The parallel with Nehru is instructive in another respect. That he has asked to be addressed as “chacha” probably has more than semiotic coincidence. In some respects Kalam’s Vision Twenty Twenty is a smorgasbord of ideas, many of them quite incoherent. But it shared with Nehru the sense of promising a new future, a relentless focus on the long-term big picture, a promise of creating a new India. There was a relentlessness with which Kalam stuck to the big theme, and that relentlessness became a sign of his sincerity. Of course the image that he thought his own thoughts was a huge boost in an age when thoughts are internalised from the outside, due to extraneous pressures. Like Nehru, there was a great faith in science and technology as the source of solution to human problems. Kalam came to office in a nation that reveres engineers more than almost anyone else. The old-fashioned sense that knowledge is the solution to many problems is one that often gets lost in our scepticism about human nature, and particularly that species called politicians.

Indeed, the strength and weakness of Kalam’s outlook is that it is very much an engineer’s: it has little patience for process, incentives, ideology, interests, all the raw material of politics. But it has also helped define the aspirations of a new and emerging India. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in the very same interviews I referred to, Bill Gates comes as a distant second icon. But did this engineering outlook on social problems make Kalam a politician? Not in one significant sense. Part of what people expect from their leaders is hope, a set of answers to their challenges, a set of possibilities, even a plan of action.

... contd.