Ambassador of inter-religious harmony

Chennai: “Is it appropriate for me as a Muslim to write about the leader of another religion,” worriedly queried the former President Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, some months before he passed away to his elder brother Muhammad Muthu Meera Lebbai Maracayer in Rameswaram, as his just-out book co-authored with Arun Tiwari, Transcendence – My Spiritual Experiences with Pramukh Swamiji, was about to be completed. His brother, living a very pious life grounded in Islam, asked him to “go ahead with the book”, explaining how, “when Prophet Muhammad arrived in Medina, there were Jewish and Christian tribes living there; he entered into a treaty with them within a larger framework dealing with inter-Muslim relationships. One of the clauses laid down in the treaty required that each party hold counsel with the other. Mutual relations shall be founded in righteousness: sin is totally excluded.” Thus Kalam was able to complete his book, he records in the introduction to a path-breaking work in promoting inter-religious harmony and understanding.

There cannot be a better testimony to how Mother Nature works through the logic of opposites. To the scientific external world, Dr Kalam was more known as India’s ‘Missile Man’ and the crucial role he played in the two nuclear explosions at Pokhran-II in early 1998, but those flashes alone did not make the man. In parallel, a spiritual stream was welling up right from his childhood days to make him blossom as another ambassador of inter-religious harmony in recent years.

As a 10-year-old boy, Kalam recalls in this work, he had vivid memories back in Rameswaram when Pakshi Lakshmana Sastrigal, the Vedic scholar and head priest of the famous Ramanathaswamy temple there, Rev. Father Bodal, who built the first church on Rameswaram island and his father, Jainulabdeen, an Imam in the local mosque, “would all sit in our courtyard, each with a cup of tea; and they would discuss and find solutions to the various problems facing our (human) community.”

In another instance, Kalam acknowledges, “other than my parents and teachers, there are five persons, all of them scientists, who inspired and influenced me and whom I call the ‘Mighty Souls’”. There were Prof Vikram Sarabhai, the visionary scientist of India’s space programme, Prof Satish Dhawan, “great teacher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru”, Prof. Brahm Prakash, former director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Prof M.G.K. Menon and Dr Raja Ramanna.

It was in the midst of life’s vicissitudes that Kalam’s self-reflective impulses got larger, particularly after his bid to actualise his dream career of being a pilot with the Indian Air Force had failed in 1958. Returning from Dehra Dun to Delhi then, Kalam says in his autobiography, ‘Wings of Fire’, that he trekked down to Rishikesh, where after a bath in the Ganga he met Swami Sivananda at the latter’s ashram there. When Kalam narrated how his ‘long-cherished desire to fly’ by joining the IAF had come a cropper, the Swamiji smiled and told him, “search, instead for the true purpose of your existence.

Become one with yourself, my son! Surrender yourself to the wish of God.” It was that quirky energy that put him on the road to the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Isro later. “If I was not flying aeroplanes, I was at least helping to make them airworthy,” recalls Kalam of that crucial phase of his life, post a spiritualist touch.

However, as Dr Kalam explains in his latest book, it was decades later that he met his “ultimate teacher” in Pramukh Swamiji of the Swami Narayan faith, through a chance introduction when he had been to Bhuj in Gujarat in March 2001 after that shattering earthquake.