And Nobels for all

Take the Nobel first. Alfred Nobel was an inventor and his original intention was to reward discoveries that would benefit humanity. The early prizes such as one for the 8220;invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys8221; were often for mundane practical work. However, post 2000 there has been a tendency for 8220;blue-sky8221; research, that is, for creative or visionary research unconstrained by practicalities. Of course, there have been exceptions, for instance, for integrated circuits, semiconductor lasers and 8220;electricity conductive plastics8221;, which have many practical applications.

But many have felt over the years that there is something wrong with the system, in that it has become, more or less, a matter of Buggins8217; turn, which in British slang means a system by which appointments are made by rotation rather than merit. It means that the Nobel committee has a list of the great and the good to get through before the 8216;scholars8217; go off to their sky labs and thus render themselves illegible. Nobel8217;s will said that the Prize should be given for work done in the previous year. If you go by the records, that8217;s asking for too much. But if rewards are handed out for things done 40 years ago, as has happened in both physics and medicine time and again, it is taking due consideration a bit too far. Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar8217;s research in astrophysics was done in 1933; he was awarded the Nobel in 1983, forty years later.

Then there is the question of who is eligible to win. Are their political considerations at work? The division of the scientific world into physics, chemistry and medicine looks, prima facie, above board. But how many have gone to the non-western world? You can count them off on both hands and still have some fingers left over. Peace Prize, which is a charitable idea, is perhaps fair though even here political considerations are paramount. As a matter of fact, it is only the field of peace that languishes outside the prize-giving pollution probably because it is so difficult to find sensible candidates even for this award. Don8217;t forget even Gandhiji was not considered as also Tolstoy because, as a Nobel committee member said, he wrote too much about 8216;War and Peace8217;.

With the world overflowing with literature prizes, it is the literature prize that attracts the greatest attention. It is the point where Nobel and Booker merge. Even here, literature is seen still as a western thing, written in a handful of languages, of which an educated judge could probably read some of them. But, more than the languages, it is western values iquest; democracy, freedom, secularism/ pluralism 8212; that tilt the scales for and against an author. Again, more than anything else, it is the Buggins8217; principle that works at least for the Nobel. The Prize cannot be awarded more than once in five to seven years to any one single country; it has to be spread around the world on what the Committee feels is 8216;equitable and fair8217;. How else do you account for some of biggest names in contemporary fiction being left out: Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka to mention just a few.

But that the Nobel prizes have managed to maintain their brand image leaderships for all the omissions and dicey decisions they have made over the years is impressive. There are two reasons why a sense of balance has prevailed: first the pressures of the market or what may be described as the peer assessment by way of reviews, other literary awards of what8217;s in and what8217;s out; second, as far as the literature prize is concerned, it has to be a unanimous decision of the committee. Only one dissenting vote means the candidate is out of the reckoning. This has been given the reason why Graham Greene was repeatedly blackballed because one committee member for personal reasons was dead against him.

A case in point is this year8217;s Nobel for the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. The Buggins8217; principle was at work here; Turkey has never been on Nobel podium. It had to get its turn. Second, Pamuk is a political creature who has identified with the 8220;the downtrodden and marginalised. The Kurd in Turkey and the Turk in Germany.8221; He is the universal man who belongs to all of us, irrespective of caste, creed or nationality.

The writer, a literary critic, was chief editor, Macmillan