The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Kalam imparts words of wisdom

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Friday, Sep 28, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Kalam imparts words of wisdom

Interacts with students at Astronautical Congress

— PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

Sharing spotlight: Former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam with a teenaged girl from Bangalore, Shriya Dinakar, at the IAC 2007 in the city on Thursday.

HYDERABAD: Will you be the one to walk on Mars? Will you be the one to contribute to bring down the cost of launch vehicles? These and several other questions were posed to school students by former President, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam during a lively interaction he had with them at the ongoing International Astronautical Congress here on Thursday.

Describing how Nobel Laureates Sir C. V. Raman had valued science and S. Chandrasekhar had treated it as a life-time mission, he told the ‘space youth’ to dream and achieve their goals through hard work. He referred to how a 13-year-old girl, Shriya Dinakar from Bangalore, met him on Thursday and described to him her ambition to land on Mars. Another girl in California had harboured a similar “dream” and became part of the team that was developing a robotic rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for landing on Mars.

Q&A session

Answering questions that ranged from the prospect of international rivalry in space to why he had not accepted the proposal to be the President for another term, he said that to achieve the dreams of the youth, laboratories should generate an environment conducive to scientific research.

Mr. Kalam suggested that a science cadre should be created to generate jobs . To a question on the possibility of international rivalry in harvesting resources on the moon, he suggested that an International Space Council should be set to deal with such problems.

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