What appears next is a notice board outside a non-descript, neglected building in Jhang. I urge you to spend about 5 minutes surveying it carefully and then honestly recording your thoughts on a piece of paper. Get a printout of the picture and hand it along with your comments to any young student in a school, and if possible to the student’s teacher, with a request to share it with others after writing down their own impressions. A photo of the same spot five years hence ought to be viewed by members of the same school. By comparing the two pictures they will be able to assess the social and cultural progress in Pakistan.
Instead of describing my feelings in detail, I mainly cover what I have done to date after seeing this picture several years ago. Suffice it to say the Department of Archaeology, which cannot even detect the spelling error of its name is unlikely to spot the other mistakes on it and its overall regrettable quality. They were not the people to ask for getting this board changed to one that is decent. Who then to approach?
I had worked in one of six Science and Technology organisations in the early 2000s that are clustered within walking distance of the Prime Minister’s secretariat. Now, more so twenty years later, they are in various stages of decay – so bad in fact that if by chance they were closed down there would hardly be a noticeable dip in the scientific output of the country.
People who recognised his true worth honored his memory by putting a blue plaque on his London home in November 2019
Amongst these major organisations is the apex S&T body of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS). It prides itself in having about 100 of the top S&T practitioners as its Fellows. In other words, it is the equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society of the UK. Among the Fellows who are physicists, many had been either students or highly influenced by Salam (these folks only refer to him as Salam Sahib, unlike Brits who called him Abdus). I, therefore, decided to see if the PAS could be persuaded to get a respectable Notice Board put on the entrance to Salam’s old house in Jhang. In 2023, I was emboldened to do so as I knew a past president of the PAS who was still its Council Member and now held a high position in the KP interim government (August 14, 2023, to March 4, 2024).
In Sept 2023 I learned from him that “[his] suggestion [on my prompting, to replace the board had been conveyed] to all fellows of the PAS. The Secretary General of PAS has already kindly agreed to place [the proposal] before the Council. So, hopefully, things will be OK.”
Five months passed but I did not hear back. Meanwhile, I had seen a report from Imperial College, London (Professor Brian Cox leads celebration of Abdus Salam’s legacy to physics It leads to another webpage, that of the Abdus Salam exhibition, which many Pakistanis may be unaware of.) There is a photo of the library renamed after Salam in the earlier webpage, and this was given to the PAS high-ups to spur them into providing the board.
Note the group photograph of the four persons with Prof. Cox leading this auspicious event: the only non-Brit is the Indian who now heads Salam’s International Centre for Theoretical Physics, since named after him – clearly no one from PAS was found worthy of being there!
I did not hear anything more and had pretty much given up pursuing the board idea. But then I learned in 2024 that an old acquaintance had become the President of the PAS. In addition to the request for getting the board done, I wrote to him:
“Can that house of Salam's be properly restored and made into an active Science popularisation place [like the Exploratorium in San Fransisco]? Perhaps the PAS and the Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF) can help create an endowment fund that will bear the running expenses of the place. The Ministry of Science &Technology (MoST) ought to chip in, as would many ex-pats and others here in Pk. There are several models for making a place like this bubble and fizz - ask your Fellows to give you ideas.”
Even if there are no external funds available quickly, each Fellow donating Rs 5000-10,000 could get you about Rs 0.5-1.0M, which ought to suffice to adequately fix up Salam's home. I will gladly chip in the same amount.’’
When I did not hear, I was advised by a Fellow to forward my suggestions to the current Secretary General of PAS. This I did and got an encouraging response on Jan 14, 2025:
“Thanks for your mail, I understand your concern. Presumably, you are unaware of my very long association with Prof. Salam. My first interaction with him was in 1975 when he helped me to get admission to Imperial College for a PhD. I returned to Pakistan in 1986 on his suggestion but I kept in contact with him through several visits to ICTP. Your suggestion is very helpful, let me work on it.”
After that, there has been silence. I have sent him several reminders since then and then finally wrote him a deadline: 4 June 2025. No response.
By not truly respecting their greatest scientist – calling him Salam Sahib is not enough – the Fellows of the PAS insult themselves. People who recognised his true worth honored his memory by putting a blue plaque on his London home in November 2019.