Republic Day 2018 | Born of Fire

In 2013, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) launched the Agni-V, an intercontinental ballistic missile that has a range of over 5,000 miles.

While people hailed the missile and its achievement by DRDO in launching a long-range device that could give China some worries, its project director Dr Tessy Thomas, hailed as India’s first missile woman stood in the background,  much like India’s missile man Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. In January 2012, a year before the successful launch, the then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh told the Indian Science Congress that Tessy was an example of a “woman making her mark in a traditionally male bastion and decisively breaking the glass ceiling.”

Dr Thomas — who is today one of India’s leading experts in ballistic missiles, says that her love for rockets come from the time she spent growing up near the Thumba rocket launching station.

From her initial fascination with rockets, Tessy, thanks to some able mentoring from her mother, developed interest in solid state physics during her time in school. She eventually went on to study engineering at Thrissur College in Kerala where she did research in missile technology.“My mother is my inspiring model,” Tessy Thomas said in an interview, explaining how her parents had raised her as a child. Her mother’s words to her were — “Show your potential.” And she did.

When she was 20, she joined Pune’s Institute of Armament Technology to pursue a master’s degree in guided missile technology. She followed this with an MBA in Operations Management, and then a PhD in Missile Guidance before joining DRDO in 1988. Here, she worked under her revered role model, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who placed her in the Agni missile programme. And since then, there has been  no looking back.

Now known as India’s agni putri, she leads a team of 400 scientists at the DRDO where she has been working for past 21 years and manages home admirably. While her scientific temper is world-renowned, Tessy (named after Mother Theresa)  an advocate of being a better person, underlines basic value as the foundation to any career. Last July, while speaking to a group of students, she said, “The core objectives of education in the coming years should encompass four essential components — building values, awareness, knowledge and skills. Ideally, these should foster development of personal qualities and behavioural attributes, which will help children develop into good citizens. She further focused on how technology has changed the educational landscape — from the use of tablets in the classroom to the proliferation of open universities and the pressure to prepare students for an increasingly competitive workplace in a hyper-connected world,” she stressed.

Last year, Anand Mahindra tweeted, “Tessy deserves to be more famous than the biggest Bollywood star. A poster of Tessy in every Indian school will wreck stereotypes & create enormous career aspirations for girls. RT to make her a star. Maybe you can download this pic, turn it into a poster.(sic)” His tweet was a prelude to Tessy speaking at the Global Entrepreneur Summit (GES) 2017, which  was attended by PM Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. During her speech, Tessy also asked women to take more risks. “When it comes to intelligence, women are a step ahead. When it comes to emotional intelligence that is where one gets stuck. Now there is a change in how families are perceiving education of the girl child which is quite significant.”

She is straightforward and doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to her  career as a scientist. Being a defence scientist is not a 9 to 5 job. Carrying out research could mean late hours. Work-life balance may be difficult,” she said in an interview, adding that those professionals who have to take a gap from work due to family life should be provided more training and updated with the latest technologies so that they can progress in their career.