Newton made a law, Pakistan would have just eaten the apple: Farooq Sattar

Politician urges engineers to be curious and develop indigenous technologies.

KARACHI: Only Dr Farooq Sattar, with his sense of mischief and politics, can, in one speech, connect the Newtonian law of gravitation or Qanoon-e-Saql to the Pakistani psyche.

On Thursday, Dr Sattar was the guest speaker for the inauguration of the fourth international symposium on infrastructure engineering in developing countries organized by NED University at the Expo Centre. He urged the engineers present to study the ‘sunnat’ (or actions) of Newton.

“When the apple fell into Newton’s lap, he didn’t respond by shoving it into his jaws,” said Sattar. “He didn’t eat it. Rather, he went on a journey of curiosity.” He asked, why did this apple fall from up to down. “Why did it not go up and up?”

A sterner message was next. “The people who acted on Newton’s sunnat made a tiny little apple in the shape of iPhones and iPads,” he said. “They dropped the apple back into our palms again.”

But in Pakistan, the sunnat which we follow is one in which we stuff the proverbial apple into our mouths. “We put it between our teeth and chewed on it. We chewed on it so much that now only the seed is left.”

That seed, he went on to say, coming full circle, is what needs to be saved today. Dr Sattar was referring to the task that lies ahead for the country’s engineers, many of whose brightest ones were sitting in front of him. “We need to save that seed from capitalism, feudalism, imperialism. We need to plant it and let it grow into a tree.”

To put his metaphors in context Sattar went on to explain that Pakistan could not say it had achieved growth because certain sectors were not working in tandem. Things were askew.

In the 1990s, when cell phones were introduced, they cost Rs12 per minute and a roti was about 12 annas, he said. But 22 years on, the cell phone package is 12 annas a minute and the roti is Rs12. “Is this real growth?”

The engineers thus had a duty to work on technologies and the transfer of technology so we weren’t as reliant on it from other countries. “A re-engineering of Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan is the order of the day,” he said. “This is no rocket science. We need not invent the wheel again. Everything is on Google. We just need indigenization.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 27^th, 2013.