Wings of fire - Sir APJ ABDUL KALAM Wings of fire | Page 65

admiration for Seshan, who would meticulously go through
the agenda and always come for the meetings prepared.
He used to kindle the minds of scientists with his
tremendous analytical capability.
The first three years of the SLV project was the period
for the revelation of many fascinating mysteries of science.
Being human, ignorance has always been with us, and
always will be. What was new was my awareness of it, my
awakening to its fathomless dimensions. I used to
erroneously suppose that the function of science was to
explain everything, and that unexplained phenomena were
the province of people like my father and Lakshmana
Sastry. However, I always refrained from discussing these
matters with any of my scientist colleagues, fearing that it
would threaten the hegemony of their meticulously formed
views.
Gradually, I became aware of the difference between
science and technology, between research and
development. Science is inherently open-ended and
exploratory. Development is a closed loop. Mistakes are
imperative in development and are made every day, but
each mistake is used for modification, upgradation or
betterment. Probably, the Creator created engineers to
make scientists achieve more. For each time scientists
come up with a thoroughly researched and fully
comprehended solution, engineers show them yet another
lumineu, yet one more possibility. I cautioned my team
against becoming scientists. Science is a passion—a
never-ending voyage into promises and possibilities. We
had only limited time and limited funds. Our making the
SLV depended upon our awareness of our own limits. I
preferred existing workable solutions which would be the
best options. Nothing that is new comes into time-bound
projects without its own problems. In my opinion, a project
leader should always work with proven technologies in
most of the systems as far as possible and experiment only
from multiple resources.
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