ET: LAHORE: 

It was during a casual conversation over a meal that film-makers Zakir Thaver and Omar Vandal came up with the idea of making a documentary on renowned physicist and Pakistan’s only Nobel prize winner Mohammad Abdus Salam.

Over a decade ago, in 1996, the year of Salam’s death, Science/Education Media Producer Thaver, and PhD from the Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Vandal, met and discussed the idea.

“Later that year, when Salam passed, we talked about him over a meal… we didn’t know enough about him then and the conversation was somewhat superficial — Pakistan’s only Nobel Laureate, marginalised by his motherland because he was born to the ‘wrong’ sect, etc,” they said in an email interview.

“After college, the both of us were in New York and revisited the idea. In retrospect, we thought in the post 9/11 climate, by way of challenging emerging stereotypes. Our minds began to query icons from our own culture, as opposed to the usual Einstein poster that almost all science majors have up on their dorm room walls.”