Friday, October 03, 2003
Igging them on
Close on the heels of J.M.Coetzee winning the Nobel Prize for literature comes the announcement of the Ignobel awards. The Ignobels (or Igs) are awarded by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research to honour people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." This years winners include Lal Bihari of Uttar Pradesh who was awarded the Ignobel for Peace in recognition of his dogged efforts to convince people he was in fact not dead.
Bihari, who lives in Azamgarh, 220 kilometres (130 miles) southeast of Lucknow, was listed as deceased in 1976. He found thousands of other Indians in the same plight and led a "posthumous" campaign to tackle the issue, even creating the Association of Dead People to press the authorities into action.
Others winners include a medical team from the University College London for their pioneering work to prove that the hippocampus of London cabbies was larger than the population-at-large and to Karl Schwarzler (Economics Ig) and the nation of Liechtenstein for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings. The full list is here.
Just for the record the real thing will be announced next week with the Nobel Peace Prize being announced on Oct 10th.
Bihari, who lives in Azamgarh, 220 kilometres (130 miles) southeast of Lucknow, was listed as deceased in 1976. He found thousands of other Indians in the same plight and led a "posthumous" campaign to tackle the issue, even creating the Association of Dead People to press the authorities into action.
Others winners include a medical team from the University College London for their pioneering work to prove that the hippocampus of London cabbies was larger than the population-at-large and to Karl Schwarzler (Economics Ig) and the nation of Liechtenstein for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings. The full list is here.
Just for the record the real thing will be announced next week with the Nobel Peace Prize being announced on Oct 10th.
