Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
"Invictus" is a short poem by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and first published in 1888 in Henley's Book of Verses, where it was the fourth in a series of poems entitled Life and Death (Echoes). It originally bore no title: early printings contained only the dedication To R. T. H. B.—a reference to Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce (1846–1899), a successful Scottish flour merchant and baker who was also a literary patron. The familiar title "Invictus" (Latin for "unconquered") was added by Arthur Quiller-Couch when he included the poem in The Oxford Book Of English Verse (1900)
At the age of 12, Henley became a victim of tuberculosis of the bone.[citation needed] A few years later the disease progressed to his foot, and physicians announced that the only way to save his life was to amputate directly below the knee. In 1867 he successfully passed the Oxford local examination as a senior student. In 1875 he wrote the "Invictus" poem from a hospital bed. Despite his disability, he survived with one foot intact and led an active life until the age of 53.
Friday, February 5, 2010
If...
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
"If—" is a poem written in 1896 by the then-31-year-old Rudyard Kipling. It was first published in the "Brother Square Toes" chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. Like William Ernest Henley's "Invictus", it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is confirmed both by the number of parodies it has inspired, and by the widespread popularity it still draws amongst Britons (it was voted Britain's favourite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll). The poem's line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same" is written on the wall of the centre court players' entrance at the British tennis tournament, Wimbledon. The entire poem was read in a promotional video for the Wimbledon 2008 gentleman's final by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
According to Kipling in his autobiography Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1937, the poem was inspired by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa, subsequently called the Jameson Raid.[1] This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
"If—" is a poem written in 1896 by the then-31-year-old Rudyard Kipling. It was first published in the "Brother Square Toes" chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. Like William Ernest Henley's "Invictus", it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is confirmed both by the number of parodies it has inspired, and by the widespread popularity it still draws amongst Britons (it was voted Britain's favourite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll). The poem's line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same" is written on the wall of the centre court players' entrance at the British tennis tournament, Wimbledon. The entire poem was read in a promotional video for the Wimbledon 2008 gentleman's final by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
According to Kipling in his autobiography Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1937, the poem was inspired by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa, subsequently called the Jameson Raid.[1] This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Moonstruck: a giant thud for mankind
For as long as man has looked up, the moon has inspired romance, poetry and songs. Man also likes blowing things up. Now we get to do both -- in the name of science.
The aim of Friday’s deliberate crash of two unmanned NASA spacecraft into the moon is to see if they can kick up some ice. It is the 20th lunar crash, most of them done on purpose, since the Russians first did it 50 years ago last month.
And that doesn’t count the eight times we tried and somehow missed the moon or couldn’t get off the ground.
For more than a century, the idea of Earthlings taking a swipe at the moon has permeated popular culture. The most enduring image is from the 1902 classic movie, “A Trip to the Moon,” in which a bullet—like rocket wincingly lodges in the eye of the man in the moon.
As much as we like to gaze at the moon, we like stirring things up even more. It’s the specialty of the hit show “Mythbusters” and the aptly named show “Destroyed in Seconds.”
Friday’s first smack: a 2.2—ton empty rocket stage crashing into the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, equal to the power of 1.5 tons of TNT, followed four minutes later with a smaller hit. As planned, the probe sent by NASA had separated into the two pieces Thursday night.
For those fearing that the crashes like Friday’s could cause the moon to shift its orbit or send huge chunks back to Earth, agency scientists have some words of comfort.
They say such crashes have no more effect on the moon than an eyelash dropping on a jet. Sure the impact may seem big, but so is the moon.
This also is something that happens four times a month to the moon, said Dan Andrews, the head of this NASA lunar crash mission. The only difference is that those hits are from naturally occurring space rocks.
No one personifies the blow-’em-up-in-the-name-of-science more than Brown University geologist Peter Schultz, a scientist who worked on NASA’s similar purposeful crash into a comet in 2005. He’s a regular cosmic crasher in the name of science -- and jollies.
“Whenever these things happen, the first thing that comes out of your mouth is ‘Geez,”’ Mr. Schultz said. “I’ve got the neatest job in the world.”
It’s human nature to blow things up and dissect what happens, Schultz said Thursday from the Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Ames Research Centre.
“There’s a reason you drop pumpkins off a 30-story building,” he told The Associated Press.
He won’t say whether he’s done that -- but he has shot eggs out of jet engines into the ground to see what happens to the shells. And then there’s this don’t-do-this-at-home moment from his boyhood: He put a firecracker into an ant mound and took pictures of the flying ants during the explosion.
Schultz later got a telescope and fell in love with the moon and its craters. He planned to look at the crash with spacecraft cameras capable of 1 million frames per second -- getting millisecond-by-millisecond details of the violence.
NASA’s plan, which often mistakenly was called “bombing the moon,” has generated lots of late-night humour and even some outrage.
David Letterman, who has dropped watermelons off Manhattan rooftops, has riffed on it repeatedly. He speculated on a counterattack by the moon with his own NASA-like animation and then compared it to the U.S. war in Iraq, as an attack-first, ask-questions-later scenario.
