In land of Indian stereotypes, Kalam talks change

But don’t include Sameera Mohamed among the cynics.

Her pretty, mascara-lined face broke into a smile as she adjusted the chador that enveloped her and discussed her recent sojourn at Daksh E-Services, a company in the sunrise Business Process Outsourcing industry in Bangalore.

‘‘I would have liked to experience more of Bangalore,’’ said Mohamed. ‘‘But I was working most of the day. Professionally, it was a great experience working in the Daksh office, in Diamond District.’’

Mohamed, one of 12,000 students at the Higher Colleges of Technology here, is just one of many infotech graduates who’ve utilised an institutional collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industries to do their work experience in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad.

On Sunday, all of HCT’s students and its faculty — Arabic, Indian and European — continued their glimpses of India’s more-modern facets through President A P J Abdul Kalam, who left the emirate alternately intrigued, amused and inspired on the second day of his first presidential sojourn.

‘‘Salaam Aleikum,’’ he said. ‘‘Aliekum assalaam,’’ the packed hall of Arab students roared back. ‘‘I have a text of my speech, but you can go to my website and get it,’’ he said to widespread laughter before launching into a quintessentially Kalamian speech of science, discovery and dreams.

Sometimes they struggled to follow his strong Tamil accent, sometimes he rambled, but most listened with open-mouthed attention. ‘‘Will you all repeat after me?’’ he asked at one point. ‘‘Yes,’’ the students replied uncertainly. ‘‘Have you not had breakfast?’’ Laughter. ‘‘Yes!’’ they roared. So faithfully the students intoned: ‘‘Dream, dream, dream. Dreams transform thought. Thoughts result in action.’’ Delighted clapping, as many of the European faculty watched bemused.

Their attention wavered somewhat when Kalam wandered into everything from food processing to female education, but their fascination for India’s scientist-president and his missile-building exploits could not have been firmer.

‘‘They (locals) do not know enough about the new India,’’ Disinvestment minister Arun Shourie said later. ‘‘The President is a personification of the new India.’’ That was just as well. The emirs have begun reining in the old Indian dream of gold in the Gulf. Everywhere in the UAE, despondent Indians cannot stop talking of the dramatic cutback in work visas for sub-continentals. The aim: ethnic rightsizing.

Kalam’s surprises continued. Later, while being shown online facilities at a women’s center, Kalam astonished teachers by logging on to a digital library — created by one of his entourage, Prof N Balakrishnan of Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science — of 32,000 books and showing them rare Arabic manuscripts uploaded from Hyderabad.

After that, he threw Abu Dhabi and Indian security and protocol officers into a tizzy when he suddenly decided he wanted to visit a university he had just heard about in a conversation. Kalam’s disarming manner worked wonderfully at the state banquet hosted by Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. ‘‘The entire ruling crew was at the banquet,’’ exulted Shourie.

The surprises were not limited to his Arab hosts. Last night, in an unusual step, Kalam met the Indian envoys to UAE, Saudi Arabi, Iran, Kuwait and Oman: all of them had been specially summoned, not something that a President has done before. He talked to them about Indian communities, their role and how India could be marketed better.

On Monday, Kalam will helicopter down to neighbouring Dubai, where Indian officials and others are frantically coordinating his scheduled meeting with 1,200 students from 47 Indian schools.