Thanks to Kalam, he can now fight, standing

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.

According to Narendranath, Rashtrapati Bhavan was in constant touch with him.

Thangamarimuthu stayed until April 30 at the hospital which took care of all his expenses and returned home triumphantly with “a pair of new legs.” He will now need training and physiotherapy to use the limbs. “But a private hospital in Madurai will help me do that,” said Thangamarimuthu.

It was on September 11, 2003, that Thangamarimuthu’s bus was involved in an accident when it collided with a truck. Several passengers in the bus had been injured including Thangamarimuthu, who suffered grievous injuries. His badly smashed limbs had to be amputated and subsequently he was also dismissed from work by the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation as being “unfit to be a conductor.”

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