An award that couldn't be rewarding enough

Different people inhabit different worlds and one man's trophy is another man's trash. Jean Paul Sartre rejected Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. Hollywood actor Marlon Brando turned down the Academy Award for the Best Actor in 1973. But a heartbroken poet of this country resorted to bizarre antics last week after he found out that he wasn't nominated for this year's Independence Day Award. Nirmalendu Goon posted his frustration in a sullen Facebook message, its tone hovering between despondency and veiled threat. Lo and behold, it worked for him! His name was added to the list.

That makes it difficult to tell if the poet has won the award for his talent or tenacity. Speculations are rife about why the reversal must have happened. One story gives credit to a poet's high connections. Another puts emphasis on his political commitment. Never mind why he is going to get it. If it makes one more happy soul, this world is a better place to live.

For his rejection of the Nobel Prize, Sartre gave two kinds of reasons: personal and objective. The personal reason is that he always refused to accept honours because it transforms a writer into an institution. For example, he said, his sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists should commit only himself. But if Jean-Paul Sartre, the Nobel laureate, championed the Venezuelan resistance, he would also commit the entire Nobel Prize as an institution. His conception of the writer's enterprise was that a writer must act only with the means that are his own if he adopts political, social or literary positions.

The objective reasons followed from Sartre's perception of contradiction between two cultures. Since his sympathies went to socialism, he felt he couldn't accept an honour awarded by cultural authorities, those of the West any more than those of the East. For that matter, he confirmed, he would have rejected the Lenin Prize as well.

Marlon Brando refused the Oscar because of the treatment of American Indians by the Hollywood film industry. There are more examples of honours and awards spurned due to humanitarian reasons. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Legendary Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar refused the Filmfare Award twice, once because the statuette was designed in the shape of a woman, and again because she wanted new talents to get the fair share of recognition. In 973, Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Henry Kissinger but refused to accept it because Vietnam was not at peace yet.

The list of rejections, however, runs much shorter compared to the list of those who have rejoiced over their wins. And, exceptions prove the rule that everybody covets some awards, honours and recognitions in life. But only a handful of people desire what they deserve, and repudiate anything that clashes with conscience.  

Our poet reconciled himself to those challenges with common sense, which he expressed in an interview. He said one doesn't get something unless one asks for it, a truth trumpeted every day by infants around the world screaming for their mother's milk. While nobody can question if the poet deserved the Independence Day Award, his go-getter attitude has somewhat tarnished its glamour. The trophy forever shall remind the world how pitifully he went to this award, which should have propitiously come to him.

We tend to interchangeably use the words award and reward because many of us have forgotten the difference between them. An award is a prize that's given to somebody because he or she has done something great. A reward is not a prize. It is compensation in cash or kind for the effort somebody has made. For example, Mughal emperor Akbar awarded the honorific title Mian, meaning a learned man, to Ramtanu Pandey, who subsequently became famous as Mian Tansen.  But reward is when a king granted feudal land to his knight warrior in recognition of his valiant service or threw a pearl necklace or gold coin at a courtesan impressed by her singing or dancing.

In this country, many of the awards have been dished out as rewards because government after government picked nominees under political considerations, their emphasis being more on loyalty than merit. So we have got two growing lists of reverse contentions. One list has those who have undeservingly won and another has those who have unfairly lost.

Nirmalendu Goon is lucky to be neither. A leading light of poetry in this country, he should have won the award in his own right. That it needed some push from his side is lamentable since it shows an inherent weakness that undermines the purpose. For a long time to come, the trophy and the poet will stare each other in the face, wondering whether it was poetry or persistence that got them together!

The writer is editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: badrul151@yahoo.com