Life & Mortality Quote by Abdul Kalam

A sour little inventory like this is meant to sting: not because it’s hyperbolic, but because it’s familiar. When Abdul Kalam, a statesman who spent years selling the public on scientific ambition and national confidence, reduces the news diet to “death, sickness, terrorism, crime,” he’s diagnosing a mood as much as a media ecosystem. The line reads like a complaint, but it functions as a provocation: if a country keeps rehearsing catastrophe, it starts to confuse vigilance with progress.

Kalam’s intent is less “stop reporting bad things” than “notice what our attention economy is training us to become.” The subtext is moral and strategic. Morally, he’s hinting at compassion fatigue: constant exposure to suffering turns tragedy into wallpaper, dulling civic urgency. Strategically, he’s warning that a nation’s imagination is a resource; saturate it with fear and scandal and you shrink the public’s appetite for long-term projects - education, research, institution-building - the slow work that doesn’t spike ratings.

Context matters. Kalam emerged as a rare Indian public figure who could speak the language of security and the language of aspiration, often in the same breath. In the post-liberalization, post-9/11 era - when terrorism and crime became sticky narratives and 24/7 news hardened into a competitive sport - his frustration doubles as a leadership move. He’s trying to redirect the national story from reactive grievance to constructive ambition, not by denying reality, but by arguing that what we constantly consume becomes what we collectively expect.