Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for 2020 for ‘Medical Education’. The award is shared by heads of Brazil, the UK, Mexico, Belarus, the US, Turkey, Russia, and Turkmenistan.
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical or parody awards given out every year by a magazine named ‘Annals of Improbable Research’. The magazine is dedicated to scientific humour, in the form of a satirical take on the standard academic journal.
It is a wordplay on ‘ignoble’, an antonym of noble. It is being given since 1991 and it aims to “honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
Narendra Modi became the second Prime Minister to win the award. Earlier, Atal Bihari Vajpayee won the 1998 Peace award for “aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.”
The ‘Medical Education’ prize is given “for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can” and is shared by Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan.
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The governments of India and Pakistan are also awarded the Peace Prize for “having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.”
This is in reference to media reports in 2018 as a row occurred between the diplomats of both countries. “The mistreatment allegedly includes tailing the cars of high commission officials, cutting off water and electricity supplies and ringing the doorbells of senior diplomatic staff at 3 am and then fleeing,” said the report.
India’s deputy high commissioner in Islamabad, JP Singh, complained about being the victim of the latter, as has his Pakistani counterpart in Delhi.
