A Granddaughter’s
Tribute
By Maariya H. Bajwa
Research Triangle
North Carolina.
There are many qualities that make leaders what
they are. A few of those qualities are courage,
honesty, caring for others, humility, and so on.
Leaders must be focused on critical issues, as
well as being able to see the big picture. They
must be calm under pressure. They also must have
passion and urgency that drive their creativity
and importance.
Leaders should be diplomatic, tactful, and above
all, just and fair in all their dealings, so they
can share their ideas, and listen to others. They
must be able to anticipate and address potential
problems before they occur. Leaders must be an
inspiration and motivation to others, and encourage
others to strive to do their best. They need to
be dedicated to what they do.
A person who comes to my mind as one who embodied
all these qualities is my grandfather, the late
Professor Sir Abdus Salam.
Professor Salam needs no introduction: his name
is synonymous with dedication to a cause and striving
tirelessly to reach a goal, to search and to question.
Allah, the Almighty, rewarded his diligence with
the highest pinnacle of achievement in the field
of physics, the Nobel Prize, in 1979. To me, his
contribution to humanitarian causes is just as
inspiring. It is one of the causes most dear to
his heart that I want to mention in relation to
his role as a leader. I am speaking about his
creation of the International Center for Theoretical
Physics.
My Grandfather came from humble beginnings and
never forgot that. He never took his success for
granted.
He always thanked Allah, the Almighty, for His
favors and he showed the responsibility of a leader
by working tirelessly to give back to the less
fortunate. He led the way in creating a place
where students of science from needy, under-developed
countries could come and learn and do research.
This place was the International Center for Theoretical
Physics, which he founded in 1964 in Trieste,
Italy, and served as its first director until
ill health forced him to step down a few years
before he passed away in 1996. On November 21,
1997, at the first anniversary of his untimely
death, the center was appropriately renamed the
Abdus Salam Center for Theoretical Physics.
Just as a medical doctor diagnoses a problem,
then researches and works for a cure, my grandfather
recognized the problem, that is , the lack of
teachers and adequate facilities in poor countries
of the world, and he did his best to find the
solution. It was not easy. It took a lot of hard
work persuading members of the United Nations
Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) and many other crucial agencies and people
to make this dream a reality.
(Editor adds: Besides the ICTP, Professor Salam
founded the Third World Academy of Sciences. So
profound was his contribution and so sincere his
strivings that it would not be wrong to call him
the patron saint of Third World science)
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