There was this noble man by the name Nobel. Swedish by birth, he decided to settle for nothing less than being a global citizen. He invented dynamite, which as you are aware is a silly little toy used to blow up bridges, buildings and people. He made a hefty sum in the bargain and decided he must do something more for humanity at large. Thus came the peace prize, and all other prizes given away annually at Stockholm and Oslo.
Unknown to most of us, there exists a less glamorous cousin, the Ig Nobel Prize. These awards are handed out every September in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre by genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates. The Ig Nobel prizes honour achievements that make people laugh and then think. My comrade-in-trade from Bangalore was feted with this for his pioneering work on nose-picking among adolescents. His research came to the brilliant conclusion that nose-picking is indeed very common among children.
Certainly, you will agree that there are many such momentous phenomena which need to be looked into in detail! Asians have always felt a tad absence of Kerala-born E C George Sudarshan in the Nobel firmament. His name had been taken up several times for serious consideration. In 1973, after the Vietnam War got over, the award-giving turned out to be a theatre of the absurd, with former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of the USA, and Vietnamese revolutionary Le Duc Tho of Vietnam being declared joint winners. These people were mortal enemies till then.
The North Vietnamese did the only sensible thing by declining the award. Since 1989, when the Dalai Lama was conferred the Peace Prize, Asians have been having a field day, being feted as peace makers. In 2014 we had two additions to this group of worthies in Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi. Malala, at 17, was the youngest to receive this award. Even a field like medicine and physiology has raised eyebrows, at least in retrospect.
Egas Moniz from Portugal was a pioneer in the field of psychosurgery. Simply put, this is about operating on the human brain to control intractable symptoms of some mental maladies. He perfected the technique of prefrontal leucotomy and was awarded the prestigious prize in 1949. After the discovery of psychotropic medicines in 1952, psychosurgery was as attractive as the practice of bloodletting, which was widely practiced in the dark ages. On the other hand, there are John Banting and James Macleod who were joint laureates in 1923 for the discovery of Insulin.
The multinational companies marketing the newer brands of insulin are some of the wealthiest corporations, but Banting and Macleod did not make a krone for their noble efforts. The prize for literature too has caused some furore. In 1958, Boris Pasternak had at first accepted the prize offered to him.
The Soviet authorities had their reservations, and this chronicler of Russia during her troubled times of the Communist revolution and its aftermath, had to ultimately decline. It seems most likely that there was more than subtle pressure on the author not to receive the prize. Surprisingly, Russian prize winners from the Soviet era showed courtesy, bordering on reverence, to the Royal Majesties who handed over the awards.
Pearl S Buck would contend that she wrote from the heart about the wretched lives of the Chinese peasants in the 1920s and 30s. She wrote a string of stories, and the one everyone has read or pretends to have read is The Good Earth (1931). She was awarded the prize in 1938. There is smouldering resentment among the present day Chinese that the good writer’s works smack of cultural imperialism. Each one can come to his own conclusion in this regard.
The lady, however, donated all the money she received towards to the Pearl S Buck foundation with the noble aim of the uplift of poor children, especially those born out of wedlock. All told, the Nobel Committee is a foreign hand of which we Indians should be wary. Why, at least one person of Indian origin, after winning the prize publicly disowned his country of birth. I will not go on to say that we should boycott these prizes or dread them like intruders such as Mohammed Ghazni. But these awards, too, have their flip side. We are not partial to the Westerners, are we?
Dr P K Kuruvilla
A practising psychiatrist
Email: kuruvilla2004@gmail.com