Others aren’t completely joking about their concerns.
Novelist Amy Ephron doesn’t understand the hoopla surrounding NASA’s moon crash and wondered whether the public would be as excited about the mission if a country like Iran were in charge.
Ephron created a “Help Save the Moon” Twitter campaign -- part tongue-in-cheek and part serious -- to prevent future lunar dustups and to start a debate about who owns the moon.
“I really am a pacifist. I don’t like the idea of sending a missile to Afghanistan or to Iraq or to the moon,” said Ephron, while stressing that she’s not against space exploration.
Still the moon beckons as an inviting target.
NASA’s Andrews said his 12-year-old son was out gazing at the sky a couple months ago and came back and told him: “Look, Dad, it’s taunting you.”
Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace prize
Oct 9 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama, 48, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace on Friday.
Here are some facts about Obama.
EARLY LIFE
Barack Obama was born in August 1961 to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. His father, Barack Obama Sr., married his mother, Ann Dunham, while studying at the University of Hawaii. The couple separated two years after Obama was born. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia.
After finishing college in 1983, Obama worked for a New York financial consultancy. He landed a job in Chicago in 1985 as an organizer for Developing Communities Project, a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods.
Three years later, Obama went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the law review.
POLITICAL CAREER
* Obama won a seat in the Illinois state Senate in 1996. During his time there he worked on welfare and ethics issues.
* Obama won a heavily contested U.S. Senate seat in 2004, carrying 53 percent of the Democratic primary vote in an eight-candidate race. He easily won the general election as well. In the U.S. Senate he compiled a liberal voting record, but was one of the few Democrats to back a measure on class-action lawsuits.
ROAD TO PRESIDENCY
* Obama announced his presidential candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was initially seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
* Obama won the first contest of the Democratic primary in Iowa in January 2008, but did not clinch the nomination until the last states had cast their ballots in June.
* Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, beating Republican rival John McCain, and became the first black U.S. president
A LONG YEAR
* In April, Obama launched a plan to create a world free of nuclear weapons in a speech in the Czech capital Prague. He said the United States would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security and urge others to follow.
His plan envisaged maintaining "a safe, secure and effective arsenal" to deter adversaries as long as such arms exist and negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia.
* In June, Obama told the world's Muslims that violent extremists had exploited tensions between Muslims and the West, and that Islam was not part of the problem but part of promoting peace.
Obama delivered a speech aimed to heal a rift between Washington and the Islamic world from Cairo University in the centre of Egypt's sprawling capital.
* In July, Obama told Africans that Western aid must be matched by good governance as he urged them to take greater responsibility for stamping out war, corruption and disease plaguing the continent.
He delivered the message on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa as U.S. president. He chose stable, democratic Ghana based on his view it can serve as a model for the rest of Africa.
* In the Middle East Obama has said "the time had come to move determinately forward" and that comprehensive peace in the Middle East was not a "zero-sum game" but a "win-win" situation for all the parties.
* Last month Obama made his first address to the U.N. General Assembly. Obama pressed world leaders on Wednesday to help confront challenges ranging from the war in Afghanistan to nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea instead of expecting the United States to do it all alone.
* Reflecting the pressure he faces for results on a slew of foreign policy problems, Obama issued a blunt message in his United Nations debut that other countries must shoulder a larger burden in tackling international crises.
* In September, Obama also chaired a historic meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which unanimously approved a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on nuclear weapons states to scrap their arsenals. Sources Reuters/http//nobelprize.org
Here are some facts about Obama.
EARLY LIFE
Barack Obama was born in August 1961 to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. His father, Barack Obama Sr., married his mother, Ann Dunham, while studying at the University of Hawaii. The couple separated two years after Obama was born. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia.
After finishing college in 1983, Obama worked for a New York financial consultancy. He landed a job in Chicago in 1985 as an organizer for Developing Communities Project, a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods.
Three years later, Obama went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the law review.
POLITICAL CAREER
* Obama won a seat in the Illinois state Senate in 1996. During his time there he worked on welfare and ethics issues.
* Obama won a heavily contested U.S. Senate seat in 2004, carrying 53 percent of the Democratic primary vote in an eight-candidate race. He easily won the general election as well. In the U.S. Senate he compiled a liberal voting record, but was one of the few Democrats to back a measure on class-action lawsuits.
ROAD TO PRESIDENCY
* Obama announced his presidential candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was initially seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
* Obama won the first contest of the Democratic primary in Iowa in January 2008, but did not clinch the nomination until the last states had cast their ballots in June.
* Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, beating Republican rival John McCain, and became the first black U.S. president
A LONG YEAR
* In April, Obama launched a plan to create a world free of nuclear weapons in a speech in the Czech capital Prague. He said the United States would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security and urge others to follow.
His plan envisaged maintaining "a safe, secure and effective arsenal" to deter adversaries as long as such arms exist and negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia.
* In June, Obama told the world's Muslims that violent extremists had exploited tensions between Muslims and the West, and that Islam was not part of the problem but part of promoting peace.
