A beautifully done tribute to late former Indian president and aerospace scientist Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Beautifully shot by Matt Shaw and directed by Senthil Kumar, the video gracefully walks through his struggles and awe-inspiring journey in 6 minutes. My father had gifted his book Wings of Fire when I was in school and I was really inspired by his firm determination and hard work in working towards a dream.
Short Summary: It’s a stormy day on a bridge over the Indian ocean, to the island of Rameswaram, a night train delivers the morning newspaper to a newspaper boy who rides out into the storm to deliver the news and is the first to read the newspaper everyday as he reads all along his morning route, under the big banyan tree and sitting on the boat while his father rowed people from the island to the mainland. One day he sees the picture of a spitfire aircraft in a newspaper article about the Supermarine Spitfire, a fighter jet used by the British in World War II. He cuts it out, makes a paper rocket out of it and makes it fly and puts it up on his wall. This newspaper image became his life’s purpose. His dream was to fly a fighter plane as a young air force pilot but he fails the Indian Air Force Pilot entrance exam after India’s independence. The young man did not give up and went back to his reading habit, that helped him overcome his fear of failure. He switched lanes to become a rocket scientist on autopilot, flying missiles and testing nuclear weapons, and rising to the highest office in the country. And when he was President of India, from 2002 to 2007, he was the Chief of all the armed forces in the country. It was finally time for his childhood dream to come true. He was flying a fighter plane, at the ripe old age of 72 years as the President of the world’s largest democracy. One of the oldest men in the world to ever fly a fighter plane, which was his childhood dream. And that’s when he wrote the famous motivational line to all children : “Dreams are not what you see in sleep. Dreams are those that don’t let you sleep.”
The story of a newspaper boy who woke up the country. A true story to ignite the power of dreams in a billion young Indians.