Some 30 years ago, a wide-eyed, impressionable girl stood beneath a towering rocket inside
of India's earliest rocket launching stations in Kerala. The rocket was readying to be fired in a
days. The student, on a school trip to the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, quietly relished the experience of being near a real rocket- "fascinate
by something she knew "tittle about".
Today Tersy Thomas-dubbed "agniputri" or the daughter of fire by the media-is the project
director of Agni V at the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) station in Hyderabad.
She was a member of the team that developed the long range intercontinental ballistic missile (IGBM)-
Agni V. The missile was successfully test-fired from Wheeler Island in Odisha.
Young Tersy's life took a significant turn when after a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering in Kerala,
she applied for a postgraduate course in Guided Missile Technology. When Agni V took off, Thomas
says it was "an indescribable and a great" moment.
After the launch, she visited her former boss and mentor, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. "He is the role model
for all our Indian scientists. He praised us for doing a good job and gifted me his latest book of poems,"
Thomas says with enthusiasm. She was a junior in the DRD0 when Kalam took over as its director.
Kalam often cites her case when he encourages young woman students in colleges to take up science.
(Based on an interview report in "The Telegraph' dated 29th April 2012)
