A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Sold newspapers as a boy, failed to become a pilot, and led India into space before becoming its president
Abdul Kalam was born in 1931 in Rameswaram, a pilgrimage town on an island off the tip of India. His father was an imam who owned a boat that ferried pilgrims across the strait, and the family had little. As a boy he got up before dawn to distribute newspapers, then went to school. He studied physics at Tiruchirappalli and aerospace engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology, where a dean once threatened to withdraw his scholarship unless a design was finished in three days. It was.
He wanted to fly. At the Indian Air Force selection board he came ninth of the candidates, and there were eight places. He took a job as a scientist instead. At the space agency from 1969 he was made project director of the SLV-3, India\'s first satellite launch vehicle. The first launch in 1979 failed and fell into the sea. The second, in July 1980, put the Rohini satellite into orbit and made India a spacefaring nation.
He then returned to defence research and ran the programme that produced the Agni and Prithvi missiles, and was a senior figure in the 1998 nuclear tests. He remained unmarried, vegetarian and plainly dressed, and wrote books urging young Indians to have large ambitions.
In 2002 he was elected president of India with support from both main parties and was called the people\'s president. He died in 2015, collapsing while giving a lecture to students.