Allure of awards: From national prizes to Nobel, India and its pursuit for recognition

With the annual kowtow of the Nobel Prizes now behind us, as well as the customary whining as to why no Indian has been given one of these prizes, I wonder why these signs of recognition continue to fascinate us. It would seem that seeking approval is primaeval to being human. Awards and trophies were bestowed even in the ancient world. In the first Olympics in Greece, victors were crowned with olive wreaths, which might not seem much today but was a hallowed status symbol in olden times, reserved only for the most elite athletes. Runners-up at the original games didn’t receive anything at all, thus giving rise to the related idea that there is no alternative to coming first. There is a victor, and then there are the failed rest. In ancient India, the accent was on the accomplishment rather than the person achieving it. For example, we do not know who wrote the Vedas and the Upanishads exactly, but we all know their content. Books ascribed to Charaka, Nagarjuna and Susruta might not have been written by a single person in a short period. Rather they might have been the output of a consortium of people spread out over several decades, or even centuries. We don’t know and in large measure, we don’t care. Even in such a different system, there was room and space for contests and awards. Kalidasa was propped up by a group to compete with Thilottama. At the same time, musical contests between stalwarts typically ended with the loser undertaking thenceforth to avoid a raga that the winner had executed so faultlessly in the contest. The important idea here is that not all practitioners of creative endeavours are the same. As in ancient Greece, those who are better simply deserve better, if not the best! Those in creative endeavours, be it the arts, sciences or sports, are particularly sensitive to peer recognition or criticism. These fields are primarily ego-driven. The need for awards and prizes, which are decided after organised peer review and appraisal, to sustain one’s activity and continued performance in these areas, is very common in almost all of us engaged in these professions. A few highly evolved individuals may be immune to this failing but one is speaking here about the typical person. Accordingly, there is a great desire and motivation among most of us to get these awards, further raising the hype that surrounds them. Awards are big business in the 21st century in India. Whether they are handed out to film stars at glitzy Mumbai functions or handed out by the President of India in the form of Padma or Arjuna awards, or whether they come in the form of science prizes, many of which have been redefined in the past weeks, they make a clear statement about achievement. Here is the winner. Here is the best. This is what we think is important. Awards send out such a clear signal that they are given to people of all ages by all kinds of organisations. An essential attribute of any credible award is that the mode of selection of the awardees is perceived to be transparent and above board. It is for this reason that the Nobel Prizes are of such high standing. No more than 600 or so people have been given these prizes in the 120-odd years that they have been in existence. Many were possibly deserving of this prize but were overlooked. Arnold Sommerfeld, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Desmond Bernal, Arthur Birch and GN Ramachandran come to one’s mind. Yet, no Nobelist has been criticised as being undeserving of the prize. It is this hallmark of quality that renders it unique among the science prizes. The value of a scientific award is the lower of the values of the person or persons handing it out and the person receiving it. A good scientist receiving a scientific award from a faulty or dishonest system is as compromised as a good committee handing out an award to a sub-standard scientist because of unspecified pressures. Both these situations have been prevalent in the Indian scientific system during the past several decades, and this is probably the reason why the Government of India has scrapped a large number of science awards in recent times, including the highly vaunted but (to my mind) vastly overrated Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award given to scientists under 45 years of age who have supposedly made a substantial scientific contribution to Indian sciences. It remains to be seen if the replacement awards, which carry no cash component, secure greater credibility than the ones they have replaced. Whether or not one receives an award depends acutely on the personalities who make up the selection committees for these awards. If these committees function in a subjective and partisan manner, the value of the award falls sharply. In many of the scientific awards that have been scrapped by the Government of India, the modus operandi has been quite opaque and incestuous with the same people inhabiting the selection committees over many years. Interestingly, I just participated in an award ceremony where a consortium of private universities gathered and conferred scientific awards through the aegis of a company that trains students for competitive examinations. A large part of the selection was done through computer screening of the publications and citation records of the candidates, in other words, quantitative screening. Very significantly, I found almost no one among the 80 or so awardees in this function had been given a serious government award, such as the Bhatnagar Prize or was a Fellow of our so-called prestigious science academies. Observations such as this call for serious soul searching and introspection and would lead hopefully to establishing proper protocols for the new scientific awards. This should not become a case of old wine in new bottles simply because the members of the selection committees have remained unchanged. A more distressing recent phenomenon in India is the woke tendency of handing out awards indiscriminately in the name of encouraging science, even to the extent of creating new awards with increasingly lenient benchmarks, just to disburse them. This mindset has arisen from the belief in equality of outcomes. Instead of everyone having the same life chances or equality of opportunity, it held that all should enjoy identical benefits, regardless of behaviour, performance or other conditions. The doctrine has become a general cultural trend in science and extends to the distribution of public money for research funding. In education, it has destroyed the idea of meritocracy, which created winners and losers with the very idea of losers being regarded as discriminatory and unfair. This is certainly a tendency that needs to be scrutinized, in the general hubris surrounding such ‘progressive’ thinking. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” To the victor then, the spoils! The author is in the Indian Institute of Science and has authored a book Bharat: India 2.0_. Views expressed here are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views._ Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.