The Nobel Prizes are world-renowned. The announcement of the yearly Nobel Awards is looked forward to every October. Each awardee has done something that has improved our knowledge in the field through his/her ideas and incentives. His or her work has brought benefits to our knowledge. No wonder a Nobelist is regarded with high esteem.
But recall that for every Shakespeare there is also a P.G. Wodehouse, whom we enjoy just as much. For every Picasso there is an M.C. Escher, and for every M.F. Husain there is an R.K. Laxman. Life is not always a serious affair, there is lightness, humour and nonsense, too, and we enjoy them as well. For every stuffed shirt there is a T-shirt as well!
This is true in science, technology and other fields of knowledge as well. This point is highlighted every year, also around October, by the awarding of what has been named as the Ig Nobel Prizes in various fields. These are awarded to “honor achievement that first make people laugh, and them make than think.” The word Ig Nobel is a play on words and a parody of the Nobel, and borrowed from the word ignoble meaning “inferior.”
That the Ig Nobel Prizes were started by scientists way back in 1991 shows that scientists too have a sense of satire, sarcasm, humour and yet appreciation. The Ig Nobel prizes are chosen by a jury and are presented yearly actually by a Nobel Awardee, adding to the satire and value of the prize. (Actually two Nobelists, Sir Andre Geim of graphite fame and Dr. Roy Glauber of quantum optics fame, were themselves winners of Ig Nobel Prizes in 2000 and 2002 as well.)
To date, over 250 Ig Nobels have been awarded in fields as wide as science, literature, economics, peace, psychology and so forth. Readers will enjoy looking at the list of winners by going to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners .
The contributions of many Ig Nobelists are serious and professional in approach, yet ones that make you laugh. For example, the Physics Prize for 2017 went to the paper by Dr. M. Farbin of France who studied the rheology (the study of the flow of matter) of cats and concluded that a cat can be a liquid (fluid enough to fit itself inside a beer mug), or a solid (shrink itself into a tight solid-like glob when immersed in a bath tub).
The Ig Nobel 2013 for Peace went to Mr. A. Lukashenko, the President of Belarus for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. You will agree that this is well deserved. Likewise, the 2003 Ig Nobel in Economics was offered to the Vatican for outsourcing prayers to India!
Ig Nobel winners from India
While no Nobel Prize has gone to an Indian citizen after Amartya Sen’s 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics (The 2009 Nobelist in Chemistry, the Indian-born Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, is an American-British citizen), Ig Nobel Prizes have gone to at least 5 Indian citizens, working in India.
The 2001 Ig Nobel in Public Health went to Dr. Chittaranjan Andrade and Dr. B.S. Srihari of NIMHANS, Bengaluru for their path-breaking discovery (published in J. Clin. Psychiat. 62: 426-31, 2001), which suggested that rhinotillexomania (nose picking, in common parlance) is a common activity among adolescents!
The 2002 Ig Nobel in Mathematics went to Dr. K.P. Sreekumar and Dr. G. Nirmalan of the Kerala Agricultural University at Mannuthy, Trichur ,for their 1990 paper: “Estimation of the total surface area in India elephants (elephas maximus Indicus) ” in Vet. Res. Comm. 14: 5-17, 1990. Working on 24 elephants, they devised a mathematical equation: [S = –8.245 + 6.807 H + 7.703 FFC] where S is the surface area, H the height at the shoulders and FFC the fore-footpad circumference. The mean surface area of an Indian elephant, using this equation was found to be 17.18 square meters. Now, why would want to estimate it? Because it indicates the total daily heat production (due to body metabolism), and thus aids in determining the necessary daily diet. One suspects that the jury which awarded the prize found the whole project exotic, the approach and the equation interesting, yet one that makes you think.
Very touching is the 2003 Ig Nobel for Peace which went to another Indian, Mr. Lal Bihari of Uttar Pradesh, for a triple achievement. Let me quote from the Ig Nobel site: “First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and third, for creating the Association of Dead People. Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari.
Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India”. How noble of the Ig Nobel organisers!
dbala@lvpei.org
