I shared with the ninety-year-old Subramaniam his vision of a second Green Revolution. He told me about his dream of setting up a national agro foundation that would develop hybrid seeds. His foundation would adopt small and marginal farmers and provide them with laboratory facilities for soil testing and access to information on the weather and markets, so that they could earn more through enhanced yields and better prices for what they produced. He aimed at bringing a million farmers under the scheme. Visionaries don’t age!

Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of independent India transformed India into a democracy. Dr C. Subramaniam’s Agriculture Vision enabled India to realize the Green Revolution. Dr Varghese Kurien’s Milk Vision led to India’s White Revolution. Prof. Vikram Sarabhai’s Space Vision enabled India to join the space club. Dr Homi Bhabha’s Nuclear Vision led India to become a nuclear power.

Gandhi, who assumed leadership of the nationalist movement several years after Aurobindo's withdrawal from politics, he was more deeply committed to the liberation of Indian consciousness than to political independence.

What Raja Ram Mohun Roy began as a reform movment early in the 19th century Devendranath Tagore made into a religion. It transformed the Bengali middle class. Rabindranath Tagore expanded that religion into a culture. And that culture became Nehru’s politics.

In 1992, he took over as the Scientific Advisor to the Minister of Defence and secretary, Department of Research and Development, and continued till he was seventy. The country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, was conferred on him in 1997. A year later, in 1998, he led the team that conducted India’s second nuclear tests in Pokhran. Five nuclear tests were conducted consecutively and India became a nuclear power. In 1999, he was appointed principal scientific advisor to the government of India with the rank of a Cabinet minister. By 2001, he was enjoying a teacher’s life at Anna University in Chennai. Meant to lecture a class of sixty, most of his lectures ended up in an overflowing hall with about 200 students instead. In 2002, he was elected the eleventh President of India.

A revolution is an idea, taken up by bayonets.

The regenerative medicine revolution is upon us. Like iron and steel to the industrial revolution, like the microchip to the tech revolution, stem cells will be the driving force of this next revolution.” — CADE HILDRETH, founder of BioInformant, a stem cell industry research firm

Corinne told us that revolution was brewing in the hills to the north, under the leadership of a man named Miranda, who with absurd inevitability had styled himself El Supremo.

Revoluţionarul este individul care doreşte să schimbe lumea şi o depăşeşte în sensul viitorului către o ordine a valorilor pe care o inventează.

Under the title of sarvodaya, Mahatma Gandhi designed a system by which human beings would minimize their material needs and maximize their quality of life through spiritual, cultural, artistic and human values.

"Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America — only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy."

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

The elements of a true leader’s vision A true leader’s vision should target specific interests and answer important questions, such as: 1. What is the country’s interest in this vision? What is the interest of its society and business community? Who will benefit from it and how? In what way will it promote development and enhance the achievements that have already resulted from previous visions? 2. Is the vision based upon specific plans or is it going to be implemented randomly, without any link between its different phases? 3. Is it realistic and feasible or is it a wild vision that no amount of financial and human resources are capable of realizing? For example, giant residential and tourist complexes such as The Palm29 and The World30 islands may require huge resources that many countries cannot afford. While they may be feasible in the UAE, it would be impossible to build them in a number of other places. 4. What is the ideal time to propose the vision? 5. What is the best way to implement it? 6. Is the executive team ready? Who are its members and where will we acquire the high-calibre skills necessary? 7. How will the implementation of the vision be financed? 8. How will we convince investors to finance the project? 9. How will we market the finished product and what is the target market? Where and when?

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives