There are prizes other than the Nobel, haven’t you heard?

 The more I get to hear about medals other than Nobel, I get more confused about why the Nobel has been placed at the apex of such awards, including the ersatz Nobel, for economics.

James Bates Clark prize, The Economist says is a little tougher to get than the Nobel for economics; I am no one to argue. Fields Medal is for mathematics and is awarded to mathematicians not more than 40 years old – a Nobel with an age limit! Obviously tougher than Nobel. Abel prize – Its only competition is Fields Medal, scat Nobel!

Now I come to Boltzmann Medal. Though my go-to-newspaper in the morning is The Hindu, (I am an armchair commentator and the paper’s leisurely pace suits me) I must point out that it slipped. The news of Prof. Deepak Dhar being awarded Boltzmann medal was carried in one of the interior pages.

In my humble opinion, it must have headlined the front page.

Why so? I have, at my very layman level with no chance of climbing up the ladder, fallen in love with statistics and it is this love that makes me appreciate the foundations of big data, AI etc. And, Prof. Dhar becomes a part of my narrative, just as E. C. G. Sudharshan did when he was spurned by physics Nobel.

We did not thump our chest when an India-origin achiever, Prof. Manjul Bhargava’s was awarded the Fields Medal some years ago, whose Indianness skips a generation. SASTRA Deemed-to-be University did confer its own award on Prof. Bhargava, notably earlier than he being awarded the Fields. Chalk up one for SASTRA. Where was GoI earlier to Fields? In hiding somewhere!

Prof. Akshay Venkatesh is one more such case - we will not celebrate an accomplishment till the same is acknowledged by a foreigner. Such inferiority/superiority (I do not know which) complex! Though, like Prof. Bhargava, Prof. Venkatesh too was awarded SASTRA Deemed-to-be University's award earlier than he got his Fields, his achievement did not get the rousing reception in Indian media – recall how the media went gaga over Venky’s Nobel award.

Such felicitations did not happen with Subramanian Chandrasekhar, the redoubtable Lahore born physicist who won the physics Nobel some fifty years after he postulated what came to be called Chandrasekhar Limit, and also the Abel prize winner S. Varadhan of Courant Institute, New York.

I am now forced to conclude that there are factors other than Indianness that occasions such chest thumping by Indians in India. Indians abroad couldn't care less. It could be that Prof. Dhar spent his career in Indian institutions, TIFR, Mumbai and IISER, Pune. Forget that the citation awarding him the prize mentioned his work as a Ph.D student at California Institute of Technology, the US west coast citadel of cutting-edge science and technology.

However, it is more than that. Just for this post, I scoured the Net and found that Boltzmann Medal does not carry any cash award. Be honest with yourself – the first thing that hits you in the face from the newspaper in October of every year is the crores of rupees the Nobel award carries.

Moreover, Boltzmann does impose the condition that downgrades the award – it cannot be conferred on anyone who is already a Nobel Laureate. This beggars belief. Why would a Boltzmann even indirectly imply that it is lower than a Nobel? It says to everyone and her cousin that once a Nobel has been awarded, all other awards lose their shine. The polar opposite of successful salesmanship! When you think someone deserves felicitation by you, why would anyone else facilitating him/her, earlier or later matter?

This is how Boltzmann loses out to Nobel. We, as poor as we are, are enamoured of money; perhaps because we ARE poor. A hungry person appreciates even a single morsel of food.

Prof. Dhar’s prize does not satisfy us, as Indians. Hence, the news about his winning a prestigious prize is consigned to inner pages.

Sad.

Raghuram Ekambaram