Wings of Fire by Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam

 

Preface

• Real joy of living can be found in only one way - In one's communication with an eternal source of hidden knowledge within oneself- which each individual is bidden to seek and find for himself.
• Historically, people have always fought among themselves on one issue or another. Prehistorically, battles were fought over food and shelter. With the passage of time, wars were waged over religious and ideological beliefs; and now the dominant struggle of sophisticated warfare is for economic and technological supremacy. Consequently, economic and technological supremacy is equated with political power and world control.
• We are all born with a divine fire in us. Our efforts should be to give wings to this fire and fill the world with the glow of its goodness.

Chapter 1: 

• “When you pray,” he said, “you transcend your body and become a part of the cosmos, which knows no division of wealth, age, caste, or creed.” 
• “In his own time, in his own place, in what he real y is, and in the stage he has reached—good or bad—every human being is a specific element within the whole of the manifest divine Being. So why be afraid of difficulties, sufferings and problems? When troubles come, try to understand the relevance of your sufferings. Adversity always presents opportunities for introspection.” 
• Whenever human beings find themselves alone, as a natural reaction, they start looking for company. Whenever they are in trouble, they look for someone to help them. Whenever they reach an impasse, they look to someone to show them the way out. Every recurrent anguish, longing, and desire finds its own special helper. For the people who come to me in distress, I am but a go-between in their effort to propitiate demonic forces with prayers and offerings. This is not a correct approach at al and should never be fol owed. One must understand the difference between a fear-ridden vision of destiny and the vision that enables us to seek the enemy of fulfilment within ourselves. 
• there exists a divine power that can lift one up from confusion, misery, melancholy and failure, and guide one to one’s true place. And once an individual severs his emotional and physical bondage, he is on the road to freedom, happiness and peace of mind.

Chapter 3

• I would enter the assembly shop leaving my other problems outside, just as my father used to enter the mosque for prayer, leaving his shoes outside.
• Seek the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Ask you shall receive. It didn't happen immediately, but it happened neverthless.
• The best way to win was to not need to win. The best performances are accomplished when you are relaxed and free of doubt. Take things as they came.
• One of the important functions of prayer, I believe, is to act as a stimulus to creative ideas. Within the mind are all the resources required for successful living. Ideas are present in the consciousness, which when released and given scope to grow and take shape, can lead to successful events. God, our creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us to tap and develop these powers.

Chapter 4:

• Those things that hurt instruct: Benjamin Franklin.
• Meet your problems head on. Get out of them as soon as possible, rather than suffer them.
• means the things that you are afraid of or you feel inferior to them; is the things you should do. Make the obstacles upside down. Those are "instruct" means instruction to do things which fears you most. Or you can simply say that: "Your greatest victory lies in your greatest fear".
• Allah's curse: "Live your life in mistrust and doubt"
• Free of doubt and mistrust then your are out of curse!!.
• What makes life in Indian organizations difficult is the widespread prevalence of this very contemptuous pride. It stops us from listening to our juniors, subordinates and people down the line. You cannot expect a person to deliver results if you humiliate him, nor can you expect him to be creative if you abuse him or despise him. The line between firmness and harshness, between strong leadership and bullying, between discipline and vindictiveness is very fine, but it has to be drawn. 
• India's first rocket : 21st November 1963, Sounding Rocket named Nike-Apache made in USA
• TERLS established from equal collaborations of USA, USSR and france.
• If Indians were to play a meaningful role in the community of nations, they must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to their real-life problems. They should have no intention of using it merely as a means to display our might.

Chapter 5

• Collective understanding of the problem is the main attribute of effective leadership. A leaders job is to make decision, but it is equally important to see to it that these decisions are accepted by his team members.
• Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger - Khalil Gibran
• Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.
• THe best work required more ability than I possessed and therefore I needed help that only god could give me.
• All reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Only a few unreasonable ones persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All progress in the world depends on these unreasonable men and their innovative and often non-conformist actions. - Bernard shaw
• It is essential for a project manager to learn to live with uncertainty and ambiguity. It was a myth to hold that the key to economic success is computability.
• A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week. It is a myth that to win big one must strive to optimize. Optimization win only in paper, but would invariably lose later in the real world.
• To make things move faster within existing work parameters, you have to pump in more people, more material, and more money. If you can't do that, change your parameters!.

Chapter 6: 

• How good is a leader? No better than his people and their commitment and participation in the project as full partners.
• Within my own small group of people I found leaders, and learned that leaders exist at every level.
• Mistakes are inevitable but generally manageable. It was in the handling of the crisis that arose as a consequence that talent could often be revealed. THE BEST WAY TO PREVENT ERRORS WAS TO ANTICIPATE THEM.
• Leader is an integrator of people.
• Scientific research could not survive in isolation, away from industry. 
• Both the worker and work is important, either extreme is sure to loose. Each member of group should work to enrich the others in the team and experience the enjoyment of working together.
• We have sent down to you revelations showing you an account of those who have gone before you and an admonition to righteous men - Qur'an.

Chapter 7

• I used to prepare a general schedule during my morning walk, and emphasize tow or three things I would definitely like to accomplish during the day, including at least one thing that would help achieve long-term goals.
• Once in office, I would clean the table first. Within the next ten minutes, I would scan all the papers and quickly divide them into different categories: those that required immediate action, low priority ones, ones that could be kept pending, and reading material. Then I would put the high priority papers in front of me and everything else out of sight.
• 3 things are important in project, which should be forced on members
• design capability
• goal setting and realisation
• strength to withstand setback.
• If you want to leave your footprints on the sands of time don't drag your feet.
• Communication and Conversation are different.
• Communication: full of informations
• Conversation: full of pleasantries, most often devoid of any useful information.
• Participative management
• Active interaction b/w those who wield administrative powers and the executing agencies.
• Being a human ignorance has always been with us, and always will be. What was new was my awareness of it, my awakening to its fathomless dimensions. I used to erroneously suppose that the function of science was to explain everything, and that unexplained phenomena were the province of people like my father and Lakshmana Sastry.
• There is difference b/w science and technology, difference b/w research and development.
• Science is inherently open-ended and exploratory. 
• Development is a closed loop. Mistakes are imperative in development and are made every day, but each mistake is used for modification, upgradation or betterment.
• Probably, the creator created engineers to make scientists achieve more. For each time scientists come up with a thoroughly researched and fully comprehended solution, engineers show them yet another lumineu, ye one more possibility.
• Science is a passion-a never ending voyage into promises and possibilities.
• Nothing new comes into time-bound projects without it's own problems.
• A project leader should always work with proven technologies in most of the systems as far as possible and experiment only from multiple resources

Chapter 8: