Sunday, October 25, 2009

Obama and the Nobel Prize...The fallibility underneath !!


Obama wins Nobel peace prize!!” I was going through my FaceBook homepage last week when a friend’s post took me by surprise. Obama ? Nobel ? For peace? I mean wtf? Isn’t it too early? The news itself has elicited a gamut of reactions from different sections of the society and different corners of the world. Some welcomed the decision citing his initiatives for global peace and nuclear disarmament while some chastised the Nobel committee’s sloth and favoritism towards a president who hasn’t yet achieved anything substantial. The Nobel committee seems to be going the U.N. way!!

The awarding of the prize to Obama raises serious questions and impels the common man to think of the Nobel committee’s decision as only politically driven. How could otherwise one explain the irony that Gandhi, the vanguard of non-violence and Satyagraha, was never awarded this prize but many other prominent figures (including Obama) who themselves followed Gandhi’s ideals were awarded the peace prize. What a bunch of hypocrites!!

The committee, trying to justify its choice, stated that sometimes the peace prize is given to encourage and motivate the awardees in their endeavors but it should have realized that writing books like Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, working with some rural communities, making eloquent and mass-appealing speeches, and using diplomatic ways with other nations on the conference table neither suffice nor promise that Obama will actually help bring the much-hyped ‘Change’ the U.S. and the world has been looking forward to, and vindicate the committee’s decision.

What is far more evident in case of Obama is that the war in Iraq continues to fester; and the assault on Afghanistan mires in a dangerously endless killing spree. The Zionists in Israel remain unmoved. The American Congress will not say ‘yes’ to climate change obligations. Pakistan, the weakest of weak states, succeeds in sucking the world’s most powerful man into a deep hole of deceit and chicanery.

So basically the problem with the Nobel committee awarding Obama the peace prize is that it sends out an entirely negative signal: that it is all right for a U.S. president to ignore global concerns on the environment, take the side of a regime like Israel that is accused of serious war crimes or to consider coercive or even military means for the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue.

Among the front-runners for the prize this year were Hu Jia of China, a social activist and Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, who actually dismantled his country’s nuclear wherewithal. If actions speak louder than words, both of them have done far more than what Obama has and choosing one of them would have actually been a sagacious decision.

Coming back to Obama, the urge to live up to the international recognition he has already received might be an incentive. But with the Nobel peace prize already under his belt and the weight of well-entrenched lobbies, interests and policies bearing down on his worthy shoulders, the chances of him actually doing so have probably just got narrower. I can only ‘hope’ that the ‘hope’ he had professed will resonate with the ‘hope’ of a peaceful world!!

2 comments:

Saurabh Sahay said...

serious topic...ideas well expressed and nicely written article..

Abhi said...

Hahaha..yea, my effort at writing The Hindu style ;)