INDIA: For Avil J.P. Abdul Kalam, the scientist behind India's missile and nuclear weapon programmes who distributed newspapers to put himself through school, the journey from a remote fishing village to the country's presidential palace has been arduous.
After India's major opposition Congress party agreed yesterday to back the 70-year-old, self-effacing "missile man" with shoulder-length hair, casual manner and heavy Tamil accent as India's next president, he remarked, "Whatever has happened, has happened for the good."
Being a Muslim, Kalam is also viewed as a "politically correct choice" for the Hindu nationalist-led government of the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee.
Mr Vajpayee's Bhartiya Janata Party has been under attack by the opposition and the National Human Rights Commission for launching, since March, a three-month-long pogrom against Muslims in western Guajarat state.
Kalam's family, which converted to Islam after contact with Arab traders, achieved a special status in the highly revered Hindu Rameshwaram temple, on the southern-most tip, after an ancestor dived in and retrieved its main idol from a water tank.
A Brahmin family was responsible for encouraging Kalam to pursue aeronautical engineering. He remains a vegetarian and teetotaller and daily reads long passages from the Bhagvad Gita, Hinduism's holy book, alongside his Muslim prayers.
Kalam was chosen as the ruling coalition's candidate earlier this week after frantic negotiations between the government and the opposition failed to arrive at a consensus candidate. Though the presidency is largely a ceremonial appointment, it has played a crucial role over the past decade in forming coalition governments.
Assured of the Congress party's backing, Kalam is now certain to shift from his modest university digs in the southern port city of Madras, where he is a professor emeritus, to the 340-room sandstone presidential palace, with a workforce of thousands, a private golf course and polo ground, and a hospital and school for the household staff.
The incumbent, Kocheril Raman Narayanan, who lives in the palace built by British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, completes his five-year term on July 24th.
Kalam's father, who rented out boats to fisherman for a living, ensured his brilliant son was educated at the Madras Institute of Technology, after which he joined India's fledgling space programme and designed satellites. Then Kalam launched India's Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme that successfully developed short, medium and longrange conventional and nuclear-capable missiles. Kalam also presided over the 1998 underground nuclear tests that made India the world's sixth nuclear weapon state.