He Started in a Church With a Bicycle Pump
In 1963, India's first rocket was transported to its launch site on a bicycle and a bullock cart. The nose cone was carried on a cyclist's head. The launch pad was a church in Thumba, a fishing village on Kerala's coast, because it sat near the magnetic equator and the land was available. Vikram Sarabhai, the man who arranged all of this, had studied at Cambridge and could have built a career anywhere. He chose Thumba. The lesson embedded in that choice is the first and most important habit Sarabhai practised: he refused to wait for conditions to be right. Chanakya wrote in the Arthashastra that a leader must work with the resources at hand, not the resources imagined. Sarabhai lived this without ever citing it.
