Vikram Sarabhai: A life By Amrita Shah,
Penguin,
Rs 425

It is 3.30 in the morning, sometime in 1968. A.P.J Abdul Kalam, aeons away from the Indian presidency, arrives in Delhi to meet the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Vikram Sarabhai. Kalam has known Sarabhai for sufficient time to stop worrying about the ungodly hour. In the next few hours, he listens carefully to Sarabhai’s idea of a rocket-assisted take-off system for military aircraft and accompanies him to see a Russian ROTA in the outskirts of Delhi.

Not all are such willing listeners and executioners of ideas, especially if these are as futuristic as contemplating artificial satellites and rocket launchers at a time when there was little capability to put together a rocket. Sarabhai was far ahead of his time, thinking of enriched uranium and fast-breeder reactors or the use of satellites to link rural communities while his colleagues in the AEC could not think beyond the next experiment. Even as a cotton-mill-owner in the earlier part of his career, Sarabhai’s attempt to change the face of the industry through the use of science caused much consternation among the Gujarati sheths.

It was because of his stupendous man management and leadership that Vikram Sarabhai was able to push through most of his dreams. But to him, the leader was more of a ‘cultivator’ than a ‘manufacturer’: “He has to provide the soil and the overall climate and environment in which the seed can grow.” And that is what he proceeded to do through his maverick style of institution-building — IIM, Ahmedabad, National Institute of Design, the ORG and a string of other premier institutes.

In Amrita Shah’s account, Vikram Sarabhai is clearly the hero who convinces traditional Gujarati banias to embrace scientific practices, sells dreams to the young, promotes the careers of the women he loves and preaches a peaceful nuclear policy in the face of tremendous hostility from his own fraternity and the political establishment. Anecdote after anecdote conveys the boundless energy, imagination, determination and commitment of India’s pioneering scientist, industrialist, institution-builder and human resource manager. Shah does not give a hagiographical account of Sarabhai’s life, and is often critical of the man, but she makes no bones of the fact that she is thoroughly in love with her subject.

Shah’s problem is understandable. It is difficult not to be charmed by this particularly handsome Gujarati — his intellect, genius, business acumen and dogged zeal to improve life through the application of science. And there is, of course, his sensitive handling of the women in his life — his sisters, wife, daughter and mistress. Vikram Sarabhai, in fact, emerges as the tragic hero in Shah’s story. Despite his sincerity and commitment to his relationships and his work, he is misunderstood. Shah deals sensitively with Mrinalini’s distancing from her husband, but her sympathies quite obviously lie with Vikram, who finds no one to comfort him in his “hour of darkness”. The mad frenzy of work does nothing to lift the gloom.

But where Shah allows the sense of tragedy to come through most palpably is in Vikram being forced, by jingoist political leaders and ambitious colleagues, to concede to India’s need for a nuclear bomb despite his convictions to the contrary. We find an oddly vacillating Vikram unable to stick to his ground on the principle of a peaceful nuclear policy. He is saved from the final humiliation of defeat by his death on December 30, 1971. It took India three more years to throw Sarabhai’s caution to the winds and explode its first bomb in Pokhran.