In 1957, a young aeronautical engineering graduate from Madras travelled to Dehradun to appear before the Indian Air Force Selection Board, carrying a childhood dream. He wanted to fly fighter planes.
Twenty-five candidates appeared before the board, and eight seats were available. The engineer from Madras came ninth, missing by a single place. Some hours later, he found himself at the edge of a cliff with a lake far below. This is the part of the story he would write about years later, in plain prose, the way a man writes about the moment his life divided in two. Everything before the cliff was one life, and everything after was going to be another.
He boarded a bus to Rishikesh, because in India, when a man does not know where else to go with his grief, he goes to a river. He bathed in the Ganga and then made his way up the hill to the Sivananda Ashram, where Swami Sivananda was giving a discourse on the Bhagavad Gita.
After the discourse, Swami Sivananda looked at the young man in the last row and asked him what was troubling him. The young man told him about the selection board, the rank of ninth, and the seat he had missed. Sivananda listened, and then he reminded the young man of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 3, where Krishna finds Arjuna paralysed by weakness on the eve of the Kurukshetra war and tells him to give up this petty weakness of heart and arise. Sivananda asked the young man to repeat that teaching as a mantra. And then, in his own words, he said the sentence that would follow this man for the rest of his life.
"What you want to become is not revealed now, but it is predetermined."
The young man went back to Delhi. He joined the Directorate of Technical Development and Production, then the DRDO, then ISRO. He built India's satellite launch vehicles and its missile programme. In 2002, forty-five years after a selection board in Dehradun had decided he would never fly, he became the President of India.
And then, on the 8th of June 2006, at the age of seventy-four, the President of India sat in the cockpit of a Sukhoi-30 MKI at Lohegaon Air Force Base in Pune and took off, becoming the first head of state anywhere in the world to fly a fighter plane. The childhood dream had come back to him. It had just taken fifty years, and it had waited for him to become the kind of man who could hold it properly.
Most of us, when something we wanted is taken away, spend years arguing with the universe about it. Kalam did none of that arguing. He accepted the closed door and walked toward the one that was still being built for him. By the time the original dream came back around, he was no longer a twenty-five-year-old who needed it to feel complete. He was a President who could receive it.
"What you want to become is not revealed now, but it is predetermined." The wait is part of the becoming.