Parenting & Family Quote by Abdul Kalam

A clean sentence like this is doing heavy political work: it converts hardship into moral currency. Abdul Kalam, speaking as a statesman and national symbol of scientific ambition, frames sacrifice not as loss but as investment - a down payment on a future the speaker claims to see more clearly than the listener. The “let us” is the key: it performs solidarity even as it asks for compliance. You’re not being ordered; you’re being recruited into a shared adulthood where discipline is proof of patriotism.

The subtext is a bargain between generations that never quite gets audited. “Our today” is conveniently collective - it can mean austerity, delayed wages, reduced civil liberties, long hours, postponed comfort - while the beneficiaries, “our children,” are emotionally unimpeachable. Who argues against children? That rhetorical shield is the quote’s power and its risk: it can dignify long-term planning, but it can also launder bad policy by wrapping it in family feeling. The future becomes a blank screen onto which leaders project legitimacy.

Context matters because Kalam’s public persona was built on national development: rockets, education, self-reliance, the idea that a postcolonial country can engineer its way into dignity. In that ecosystem, sacrifice reads less like martyrdom and more like discipline - the ethic of the lab applied to society. The line works because it offers a story structure people crave: suffering with direction. It asks citizens to trade present frustration for a promised narrative of arrival, and it makes refusing feel not merely selfish, but generationally disloyal.