How does the author describe: (i) his father, (ii) his mother, (iii) himself?
<answer> 1) The author describes his father as a wise and generous person. He felt happy when he helped others. He did not have much formal education and riches. He was a man of confidence and great wisdom. He avoided  inessential comforts and luxuries. 2) His mother was a noble and kind-hearted woman. She used to feed a large number of people. She had all the attributes of a typical Indian mother. 3) I was born into a middle-class Tamil family. I was a short boy with rather undistinguished looks, born to tall and handsome parents. I studied physics and aerospace engineering and became a scientist. <context> 1. I WAS born into a middle-class Tamil family in the
island town of Rameswaram in the erstwhile Madras
State. My father, Jainulabdeen, had neither much
formal education nor much wealth; despite these
disadvantages, he possessed great innate wisdom
and a true generosity of spirit. He had an ideal
helpmate in my mother, Ashiamma. I do not recall
the exact number of people she fed every day, but I
am quite certain that far more outsiders ate with
us than all the members of our own family
put together.
2. I was one of many children — a short boy with
rather undistinguished looks, born to tall and
handsome parents. We lived in our ancestral house,
which was built in the middle of the nineteenth
century. It was a fairly large pucca house, made of
limestone and brick, on the Mosque Street in
Rameswaram. My austere father used to avoid all
inessential comforts and luxuries. However, all
necessities were provided for, in terms of food,
medicine or clothes. In fact, I would say mine
was a very secure childhood, both materially
and emotionally.
3. The Second World War broke out in 1939, when I
was eight years old. For reasons I have never been
able to understand, a sudden demand for tamarind
seeds erupted in the market. I used to collect the
seeds and sell them to a provision shop on Mosque
Street. A day’s collection would fetch me the princely
sum of one anna. My brother-in-law Jallaluddin
would tell me stories about the War which I would
later attempt to trace in the headlines in Dinamani.
Our area, being isolated, was completely unaffected
by the War. But soon India was forced to join the
Allied Forces and something like a state of
emergency was declared. The first casualty came
in the form of the suspension of the train halt at
Rameswaram station. The newspapers now had to
be bundled and thrown out from the moving train
on the Rameswaram Road between Rameswaram
and Dhanuskodi. That forced my cousin Samsuddin,
who distributed newspapers in Rameswarm, to look
for a helping hand to catch the bundles and, as if
naturally, I filled the slot. Samsuddin helped me
earn my first wages. Half a century later, I can still
feel the surge of pride in earning my own money for
the first time.
4. Every child is born, with some inherited
characteristics, into a specific socio-economic and
emotional environment, and trained in certain ways
by figures of authority. I inherited honesty and selfdiscipline
from my father; from my mother, I
inherited faith in goodness and deep kindness and
so did my three brothers and sister. I had three
close friends in my childhood — Ramanadha Sastry,
Aravindan and Sivaprakasan. All these boys were
from orthodox Hindu Brahmin families. As children,
none of us ever felt any difference amongst ourselves
because of our religious differences and upbringing.
In fact, Ramanadha Sastry was the son of Pakshi
Lakshmana Sastry, the high priest of the
Rameswaram temple. Later, he took over the
priesthood of the Rameswaram temple from his
father; Aravindan went into the business of
arranging transport for visiting pilgrims; and
Sivaprakasan became a catering contractor for the
Southern Railways.
5. During the annual Shri Sita Rama Kalyanam
ceremony, our family used to arrange boats with a
special platform for carrying idols of the Lord from
the temple to the marriage site, situated in the
middle of the pond called Rama Tirtha which was
near our house. Events from the Ramayana and
from the life of the Prophet were the bedtime stories
my mother and grandmother would tell the children
in our family.
6. One day when I was in the fifth standard at the
Rameswaram Elementary School, a new teacher
came to our class. I used to wear a cap which
marked me as a Muslim, and I always sat in the
front row next to Ramanadha Sastry, who wore the
Our family used to arrange boats for carrying idols
of the Lord from the temple to the marriage site.
sacred thread. The new teacher could not stomach
a Hindu priest’s son sitting with a Muslim boy. In
accordance with our social ranking as the new
teacher saw it, I was asked to go and sit on the
back bench. I felt very sad, and so did Ramanadha
Sastry. He looked utterly downcast as I shifted to
my seat in the last row. The image of him weeping
when I shifted to the last row left a lasting
impression on me.
7. After school, we went home and told our respective
parents about the incident. Lakshmana Sastry
summoned the teacher, and in our presence, told
the teacher that he should not spread the poison of
social inequality and communal intolerance in the
minds of innocent children. He bluntly asked the
teacher to either apologise or quit the school and
the island. Not only did the teacher regret his
behaviour, but the strong sense of conviction
Lakshmana Sastry conveyed ultimately reformed
this young teacher.
8. On the whole, the small society of Rameswaram
was very rigid in terms of the segregation of different
social groups. However, my science teacher
Sivasubramania Iyer, though an orthodox Brahmin
with a very conservative wife, was something of a
rebel. He did his best to break social barriers so
that people from varying backgrounds could mingle
easily. He used to spend hours with me and would
say, “Kalam, I want you to develop so that you
are on par with the highly educated people of the
big cities.”
9. One day, he invited me to his home for a meal. His
wife was horrified at the idea of a Muslim boy being
invited to dine in her ritually pure kitchen. She
refused to serve me in her kitchen. Sivasubramania
Iyer was not perturbed, nor did he get angry
with his wife, but instead, served me with
his own hands and sat down beside me to eat his
meal. His wife watched us from behind the kitchen
door. I wondered whether she had observed any
difference in the way I ate rice, drank water or
cleaned the floor after the meal. When I was leaving
his house, Sivasubramania Iyer invited me to join
him for dinner again the next weekend. Observing
my hesitation, he told me not to get upset, saying,
“Once you decide to change the system, such
problems have to be confronted.” When I visited his
house the next week, Sivasubramania Iyer’s wife
took me inside her kitchen and served me food with
her own hands.
10. Then the Second World War was over and India’s
freedom was imminent. “Indians will build their
own India,” declared Gandhiji. The whole country
was filled with an unprecedented optimism. I asked
my father for permission to leave Rameswaram
and study at the district headquarters in
Ramanathapuram.
11. He told me as if thinking aloud, “Abul ! I know you
have to go away to grow. Does the seagull not fly
across the sun, alone and without a nest?” He quoted
Khalil Gibran to my hesitant mother, “Your children
are not your children. They are the sons and daughters
of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but
not from you. You may give them your love but not
your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts.”
A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM
