Satire and criticism have been the ways of great kings! Even one of the greatest kings King Krishnadevaraya used to listen to Tenali Raman who was not only clever but also used Humour to give great and apt suggestions!
In the modern era the realm of Humour with intelligence could be the Ignoble prize!
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.
Its aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word “ignoble”.
Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the Ig Nobel Prizes are presented by actual Nobel laureates in a ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology!
The Ig Nobel Prize monetary award is given in a solitary banknote for the amount of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars! In case you are wondering wow! That is a big amount! Well, it translates to 0.003106 USD! It may not get you a House but it is a highly priced collector’s item!
During the ceremony there is a custom of throwing paper planes!
For many years Professor Roy J. Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official “Keeper of the Broom”.
Then in 2005 Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards because he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics!
Yes!
So the satire and the comic relief actually leads to development and invention and maybe progress!
Like in 2006, a study showing that one of the mosquitoes that can carry malaria (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology!
You may laugh at that but what happened was that as a direct result of these findings, traps baited with this cheese have been placed in strategic locations to combat the epidemic of malaria in Africa!
Later on Also Sir Andre Geim, who had been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for levitating a frog by magnetism, was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for his work with the electromagnetic properties of graphene. He is the only individual, as of 2025, to have received both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel!
Then again his Ignoble research magnetic levitation of a frog, was by 2022 reportedly part of the inspiration for China’s lunar gravity research facility! Now that is very Noble indeed!
Noble and brave also was Squadron Leader Ajjamada Boppayya Devayya! This movie called the Sky Force is a remarkable ode to the legacy of this great man who sacrificed his life for our country. They used to call him mad! And like AK says in the movie, “The love for your country is madness indeed!”
Do read about him!
Jai Hind..
SHubh Ratri…
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