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By Zia H. Shah | Upstate, NY
In his achievements, Dr. Salam saw a certain special Providence of God. Let me quote from the transcript of one of his interviews. The questi0ns asked by Lewis Wolpert or Alison Richards are in inverted comas:
"But I am not quite sure how you got to Cambridge."
I got to Cambridge by means of a scholarship from Small Peasants' welfare fund which was set up by the Prime Minister of the State of Punjab at that time.
"Did you come from a peasant background?"
That's right. Although my father was a Civil Servant, he had a small parcel of land and he qualified. So I got one of those scholarships and the interesting thing is that only five scholarships were offered, and the other four people who got them could not get university admission that year. Then came the partition of the country and the scholarships disappeared. So the entire purpose of that fund and those scholarships seemed to be to get me to Cambridge.
"Did you really think that fate was playing a hand? After all, each of these events was very much a matter of chance."
Certainly my father, who was a deeply religious man, always said that this was a result of his prayers. He wanted his son to shine in some field. Of course, in the beginning he was thinking of me as a Civil Servant, but when I decided that I was going to do research, he felt that this was something very appropriate and encouraged me. But the whole sequence of events, my getting a scholarship at the right time, my getting to Cambridge at all at the right time, and then being interested in science, was all, he thought, very much a part of something deeper.
(Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam. Editors: CH Lai and Azim Kidwai, Third Edition. World Scientific, 1989. Pages 465-466.)
Read the complete post here: Dr. Abdus Salam: Nobel Laureate in Physics
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