MPSC Rajyaseva 2018 CSAT — Question 26

Read the following passage and answer the questions from 26 to 30: [Note: this is a paraphrased summary of the original passage, not a verbatim reproduction, since the source is an excerpt from a specific published memoir.] The narrator, APJ Abdul Kalam, recalls a colleague named Arun Tiwari, who had worked in his laboratory since 1982. Their bond deepened in February 1987, when Kalam visited Tiwari in a coronary care unit in Hyderabad, where Tiwari was recovering from a serious heart-related illness. Tiwari asked only for Kalam's blessing, hoping to live long enough to complete one of his projects. He recovered within a month and went on to play a key role in completing the airframe of the Akash missile, a task finished in three years. Afterward, Tiwari spent a year turning Kalam's own recollections into a connected narrative, eventually helping write Kalam's autobiography, weaving in pieces of poetry Kalam had marked in his personal reading over the years. Kalam frames the resulting book as more than a personal memoir -- as an account of Indian science's broader struggle to become self-reliant. He closes by describing himself as a believer who sees his scientific achievements, and the people who helped him along the way, as expressions of a higher purpose rather than his own doing alone.