Look! A real president!

From India. Remember back a few years when we had a real president, too?

The buzz around the stately but run-down auditorium of Sapru House was that President APJ Abdul Kalam, a rocket scientist, would speak about the Indo-US nuclear deal. Instead, on Wednesday, the President talked of the need to keep the peace in outer space where India has a lot of satellites.

"Above all we have to keep peace in space," Kalam told former Indian diplomats, as he laid out his vision of how to make diplomacy relevant to the requirements of the country.

"Diplomacy is a dynamic process. In future we may also move towards getting material from Moon and creation of habitat in Mars. Our diplomacy should see that war is not extended to space."

China recently launched an anti-satellite missile, which has worried the global and Indian security establishment, prompting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to recently say, "we are not in favour of weaponisation of outer space."

(Update: fixed grammar.)