Science & Tech Quote by Abdul Kalam

“English is necessary” lands like a concession from a man who spent his life selling national self-reliance. Kalam isn’t praising English; he’s treating it as a temporary technology, a tool you pick up because the world’s instruction manual happens to be printed in it. The sentence has the pragmatist’s cadence: necessity first, pride later. It’s also quietly impatient. English dominates “as at present” original science is in English, implying the problem isn’t Indians learning English but Indians not being the place where first drafts of knowledge are written.

The subtext is a cultural bargain: access now, sovereignty soon. Kalam sketches a two-decade runway where India uses English to absorb frontier research while building the institutional muscle to produce “original works” in Indian languages. That phrase matters. He’s not talking about translation or popularization; he’s describing a shift in epistemic power, from consuming science to authoring it, from fluency as a gatekeeping requirement to fluency as an option.

The Japan comparison is doing diplomatic work. Japan modernized without surrendering its linguistic core, building technical vocabulary domestically and letting Japanese carry advanced thought. Kalam holds that up as a model that sidesteps the bruising politics of language in India: he’s not attacking English outright, he’s proposing an exit strategy.

Context sharpens the intent. Coming from a scientist-president in a postcolonial, globally competitive India, this is nation-building framed as language planning: a belief that the future of dignity is written not just in rockets and labs, but in the tongues that get to name discoveries first.