NEW DELHI: Who discovered gravity? Isaac Newton, if you were to go by your science textbook, but for Commerce minister Piyush Goyal it was Albert Einstein. The faux pas happened while he was labouring a point on the slowdown in the economy after a Board of Trade meeting here. He asked people not to use a mathematical prism to figure out how India’s goal of becoming a $5 trillion economy can be achieved, adding maths did not help Einstein discover gravity!
“Don’t go by all these calculations you see on TV, that if the country has to become a $5 trillion economy, it will have to grow at 12% but right now it is currently growing at 6-7%,” Goyal said. “Don’t get into those maths. Those maths never helped Einstein discover gravity,” Goyal said.
Goyal’s bizarre explanation saw social media explode with humorous takes. “Former Finance Minister @PiyushGoyal is correct, Einstein did not require maths to discover gravity, but Sir Isaac Newton did. FYI, maths is also required to #FixTheEconomy,” the Congress party tweeted from its official handle.
“The govt shouldn’t wait for an apple to fall on its head before it realises that the Math about the economy is all bad. It doesn’t even need an Einstein (due apologies to Newton) to tell us that. Instead of focusing on distant dreams, minister would do well to focus on reality,” CPM leader Yechury tweeted.
“India’s GDP is going down because millennials are not doing GDP maths anymore,” another twitterati quipped.
"According to Piyush Goyal, Einstein discovered gravity.. Science or History dono ek sath Khatre mein h....," wrote one Twitter user.
Piyush Goyal & Co believe Einstein Discovered Gravity and disown Newton's work.
This is because once he got a msg on WhatsApp that Newton is a kashmiri Muslim who sell apples in Lincolnshire, England.
Realising he was being trolled, Goyal tried to clarify his point, but again repeated the Einstein discovered gravity sentence in his byte. In a later handout though, Einstein was purged. For the record, Einstein is the father of the theory of relativity.
Goyal's comments come days after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman blamed 'millennials using cab services like Ola and Uber' for the slowdown in the automobile sector.
(With Online Desk inputs)