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Founder head of SISIR Radar, Distinguished scientist and former Director Space Applications Centre, Tapan Misra was Chief Guest to 3rd Annual Convocation of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kalyani, held at RN Tagore Auditorium of IISER, Kolkata on 7 December 2023.

We are publishing the transcript of Tapan Misra’s speech.

My dear young friends, you are standing on the threshold of your bright future which is going to span over a few decades ahead. I know, today is a day of mixed emotions- a fantastic feeling of announcing to the world that you have arrived and a bit of apprehension on what the future holds for you. You are going to witness and experience tremendous changes in society, technology, lifestyle, and global politics which I dare not hazard a guess today.

I am sure, all of you have planned your future course. Some may be already on the course and some may be just in the preparation. Whatever course you may embark upon, you may be naturally expectant of success in your chosen path.

Success means many different things to different people. But after four decades of working experience, I feel the success is when you feel that you still command respect from people when you retire from a position of power and influence and you are in no position to benefit them in any way.

Success means to me, at the end of the day, when you feel inner satisfaction that you have contributed your mite in building your nation and bringing smiles to the people who are not as fortunate as you are.

In my humble opinion, you have two options for choosing your career before you. Either you choose a path, well-trodden for long and by many. Or you decide to travel through a path, uncharted till now.

The first choice will bestow you with a well-paid job and a comfortable and predictable lifestyle. The second choice is risky. You will have to build a path where there was none before. Building your own trajectory is arduous and needs gumption on your part. But if you build your own path, you will learn to create your own future, your own destiny. You will realise that the best way to predict your future is to build it. The reward you get is incomparable. Great careers are built this way.

When you rejoice at coming through a great stride in your journey through academics, you are going to start another important journey of your life. So, choose your path carefully. God bless you for whatever path you choose.

Let me share my personal experience of building my career in ISRO.

When I passed out in 1984 from Jadavpur University, I had four options: Three jobs in Jenson Nicholson, HCL and ISRO and a place in School of Automation in IISc. The intelligent choice was to join IISc as passing out with a master’s degree from the best M Tech programme in the country, in those days, would have ensured a gate pass to some prestigious university in America and a great future in American Industry.

I went to buy a ticket at the railway counter and I do not know why, but I purchased a ticket to Ahmedabad in place of Bangalore. I landed up at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.

I was the only non-IIT BTech recruited in SAC. Their preference was IIT MTech, PhD, IIT BTech. All smarter fellows were absorbed in prestigious IRS and INSAT programmes, which were flush with funds and boasted huge labs with all the top-notch equipment. I was the only leftover. After a month, I was put in a new activity, called Microwave Remote Sensing Programme. Hardly any funding or facility, not even a proper seating place or lab. The team had certain senior people who were odd outliers of SAC under the guidance of a great human being, Shri N S Pillai. The team was repairing a defunct radar, donated by the Indian Navy, to build ISRO’s first imaging radar.

Everybody told that there was no future. Our team built the first imaging radar, flying on a second world war vintage Dakota DC-10 aircraft and everybody used to laugh at us for the poor resolution of 250 metres from 3 km height over a very poor swath of 5 km. The newly launched ISRO’s IRS-1 was delivering fantastic colour images at 23 m resolution from 840 km altitude. Ours was no comparison at all.

Undaunted by indifference, from there, we moved in long strides. We built the world’s 5th Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, and spaceborne RISAT SAR, which was a global trend setter. In fact, RISAT SAR is the first payload which had many firsts and globally we became the de facto standard for all the spaceborne SARs built after RISAT-1.

ISRO’s fame zoomed internationally and the satellite brought great benefits to crop estimation, flood mapping, saved many lives, contributed greatly to Indian economy and most importantly, it helped many important military missions and advanced plannings by imaging at high resolution of better than one meter, through clouds, fogs, rains and at any time of day or year.

My greatest pride is not that I held important and coveted positions but that I played a role in ISRO to build a very Avant Garde remote sensing technology, available to only a select few globally and used to cost a fortune in the global market. We built the technology cheap, almost one tenth of international pricing, which helped our country to chart many new paths.

My career was built with radar technology, the subject I dreaded the most in my college days. When I look back to my career, I probably did not miss the God- sent opportunity, which came in the camouflage of the possibility of sure case of bad career choice. Please remember, opportunity stares at you when you are faced with making a difficult choice.

You are going to be future leaders of our country, our institutions, our industries. From my experience I have observed that great leaders have the three qualities: (1) Connection with society, customers, or end users (2) Experience in running an administration with an ability to take very matured decisions, and (3) A vision which goes beyond profits and losses and positions and remunerations.

All successes will not be the same. Some will get public prominence, sometimes unduly. Life is never fair. You will find some will try to take undue credit.

Many of you will remain incognito, but become the backbone of any institution or a project or an endeavour.

I have faced the same predicaments many times in my professional life. Sometimes I used to feel frustrated. But I always bounced back, remembering what our former Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, famously observed, “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.” Finally, your work, your contribution speak for you.

God has bestowed us with a simple life. We make it complicated by overthinking. Geniuses are those who can explain in simple words, and find out the simplest way of expressing the most complex of the subjects.

I get inspiration from the simple messages by Shri Ramakrishna Paramhansa Dev. Ramakrishna Dev once met a Hatha yogi in Varanasi. He demonstrated his siddhi to Ramakrishna Dev by walking across mighty Ganga and coming back, all by walking on water. Ramakrishnan Dev was very appreciative of the Yogi’s siddhi. He asked him, “How many years did you do your sadhana to achieve this siddhi?” The yogi replied, “12 years”. Ramakrishna Dev enquired, “How much does it cost to cross the river and come back by boat?” Yogi replied, “Two Annas.” One Ana used to be six paise those days. Ramakrishna Dev, in his usual simplicity, observed,” In 12 years of sadhana, you achieved a siddhi worth only two annas?” A profound lesson to all of us. When I think of Newton’s Laws of Motion, Faraday’s laws of electromagnetic induction, Keppler’s laws of planetary motions or Einstein’s famous equation of E=mc2, I am amazed that they describe the complex cosmic processes by very simple mathematical descriptions. These simple laws laid the foundation of industrial and technological revolutions which metamorphosed human civilisation over a short period of two to three centuries, beyond recognition.

The greatest lesson of our life: you achieve success when you learn to think simply, communicate simply, execute in simple manner and be simple in your day to day dealing. It takes great effort in unlearning to be simple.

Please remember, today it is just a step of education you climbed. Education is given by your teachers, institutions, and your parents. Learning is all by yourself. Learning is a lifelong companion as observed by Albert Einstein, “People and Time will teach you what books cannot”

I remember my late mother today, who went to leave my brother in IIM, Ahmedabad hostel. While coming back, she was coming down the famous Louis Kahn designed iconic Harvard Steps, with an ecstatic face, tinged with a slight feeling of melancholy. While climbing down, she was muttering to herself; in her days she never got a chance to cross the threshold of school education because of societal and family pressure in a far-flung village in Odisha. If she gets one more chance in her second birth, she will surely try to study in some topmost institutions like IIM, Ahmedabad.

I have great appreciation for the parents of the graduating students, who have made umpteen sacrifices, which they never made you realise and hid them behind their dried-up tears, to bring you up to this level. They achieved something through you, which probably they could not get the opportunity to achieve. My salutes to your proud parents.

Let me first thank the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kalyani, for giving me an opportunity to speak to the assembled bright minds, who are going to build Bharat’s future. Thank you all very much for your kind patience. Wish you my young friends great success in whichever endeavour you embark upon.

God bless you all. Jai Hind.