Noble Anguish

Winning Nobel prize and accepting the kudos coming from all over the world is not an easy task. The world's most coveted prize attracts everyone's attention. The celebration of the winner won't be confined to one nation or region. He or she belongs to the entire world. In this victory celebration, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan who won Noble prize for his path breaking protein research is an anguished man. Due to the thousands of congratulatory messages pouring into him, his email inbox got clogged. He was not able to access his official mails. Due to this tension he blasted people who ignored him during his student days. Understandable agony. But as a Noble winner he should also be a Noble human being to forget the bitter past and politely tell his fans that they can email messages in a separate id which can be created.

Abhishek Manu Singhvi writes in The Times of India (20 October 2009)

Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan only the seventh person of Indian origin to have won the honour has tellingly highlighted the frequently
unbridgeable chasm between emotional intelligence (EQ) and traditional intelligence (IQ). His recent statements, after receiving the Chemistry Nobel, underline the inverse ratio between IQ and EQ and do no credit to his obviously outstanding intellectual equipment.

Ramakrishnan is reported to have expressed disgust at the outpouring of fan mail received by him from India, especially from Tamil Nadu, after the conferment of the Nobel. On two issues, his anger is understandable, though perhaps expressed at the wrong time, the wrong place and in the wrong manner. He may be right in pointing out that several teachers have suddenly discovered him as their student in his school/college days in India, while he remembers none of them. Secondly, he has expressed resentment at being contacted by persons who had chosen to ignore him for decades but started expressing new-found love after the Nobel win.

Both sentiments are understandable, may even be justifiable, though Ramakrishnan can scarcely believed to be innocent of the universal creed and global phenomenon, not at all peculiar to India, that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. That this universal phenomenon should surprise Ramakrishnan is surprising. He would surely have encountered enough of it in the American and European cultures in which he has worked for decades to not treat it as uniquely Indian, as his observations suggest.

But these parts of his statement are not the subject of this critique. What is deplorable is Ramakrishnan's equation and linkage of something as lofty and noble as patriotism and nationalism with something as banal and ridiculous as the clogging of his e-mail accounts and a general disgust at being troubled by his countrymen. When a Rajasthani, or a fellow citizen from Jodhpur, gets an outstanding international award, i feel a wee bit extra joy and exhilaration than my other Indian compatriots, because i was born in Jodhpur and hail from Rajasthan.

When an Indian gets a prestigious global award, all Indians feel proud, and even jingoistic, whereas the same award to a foreigner is merely another statistic in a newspaper. This is not to suggest that we are, or i am, casteist, regional or practising false nationalism. Patriotism can be distorted and misused as the "refuge of the scoundrel" but, at its core, it has an intersection of noble values which, in this case, appear to have completely escaped the mind of a brilliant Nobel laureate.

These are the values of link and affinity with a culture, a people, a territory and a national identity. It is this sentiment alone which connects India and Indians, despite this country being the greatest aggregation of diversities on this planet.

Yes, Mr Ramakrishnan, the place and nation of your birth may be "accidents of history", as you put it, but you are woefully and grievously wrong to suppose that the overwhelming tidal wave of affection for you from fellow Tamilians and Indians can be seen or explained merely as an accident of history. Your comments illustrate not merely an absence of EQ but the arrogance of relative youthfulness and an assumption that you can see and analyse everything from the mind while deadening your heart. I can wager a bet that when you grow old (maybe over 75 by western standards, but 65 by Indian standards), you will hark back and hanker for the peace, tranquillity and cultural affinity of the same Chidambaram town, whose eulogising e-mails you are currently castigating.

Nobel Politics

Certain awards should be non controversial and pass like 100% purity event. Unfortunately the Nobel Prize is getting tucked into trouble after trouble. The recent controversy about the Nobel Peace Prize's committee's decision to award the prestigious prize to the US president Barack Obama who doubtlessly the leading contender for the future prize. May be the committee slipped in its announcement. Instead of saying "Would be winner" the erred to declare the winner of Nobel Peace Prize 2009. Even Obama was stunned to hear this unexpected news. It is high time that the Nobel Prize committee rises above abroad and safeguard its sanctity.

Shobana Saxena writes in The Times of India (11 October 2009)

US President Barack Obama has been given — at first shot — something his hero Mahatma Gandhi could not in five attempts. Perhaps, it was too
difficult for the Nobel committee to give the prize to the “half-naked fakir” who shook the very foundations of the western empire. As a nation, Indians have neither forgotten the “insult” nor forgiven the West for this Nobel “politics”.

Winning a Nobel has never been easy. The rules are simple for those competing in the physics, chemistry or economics categories: Do some groundbreaking work on a quiet campus for years and then wait for the call from Stockholm. But to those angling for the peace or literature prizes, merit may not be enough. Factors such as national pride, ideology, and global politics play a role. Awarding the peace prize to former US president Jimmy Carter in 2002, Gunnar Berge, the Nobel chairman, described it as a “kick in the leg” for the then US president George Bush.

Back to Obama. As his name was announced on Friday, the world gasped and many wondered if the award had come “too soon, too fast”. But Thorbjorn Jagland, the Nobel committee’s chairman, said: “We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.”

Indeed, the awards for peace and literature have always been about real politics. Politicians have been accommodated in the peace category — Teddy Roosevelt, Carter, Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Al Gore, etc. Sometimes, politicians dominate the literature category, Winston Churchill being a case in point. In 2005, as Harold Pinter, the British writer known for his virulent opposition to Iraq war, got the award, literary observers wondered if he were chosen solely on the basis of his writings. “There is the view that the Nobel literature prize often goes to someone whose political stance is found to be sympathetic at a given moment,” wrote Alan Jenkins in the Times Literary Supplement, London. “Harold is now a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad — he really likes to get up people’s noses.”

This was not breaking news to China’s communist bosses who have long worked on Project Nobel, their attempt to secure the literature prize for their country. In her book, The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, author Julia Lovell exposed China’s lobbying. “When Gao Xingjian, a dissident Chinese writer, received the Nobel for literature in 2000, China reacted very strangely. For two decades, the country had energetically campaigned for the award, from flying writers to Sweden to funding an anthology of writings by Nobel prizewinners,” says Lovell, explaining how the prize is important for China’s “national pride as well as for its position in the world.”

Closer home, the fight for the Bharat Ratna and Padma awards is even messier. “It’s nothing but lobbying and money. That’s why these awards were discontinued for several years after the Supreme Court observed irregularities,” says an RTI activist who filed a petition some time ago to ascertain the exact process of choosing the Padma awardees.
In response, the Union home ministry was forced to admit that “no specific record of the deliberations of the meeting of the Padma awards committee is maintained. Only the final recommendations of the awards committee are submitted for the approval of the Prime Minister and the President.”

Small wonder these awards have generated more disharmony than spread peace. In 1999, vocalist Pandit Jasraj alleged that sitar maestro Ravi Shankar had approached influential MPs to secure a Bharat Ratna. “The people close to the ruling party are the main beneficiaries of these awards,” says Subhash Agarwal, an RTI activist. National or international, it seems there is no escape from the politics of giving and getting awards. Time to institute a Nobel Prize for Politics?