Chennai: On a Sunday last October, the 18th of the month to be exact, I received a call from my Delhi bureau chief E. T. B Sivapriyan telling me that the Union Urban Development Ministry was vacating 10, Rajaji Marg, where the late President Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam had lived for most part of his post-retirement days. His thousands of books, manuscripts and even the veena on which he played now and then, were being packed into boxes to be loaded on to trucks and sent away to hometown Rameswaram. The bungalow would have as its new tenant the UPA regime’s Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma — remember his famous statement that Kalam ‘was a nationalist despite being a Muslim’?
I was then heading the News7Tamil TV channel as its Executive Editor. I asked Siva to rush the camera unit to record the horrific emptying of Kalam’s House of its soul — his books and personal belongings — to be readied for Minister Sharma. All the channels were busy, nay obsessed, with reporting the movie stars participating in the hotly contested Nadigar Sangam elections, when News7Tamil broke the Kalam story with all those very sad visuals, which included the veena being wrapped in a cloth and getting loaded on a truck. We got angry citizens to comment on the insensitive action by the Centre ignoring the plea from Kalam’s family and thousands of fans and followers to convert that house into an International Knowledge Centre, some sort of a research destination for the youth seeking answers to the problems of poverty, unemployment, migration, and so on, in the backdrop of the Vision-2020 scripted by the patriot-visionary.
A good friend and former journalist Durga Nandini, currently with change.org, suggested I use that global platform to put out a petition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu to stop the trucking away of Kalam’s belongings from 10, Rajaji Marg and to convert the House into a Knowledge Centre. I put out the petition on October 27 and within a short period, over 30,000 people signed, many of them angrier than me.
But there was no response from the Centre to all that anger and the public outrage at what we felt was an insult to not just Kalam’s legacy but also to the Indian youth, as it denied them an international research centre to pursue the development dreams of the late President. A few had then argued, insensitively, that it would be better to have the Kalam Centre at his native Rameswaram than in ‘distant’ Delhi. I responded pointing out that it would be best to set up a good district library in Rameswaram or Ramanathapuram to benefit the school and college students in the region while setting up the international research centre in Delhi so that scholars and researchers from across the world, particularly the third world countries, access the facilities there and seek answers for their national problems.
The change.org petition and the huge public response to it caught the eye of AAP Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Culture Minister Kapil Mishra. The latter got in touch with me saying so what if the Centre did not wish to have the Kalam Knowledge Centre in his House, the Delhi government would like to put up the Centre at a suitable site in the national capital. We were overjoyed as trucks were sent to Rameswaram to ferry back Kalam’s belongings to Delhi. Minister Mishra had insisted that his government only wished to honour the Kalam legacy and gift something of his dreams to the youth and did not wish to get into any politics. He insisted that Kalam’s family agreed wholeheartedly to gift his belongings to the proposed Centre in Delhi. I spoke to the family and a written acceptance was obtained from Kalam’s elder brother Mohammed Muthu Meera Lebbai Maraikayar, 99, for the AAP government to go ahead.
Things moved pretty fast after that. CM Kejriwal set up a three-member expert team to visit Rameswaram and assess the books and other belongings for planning the logistics of shifting them to Delhi and putting them on public exhibition until the full-fledged Knowledge Centre got ready. And now on July 30, the Kalam Museum will be inaugurated at Delhi by the CM.
“The museum — a microcosm of his life — will not educate people about Dr Kalam’s ideals, simple lifestyle and stratospheric achievements but will also inspire the youth of our country. Thousands of Dr Kalam’s books and documents that he worked through his life and the veena that he often played will be on display”, said the letter that Minister Mishra wrote to me on Tuesday, inviting me to participate in the grand inaugural. Nothing in my life, nothing at all, can match the happiness and pride of that great moment.
