By K C Bhatt
Awards no more signify excellence in a discipline but are meant to reward a mediocrity which is steadily sucking the vigour out of the human civilization.
The Nobel award in literature is a case in point, which is recently being given often to the writers writing the most innocuous type of romantic poems or the equivalent kind of short stories, or composing folk songs.
Displaying a zero political consciousness in a work of literature is the most favourable quality of a literary man these days when everything has been mainstreamed so rigorously by the education of the universities, which need movie-starts to promote their courses.
It gives an impression if the world is almost a conflict-free zone now and can indulge permanently in the finer emotions the love brings to life.
It is an about-turn since the days of yore when the acerbic writers writing in favour of the powers-that-be were being rewarded with most of the literary awards.
It was better as compared to the present situation, as it created a sharp literary response from amongst the other side of the divide.
But now it seems if the literature no more has the resources to kick the world out of its comfort zone to intellectually renew it perpetually to salvage it from falling in a torpor which leads to the black hole of degradation, and the final, consequent annihilation.
Having taken away that venom thus, from the literature, the decline in other forms of human enterprises is bound to set in.
There have been several Nobel laureates in economics from the third world countries, who have written speculative theories about the prevalence of poverty in their countries of origin but have failed spectacularly to recommend a solution.
Having originated from where they have, they have possibly accepted the poverty as fait accompli of their brethren, about which nothing can be done. So they too have accepted their karma in a way and that of their subject, in which they were trained in a Western university.
That, no matter how knowledgeable they become, they cannot have a solution. Strangely, a few such laureates were seen vying for a high political office in their countries of origin, entirely giving up on academics after winning the Nobel thereby.
In a way they have become like beauty-queens of their disciplines, from this part of the world–which is so full of tragedies, mostly man-made. They could be looked at in admiration for their accomplishments by their universities and its young students. Learning which is as impotent as Casanova: the impotent god of male beauty.
To make the beauty-queens and the values they represent look more egalitarian, it was only recently that the women of colour were started being rewarded with the beautiful crowns.
The politics and the commercial interests of the first world in the third world made sure that they always remained the women of colour for nearly a decade.
Now, this charity has been extended to a few disciplines of academics too, which have the possibility of making endless speculations without making any recommendations.
So the pure science Nobel awards remain still far from the reach of the people of colour, except for a few exceptions. For, that scientific temperament is still out of the possibility in the people of these cultures, which espouse the philosophy of karma so eternally.
In a way, the pandemic plaguing humanity now is a cruel reminder to it, that its failure recently has been total. Good literature might have kept the world in an ever-present pandemic like terror, to save it from the present predicament caused by a new pandemic.
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