The Kalam Effect: My Years with the President
P.M. Nair
Harpercollins india, Rs 295

P.M. Nair’s account of his years with Kalam paints an affectionate profile of the “people’s president”
India’s eleventh president, Abul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, is not only a fascinating man but also a very lucky man. Before being sworn in as head of state, Kalam’s seven-year tenure as scientific adviser to the defence minister culminated in the Shakti series of nuclear tests in 1998 and a largely successful Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme. It was only after he left that the public and the lawmakers started questioning the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) on cost overruns and delays, and the truth behind its indigenisation of the Indian weapons programme.

In fact, it was the politics of the day and the equation between the then defence minister George Fernandes and Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav that prepared the pitch for Kalam as the president of India. His five-year tenure at the Rashtrapati Bhavan was synchronous with the ascent of India to the global high table, with the most powerful people making a beeline for New Delhi. Kalam could even get away with lecturing the high and mighty, including the no-nonsense general Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, with a presentation on his pet project, Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA).

Of course, none of this is recorded in P.M. Nair’s book The Kalam Effect, which chronicles the career bureaucrat’s five-year term as secretary to President Kalam. The author is unabashed in his praise for Kalam as he nearly believes that his president had a channel to the weather gods. Nair, it seems, has downplayed his own part in the book to show the sharp contrast with Kalam. Like the author himself, the book is rather non-controversial, a narrative of the high point of Nair’s 39-year career in the IAS.

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