For P Thangamarimuthu (38), both of whose legs were amputated after an accident more than three years ago, it’s virtually a fresh lease of life. And the person who gave him new hope was none other than President A P J Abdul Kalam.

The two had never met before. But Thangamarimuthu, formerly a conductor in a government transport bus, remembered reading somewhere about Kalam’s experiment with lightweight carbon-carbon material designed for Agni to make calipers for the polio-affected. This reduced the weight of the 4-kg calipers by 400 grams. This factoid gave him an idea.

Burdened with debt running to about Rs 8 lakh, dismissed from his job due to his disability, and having to literally crawl from one official to another for justice, Thangamarimuthu, in sheer desperation, dashed off a letter in March this year to Kalam, seeking his help to get a pair of calipers.

He had the letter scanned and sent by e-mail to Kalam’s address. “I got a response in 10 days,” he told The Indian Express over mobile phone from Alangulam village about 20 km from Madurai. The letter, signed by the President’s private secretary, instructed him to contact the Hyderabad-based Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS). It was at NIMS that Kalam had experimented with calipers using defence technology systems.

Thangamarimuthu, accompanied by his mother, took a train to Hyderabad on April 7. There he learnt that what he required was prosthesis and not calipers that were used by polio-affected people. But Kalam had realized this and had not wanted to disappoint Thangamarimuthu. So he instructed L Narendranath of the institute’s orthopaedic department to give the man a pair of artificial limbs instead.

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