Visionary

It was 2007. We were taken to a college from our school to witness the speech of our beloved former President, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam. It was an international conference on math and science. I don’t remember what he spoke. Please don’t ask!

After the incident, many of us became excited and started fighting for his books in the school library. ‘India 2020’ and ‘Wings of Fire’ remained popular reads for years. I guess it’s present even now in the reading wish-list of many.

Those were the days when the year 2020 was over-hyped. Delivering a speech on “India 2020” was a proud moment for most school-goers. Transforming the nation to a developed country was a goal back then.

When we were focused on developing an ambitious mind, countdown began for the final exams. Library got abandoned all of a sudden, and we were back to textbooks.

Mocks started. As expected, there was an essay asking us to describe India through our eyes in 2020. Most of us flooded the pages with national development – a nation free of poverty, illiteracy, corruption, technological developments in transportation like bullet trains and flying cars, automated systems in various sectors, designer crops to survive disasters, improvement in population genetics to battle diseases, and what not!

There are few exceptionally creative minds everywhere. There was one in our batch, too. She’s the one who wrote interesting stories on her personal goals and where she’d be in 2020. To provide justice to the assigned topic, she concluded, “I’d be more than happy to live my life in India which would be a developed nation in 2020”.

You could’ve guessed the results. Following the usual norms, the teacher provided her a standing ovation in the classroom, and she failed the mock.

Now, on turning the pages back, I feel that she was the right visionary, we failed to see then! She was the one who deserved the applause!

We don’t make mistakes,
just happy little accidents.
– Bob Ross

Stay Safe! Cheers!

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Update:
There’s a new column on ‘Crazy Nerds’ which displays a quote every week, irrespective of whether a post is being posted or not. It’s available in the footer in the desktop version. For those on the WordPress app, you can follow the link in the footnote of blog posts.