Kalam's publisher on how former president knew the value of every sentence

Every meeting with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was memorable – I never ceased to be amazed by his energy, his enthusiasm, his ability to come up with new ideas coined in the most succinct language. He would invariably greet me with: "So what is your mission?" I came to expect this so much that before every meeting, I began to prepare an elevator pitch about what it was that I had come to see him about.

The meeting that I will remember always, though, is the one that would turn out to be our last – this was a day before we were to send Beyond 2020, the last Kalam book I edited, to press. We sat in an upstairs room at 10 Rajaji Marg, Dr Kalam at his desk, his secretary at the computer, and I had been ushered into a comfortable armchair. Dr Kalam had some doubts about a couple of the chapters still, he wanted to fine tune the text. The text was projected, in very large pointsize, on to the white wall, a page at a time. All of us stared at the relevant passages in silence for a minute or two. Then, to my surprise, the secretary started to read the text out loud, in an oratorical style. Dr Kalam nodded several times at sentences he was happy with, and every now and then he would stop the narration and say, "No no no no – can’t say that no," and then he would cite some statistical data off the top of his head which contradicted the sentence that had just been read. Once or twice he said, "No, say this no," and then he would close his eyes and recite a somewhat rhetorical sentence that he wanted to replace the existing one with. Turning to me, he explained, "Books were listened to before they were read, no – even now we first listen to stories as a children, before a child gets to read them." I understood that he was focusing on the impact of the spoken word even as he was working for a book – and was impressed afresh.

At one point, I voiced one of my rare objections to something he had written, which seemed a bit too much of a broadbrush statement to me. Dr Kalam turned his charming smile on me. "Tea has arrived," he said, "have a biscuit, no." This was his gentle way of overruling me. I had to remind myself that he knew the value of every sentence that was in his books, everything was there for a reason – sometimes an editor wouldn’t quite "get it", and had to be persuaded…

We finished in about three hours; I could tell that Dr Kalam was exhausted, but all of us were now satisfied with what would go to print. I turned at the door to say goodbye to him. But his job done, he had now fallen asleep. That was the last time I saw him.

I will miss Dr Kalam: I have never known a person like him, living for ideas, always full of life, never ceasing to dream, able to inspire people in an instant. And I still can’t bring myself to believe that there will never be another Kalam book to edit.

(Udayan Mitra was Kalam's editor for 10 years)