Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, parliamentary affairs minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, President APJ Abdul Kalam, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat walk into Parliament. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

New Delhi, June 7: The President today took the liberty of departing from parliamentary convention. But it was a poetic liberty.

As A.P.J. Abdul Kalam began his customary address to the first joint sitting of the two Houses after the Lok Sabha elections, Manmohan Singh and his cabinet colleagues must have wondered for a moment what the President was up to.

Kalam was not reading out the text of his speech cleared by Singh’s cabinet, though convention required him to faithfully read out the prepared text.

But the new Prime Minister must have realised soon that the man who now occupies Rashtrapati Bhavan is also a poet. Perhaps, Singh’s predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a poet himself, would have latched on quicker. Moreover, the new regime does not have too many poets in its ranks, unlike the previous government which had a line-up ranging from Vajpayee to Mamata Banerjee.

Kalam, as it turned out, was only giving a harmless prelude to the speech he was to read out without the freedom to quote a shayari (Urdu couplet) or two in between as Singh often used to in his budget speeches as finance minister earlier.

It was actually a prayer on behalf of the new government. Kalam said the idea for his poem, praying to the lord to bless India with a vision, struck him while he was taking his morning walk. He recited a few lines from the poem, The Vision, in his mother tongue, Tamil.

I climbed and climbed, where is the peak my lord?

I ploughed and ploughed, where is the knowledge treasure, my lord?

I sailed and sailed, where is the island of peace, my lord?

Almighty, bless my nation with vision, sweat resulting in happiness.

Perhaps, only the 50-odd MPs from Tamil Nadu — among them finance minister P. Chidambaram — would have grasped the message. Others had to depend on the English and Hindi translation.

After Kalam’s convention-breaking recital, it may not be surprising if Chidamba-ram’s budget speech next month has liberal sprinklings from Tagore and Thirukkural, the Tamil equivalent of Kautilya’s Arthashastra.

After all, he has done so in the past when he presented two budgets as the United Front’s finance minister.

The President was not the only one to deviate from tradition. His deputy did so, too.

Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, who developed cramps in his leg while reading the translated version of the President’s address last year, read out only the first and last paragraph of the 50-minute speech. Shekhawat said the “middle portion (should) be treated as read”, provoking laughter and thumping of desks.

Sources in the Vice-President’s office said Shekhawat had “informally sounded” both Kalam and parliamentary affairs minister Ghulam Nabi Azad about his decision. “The Vice-President felt there was no need to repeat the same address as there was a simultaneous interpretation service in place besides the Hindi texts provided to all the members,” a source said.