With Buddhist monks at the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh: an unerring instinct for the right gesture
He calls up journalists on reading their newspaper reports to personally discuss the issues involved.Besides, he has invited an astounding range of people, including schoolchildren, teachers, scientists, the disabled, development activists, doctors, museologists, farmers, and engineers from across the country, for chat sessions. He has transformed the sleepy, pensioner's pace of the Rashtrapati Bhawan with a couple of engagements a day into an 18-hour working day fitting in as many as seven to ten engagements in his day's overflowing schedule. He has a fan club, plays the veena, composes poems for all occasions; he gives out autographed cards, with his portrait and a little "knowledge" verse, embossed with the national emblem and with his e-mail address, responding to about 400 e-mails every day. His staff is so enamoured with the new president that one of his security cops, Radhakrishna Pant, composed a poem hailing the "president of hearts". His autobiography, Wings of Fire, has become a runaway bestseller with over 2,00,000 copies sold.
Kalam is a peripatetic president who has already visited 21 states in the 10 months he has been in office. This is possibly more than what most presidents manage to do in five years. He packs in as many as 15 programmes into these whirlwind tours, arriving the night before to fit in as much as possible into his tight schedule, often staying up till midnight to meet his many admirers, and travelling to relief camps in riot-affected Gujarat, cyclone shelters in Orissa, or farmers in Paliganj in the Nalanda district of Bihar. He meets the state's lawmakers, secretaries, entrepreneurs, development activists and, of course, students and teachers. Add to that Kalam's self-devised rule that if he visits a place of worship of one community, he has to visit a shrine or church of each of the other major religions. Even an election campaign would pale in comparison.
He also seems to have an unerring instinct for the right gesture: he cancelled the traditional Rashtrapati Bhawan Iftar party during the month of Ramzan, donating the money to orphanages; he arranged to meet with a cobbler in Kerala. He talked long distance to a 14-year-old boy in a remote Tripura village and arranged for his heart surgery by specialists from Hyderabad's care Hospital. Among the invitees on his famous rail trip from Harnaut to Patna, for instance, was a 10-year-old schoolgirl from a government-run school near the state capital, Sangeeta Kumari, the daughter of a watch-mender, who got a chance of a lifetime to chat with the president and ride in his saloon car. And when he saw a newspaper photograph of schoolgirl Minnuz Fatima in tears because she had missed meeting the president and getting his autograph, he took the pains to find her address and send her his autographed card with a letter of greeting.
But these are no random or politic gestures. President Kalam has always been a man with a mission: to make the best use of his five years in Rashtrapati Bhawan in promoting his dream of making India safe, prosperous and enlightened—in short, a developed nation—by the year 2020. "He believes that within his constitutional role he has the scope as president to motivate and inspire people from different sections of society to work towards this goal," says an official.
Prime Minister Vajpayee has breakfastwith the head of the state at Mughal Garden : an easy camaraderie
Behind his guileless and Pollyanna-like manner dwells a shrewd mind waiting to pounce on any chance to realise his dream mission. When Union minister for social justice Satyanarayan Jatiya came to invite the president to a function to commemorate B.R. Ambedkar's birthday, the president was quick to strike a bargain. He would come, he said, if the minister agreed to announce three schemes on the occasion: scholarships, hostels and financial support for public school admissions for scheduled caste students. Jatiya was forced to agree.
The man at the centre of all learning,at the Nalanda complex in Bihar
