Iyer
caught me by the neck and caned me in front of the whole
class. Many months later, when I scored full marks in
mathematics, he narrated the incident to the entire school
at morning assembly. “Whomsoever I cane becomes a
great man! Take my word, this boy is going to bring glory to
his school and to his teachers.” His praise quite made up
for the earlier humiliation!
By the time I completed my education at Schwartz, I was
a selfconfident boy determined to succeed. The decision to
go in for further education was taken without a second
thought. To us, in those days, the awareness of the
possibilities for a professional education did not exist;
higher education simply meant going to college. The
nearest college was at Tiruchchirappalli, spelled
Trichinopoly those days, and called Trichi for short.
In 1950, I arrived at St. Joseph’s College, Trichi, to
study for the Intermediate examination. I was not a bright
student in terms of examination grades but, thanks to my
two buddies back in Rameswaram, I had acquired a
practical bent of mind.
Whenever I returned to Rameswaram from Schwartz,
my elder brother Mustafa Kamal, who ran a provision store
on the railway station road, would call me in to give him a
little help and then vanish for hours together leaving the