"Sir, I want to call on you."
"Most welcome. Please come over at 10.30."
"Sir, my office is far away. I may not be able to reach you in time. Could you please give me another time?"
"You have all the time in the world. I meant 10.30 p.m.!"

R. Ramanathan retired as Member Finance, Ex-officio Secretary to the government of India, Telecom Commission. At the beginning of his career with the Indian Audit and Accounts Service in 1965, he could not have possibly imagined that one day he would have the privilege to narrate the stories of the ascent of the greatest stars to shine in the history of his generation. Perhaps, out of his own simplicity, he still doesn’t realise, that his words have given rise to the only myth of our times, which is real.

R. Ramanathan’s book, ‘Who is KALAM?’ is not just an account of the seven years he spent with our beloved President and ‘the humanist’, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, but a loving tribute to a colleague. During the years 1993 – 1999, R. Ramanathan worked as a financial advisor in the DRDO, and had an opportunity to look at Dr. Kalam from close quarters. Here, he recounts those moments related to day-to-day business with the Director General of DRDO.

Everyday we see president Kalam on TV and every image is as endearing as the last one. Ramanathan’s book goes beyond the charming president who loves kids. Beginning, the chapter, ‘My reminiscences of a humanist’, the book goes on to unfold various facets of the ‘Man’ - Dr. Kalam as the head of a key department and a scientific advisor to the Rakshamantri. Dr. Kalam was a boss who would make sure that he was in touch with every single instrument of his department and meet his colleagues on every Monday for Defence Research Council meetings. He was a truly democratic boss and would admonish a department head if he came alone by saying, "So, you are solo! You know everything". Dr. Kalam was man sensitive to his subordinates, who would go out of his way to make sure that the department stood by them in the need of the hour. Dr. Kalam was a visionary who has made great efforts to utilise the benefits of specialised science to the common man. Dr. Kalam pioneered the introduction of composite materials in India. At his behest, very strong and light composite material suited for space and aircraft applications are now being used to make light artificial legs.

Small things make great men, they say. Dr. Kalam gives a special meaning to it. Consider this anecdote from Ramanathan’s book:

"Sir, I want to call on you."
"Most welcome. Please come over at 10.30."  
"Sir, my office is far away. I may not be able to reach you in time. Could you please give me another time?"

"You have all the time in the world. I meant 10.30 p.m.!"

This is a conversation between Dr. Kalam and a major general. Ramanathan’s book is full of such anecdotes. Word by word, anecdote after anecdote, Ramanathan builds on his narrative about Dr. Kalam. The more the author tries to bring Dr. Kalam to a more humane level, the more his personality grows into something exalted. Small bits from Dr. Kalam’s life, put together by Ramanathan conjure an image of an ordinary man chosen by destiny to perform extraordinary deeds. Ramanathan’s book doesn’t state it explicitly, but what is implied, is that Dr. Kalam by virtue of his humility, an unbound dedication to his calling in life, his uncompromising faith in human good and efforts to become a good human being, make Dr. Kalam Destiny’s favorite child.

Ramanathan, through a series of loosely connected events, succeeds in making us walk along the lofty corridors of state machinery that Dr. Kalam made relevant to the common man by putting people first, ahead of everything else. The effusive admiration, with which Ramanathan holds Dr. Kalam colours every word, yet doesn’t make it an obsequious eulogy to a colleague, who has become the President of our nation. Instead, it painstakingly narrates individual traits, which Ramanathan has repeatedly seen getting transformed into actions. He tells us about the commendable scrupulousness which Dr. Kalam shows in his personal financial dealings. Obviously, The president of a country, where official jurisdiction is easily taken to be a personal fiefdom, paid for the services provided to him and during, never left a guesthouse until all his account were personally settled. In the same breath, we are told that Dr. Kalam never hesitated to get huge amounts sanctioned by the government for the projects he set his heart on.

Ramanathan’s achievement in writing this book has been his simplicity. He knows that he’s not writing a literary masterpiece. Sentences begin to follow a familiar pattern in terms of their structure, once you reach midway through the book. Yet they ring with satisfaction, which comes out of the realisation that the only way to convey the true significance of Dr. Kalam’s work is by letting it speak for itself. Therefore, there are just enough words in the book, no superfluity, no pompous metaphors. ‘Dreamer’ is the only epithet other than the ‘Humanist’, which Ramanathan chooses to get to the essence of Dr. Kalam. He tells us that, a single-minded approach, to change one’s action with all the energies in order to reach a certain well-defined goal, is what Dr. Kalam calls dreaming. For Ramanathan, Dr. Kalam is another Vivekanada, who inspired with his own vision goes about changing the face of an entire era.

The book never tries to make a superman out of the ‘missile man’, instead it goes deeper into the heart of Dr. Kalam to seek out the core, which makes Dr. Kalam a unique combination of all the traits which make a ‘Yugpurusha’, the man who defined his age. ‘The quintessence of Dr. Kalam is his intense humanism’, says Ramanathan. Indeed, the word is the epitome of what all of us hold to be true, yet choose to act otherwise. Dr. Kalam’s life is surely going to be a source of inspiration for the generations to come. What the book ‘Who is Kalam?’ does, is to open a window for a more-than-curious reader into those years of Dr. Kalam’s life’s, where he finds himself standing along with a whole nation at the very edge of a dream about to be fulfilled.