Abdul Kalam Born: India's Missile Man and People's President

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam engineered India's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before becoming the nation's 11th president, a role he used to champion science education for the young. Known as the "Missile Man of India," he inspired a generation of students to pursue careers in technology and earned widespread admiration as a leader untouched by political corruption. Born in 1931 in Rameswaram, a small island town in Tamil Nadu, Kalam grew up in a modest Muslim family and worked as a newspaper delivery boy to help pay for his education. He studied aerospace engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology and joined India's Defense Research and Development Organisation in 1958. Over the next four decades, he led the development of India's first indigenous satellite launch vehicle and the Agni and Prithvi missile systems that gave the country credible nuclear deterrence. His role in India's 1998 nuclear weapons tests at Pokhran made him a national hero. Elected president in 2002 as a consensus candidate, Kalam was the rare head of state who genuinely preferred meeting schoolchildren to meeting dignitaries. He visited schools across India, delivered lectures at universities, and made himself accessible to students through personal correspondence in a way that no Indian leader had done before. His 2002 book Wings of Fire became required reading in Indian schools. He died in 2015 while delivering a lecture to students at the Indian Institute of Management in Shillong, collapsing mid-sentence. His funeral drew heads of state from across the world and millions of mourners in India.