“I froze. Any other President, and my head would have rolled though for no fault of mine,” says Nair
Poet and lyricist Vairamuthu at Rameswaram on Wednesday. (Photo: DC)
Chennai: The bedroom of the President in the Stately Rashtrapati Bhavan, the pride of Lutyens' Delhi, found leaking? Yes, it did as P.M. Nair, then secretary to the former President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam discovered to his shock, when the latter called him up on the morning of July 14, 2003, to say, “last night I could not sleep because my bedroom was leaking.”
“I froze. Any other President, and my head would have rolled though for no fault of mine,” says Nair in a shuddering recall, in the annexure to his political memoir, The Kalam Effect: My years with the President.
But thanks to Kalam’s innate empathy, he put his secretary to ease quickly. “Don’t worry. I know you will immediately set things right in my bedroom, but I am worried about those houses in the President’s Estate where they may not have a second bedroom to shift to when the only one that is available leaks,” Nair notes in a letter as Dr. Kalam having told him then.
Immediately sending for his colleagues in the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), Nair indicates that demonstration of empathy by Dr Kalam made them decide on a “crash programme of maintenance of all civil installations in a time-bound manner.” This was in the backdrop of various buildings in Rashtrapati Bhavan and the President’s Estate having “not being attended to for decades,” says Nair.
And one constructive step led to another. Nair writes that they in phases took up rectification works in various parts of Rashtrapati Bhavan, including restoring the “deteriorating conditions of the priceless paintings in Ashoka Hall.”
Then a ‘Children’s Museum’ was set up in 2003, which was a “novel addition to the variety of facilities available,” says Mr Nair. A new ‘herbal garden’, a garden for the visually challenged, a ‘Musical Fountain’ that was commissioned in 2006 and a bio-diversity park were all pleasant and aesthetic additions when Dr. Kalam was at the helm.
Equally significant, reflective of the former President’s keenness to intensely use the Internet to communicate with and disseminate knowledge to the people at large, Mr Nair writes how in those years, July 2002-July 2007, a “veritable electronic revolution” was seen at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
“Accessing the first citizen through e-mails that ran into few hundreds almost every day became a way of life with people all over the country,” says Mr Nair, even as he recalls how Dr Kalam’s love for books and reading occasioned publications on flora and fauna of Rashtrapathi Bhavan among others.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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