** Who says Indians aren't Nobel worthy? cm
The following from the ToI: 'Dead' Indian bags Ignoble Prize CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, OCTOBER 04, 2003 12:00:00 AM ] WASHINGTON: The Nobel Prize might continue to elude Indians, but for the second year running, they were nailed by an 'IgNobel Prize', a mock award given by groups at Harvard and Radcliffe, to "honour achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced." This year's IgNobel "peace prize" went to Lal Bihari of Uttar Pradesh in India, "for a triple accomplishment: 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," the IgNobel committee said in a statement. Lal Bihari is part of a well-chronicled scam in India, in which officials are bribed to declare landowners dead, so that they can be deprived of their property. A native of Azamgarh in UP, Bihari was declared dead in 1976 and has been fighting to regain his 'life' and rights since then. In fact, Lal Bihari is considered so "dead" that the Indian government initially refused to give him a passport to travel to the US for the IgNobel ceremony. The ceremony is a rousing event that is attended and addressed by real Nobel laureates. The event takes place in Boston in the first week of October each year, around the same time the Nobel prizes are announced. When the government finally relented, it was too late for the US visa and the prize was received by a live surrogate, organisers said. "The Indian government, which didn't recognise his life, gave him a passport. But the American government, the paragon of efficiency and helpfulness, won't give him a visa. You would expect a man, who comes back from the dead, would get a little extra help," Marc Abrams, editor of the science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, which organises the award, told the wire service Reuters. Lal Bihari is not the first Indian IgNobelist. Last year IgNobel for Mathematics went to K P Sreekumar and the late G Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."� In 2000, the IgNobel committee awarded the Public Health Prize to Chittaranjan Andrade and B S Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. They were awarded for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents. [Reference: "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.] IgNobels have also gone to notable people such as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, "for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs" in 1998. French President Chirac was also awarded the IgNobel Peace Prize in 1996 for "commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific." Among other previous Indian winners are economist Ravi Batra, best-selling author of The Great Depression of 1990 and Surviving the Great Depression of 1990, "for selling enough copies of his books single-handedly, to prevent worldwide economic collapse." _______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam
