- Lived:
- 1931–2015 · Rameswaram, Madras Presidency (Tamil Nadu) → Thumba, Hyderabad, Pokhran, Rashtrapati Bhavan, and every school auditorium in India
- Field:
- aerospace engineering — rocketry, guided missiles, national projects — and, from 2002 to 2007, the Presidency of India
- The Big Idea:
- A boatman's son learned to organize thousands of engineers into machines that fly — satellite launchers, then ballistic missiles, then a nuclear test — and then spent his last two decades as the republic's most beloved teacher, telling children they were allowed to dream. India has never fully worked out whether those are two stories or one.
- In their words:
- "Strength respects strength" — his standing defence, in interviews and in India 2020, of the weapons he built
- If you remember one thing:
- The most loved public figure of modern India was the man who ran its missile programme — and the country's inability to separate the teacher from the weapons-builder is not a flaw in his story; it is the story.