When the Nobel Prize was forced to cut costs, it permanently outsourced the Peace Prize. The US gleefully accepted that the role reserved for India when it comes to call centres, making it inseparable from malleable dogma and Western propaganda.
Whenever there is a need to raise someone’s profile or lend someone credibility, awards are a handy tool. The US can be trusted to be the knight in shining armour, so long as its interests are served. There is a long queue of egomaniacs desperate to be relevant, who live to pleasure the West.
The scraps spilled from its table during the process of gratification is all they seek. The Nobel Peace Prize, with a name reeking of unimpeachable credibility, is amongst the highest of politically motivated honours that can be bestowed on these lesser men and women as they grovel towards climaxes themselves.
Excellence in peace has never been achieved. Navigating the political terrain, driven by the principle of individualism, not only necessitates being selfish, self-serving, and self-aggrandising, but also striking deals that are beneficial to one’s objectives rather than for the greater good.
Peace is a pathetic greater good, the quest for it an ignoble one that does not help expand one’s mythos, cult or legacy. The illusion of being in the service of peace, however, is a coveted feather in one’s cap that the Narcissuses of today who dominate the political arena and those linked to it cannot resist.
The lure and the benefits are cherished by all: Bankers to the rich and the poor, bakers of famed and impoverished lands, candlestick-makers thoroughly redundant. The prize, thus, does not humbly acknowledge excellence or accomplishment, but propagates celebrity and its psychopathic tendencies.
Objectively trying to answer what any one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize has done to further peace is as futile an exercise as locating a drop of sweet water in the world’s oceans.
However, objectively trying to answer what any of them has done to establish his or her cult, to cement his or her own importance, to secure a lifetime of book deals, guest lectures and myriad lucrative opportunities beyond the grasp of worthier mortals for himself or herself, is akin to comparing the saline content of a drop from one ocean to one from another.
The public relations machines go into overdrive to keep the fading spotlights shining, and the cheques from the books, lectures and sundry continuing to trickle through.
Consider, for a moment: A teenager shot and left for dead by those derided as being extremists and terrorists, the very face of evil responsible for all the ills of the world, recovered and campaigned for education. Whether she is the darling of the West or not, whether there are unsavoury details about her current state of existence that are conveniently left out to nurture the romanticism surrounding her or not, whether it is purely a wicked publicity stunt or not, it cannot be denied that a symbol of hope has been birthed by the actions, well-informed or ill-advised, of a committee that would have faced repeated calls to give Malala Yousafzai the award.
Hope needs to be treasured in a world in which it is in short supply. Additionally, it needs to be acknowledged that there is another with whom she shares the accolade. Kailash Satyarthi’s story needs to be told and remembered if the Nobel Peace Prize is to attempt to shed its label of pandering glamorously to populist or politically convenient illusions. His journey, met with indifference and ignorance until now, needs to only be beginning, not ending, if the world is to see substantive rather than cosmetic changes.
This year’s prize needs to be about more than Indo-Pakistani relations and a young girl shot by extremists in a country and region under threat from terrorists if it is to ever amount to anything of real significance. Malala had to be shot for the West, and through it the world, to take notice of her and apologise, thereby elevating her by shaping her to its liking.
There are countless nameless others being mercilessly slaughtered by the forces that attacked her and the ones that saved her. As peace remains further from reality than fairy tales, many unknowns like Kailash who fight the broken systems in desperate need of change continue to suffer for daring to do so. The unbridled deifying of fallible, flawed human beings, boisterous in their desperation to extend their fifteen minutes, is not for the greater good.