Obama delivered a speech aimed to heal a rift between Washington and the Islamic world from Cairo University in the centre of Egypt's sprawling capital.
* In July, Obama told Africans that Western aid must be matched by good governance as he urged them to take greater responsibility for stamping out war, corruption and disease plaguing the continent.
He delivered the message on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa as U.S. president. He chose stable, democratic Ghana based on his view it can serve as a model for the rest of Africa.
* In the Middle East Obama has said "the time had come to move determinately forward" and that comprehensive peace in the Middle East was not a "zero-sum game" but a "win-win" situation for all the parties.
* Last month Obama made his first address to the U.N. General Assembly. Obama pressed world leaders on Wednesday to help confront challenges ranging from the war in Afghanistan to nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea instead of expecting the United States to do it all alone.
* Reflecting the pressure he faces for results on a slew of foreign policy problems, Obama issued a blunt message in his United Nations debut that other countries must shoulder a larger burden in tackling international crises.
* In September, Obama also chaired a historic meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which unanimously approved a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on nuclear weapons states to scrap their arsenals. Sources Reuters/http//nobelprize.org
Odd facts about Nobel Prize winners
October 6, 2009 -- Updated 1827 GMT (0227 HKT)
By Jason English
(Mental Floss) -- It's Nobel Prize announcement week, and if you had Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, or Jack Szostak in your office pool, you're off to a good start (the trio will share this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine). As we await news of the rest of the winners, here are some stories about past Nobel laureates.
Nobel Prize winners receive a medal and a cash award.
1. Robert Lucas, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the theory of "rational expectations," split his $1 million prize with his ex-wife.
If there were a Nobel Prize for Foresight or Timing, she should be nominated, based on a clause in their divorce settlement from seven years earlier: "Wife shall receive 50 percent of any Nobel Prize." The clause expired on October 31, 1995. Had Lucas won any year after, he would have kept the whole million.
2. Physicist Lise Meitner, whose work helped lead to the discovery of nuclear fission, was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times without ever winning (though nominations are kept secret, so we don't know for sure). This makes her the Dynasty of the Nobel Prize scene -- that show was nominated for 24 Emmy Awards but never won. Other analogies we'd accept: The Color Purple (11 Oscar nominations in 1985, no wins), the Buffalo Bills or Minnesota Vikings (4 Super Bowl losses each without a victory) and William Jennings Bryan (three-time Democratic nominee for President, losing twice to McKinley and once to Taft.)
3. People who refused the prize:
• Le Duc Tho was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger for their roles in brokering a Vietnam cease fire at the Paris Peace Accords. Citing the absence of actual peace in Vietnam, Tho declined to accept.
• Jean Paul Sartre waved off the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. His explanation: "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."
Don't Miss
• Afraid of Soviet retribution if he traveled to Stockholm to claim his prize, Boris Pasternak declined to accept the 1958 Prize in Literature, which he'd earned for Doctor Zhivago. The Academy refused his refusal. "This refusal, of course, in no way alters the validity of the award. There remains only for the Academy, however, to announce with regret that the presentation of the Prize cannot take place." Yevgeny Pasternak accepted the prize on behalf of his deceased father in 1989.
• Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt won for Literature in 1918. He did not accept because he was Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. He was given the award posthumously in 1931. This was allowed because the nomination was made before Karlfeldt died -- no candidate may be proposed after death. Mental Floss: 10 technologies we stole from the animal kingdom
4. In 2007, 90-year-old professor Leonid Hurwicz became the oldest person to ever win (one-third of the Prize in Economics); at 87, writer Doris Lessing became the oldest woman (Literature).
5. DNA expert Kary Mullis -- 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry -- was scheduled to be a defense witness in O.J. Simpson's murder trial. However, Simpson's lawyer Barry Scheck felt the prosecution's DNA case was already essentially destroyed, and he didn't want Mullis' personal life to distract jurors (he'd expressed an affinity for LSD.)
6. Nobel Laureates you must know: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Jimmy Carter, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Pierre & Marie Curie, Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
7. Big names who never won: Dmitri Mendeleev, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henrik Ibsen, Joan Robinson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Jules-Henri Poincaré, Raymond Damadian and Mahatma Gandhi.
8. Winners without the greatest reputations:
• Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who won in 1976 for his research in human slow-virus infections, spent 19 months in jail after pleading guilty in 1997 to charges of child molestation.
• Johannes Fibiger won in 1926 after discovering parasitic worms cause cancer -- a breakthrough that turned out to not be true.
• Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. This decision caused Nobel Committee member Kare Kristiansen to resign. "What consequences will result," he asked at the time, "when a terrorist with such a background is awarded the world's most prestigious prize?"
• William Shockley won for Physics in 1956 for his role in the invention of the semiconductor, but his support of the eugenics movement alienated the scientific community. Shockley also donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank developed to spread humanity's best genes.
9. As part of his divorce settlement, Einstein's Nobel Prize money went to his ex-wife, Mileva Maric.
10. The Curie family is a Nobel Prize machine, winning five: Pierre and Marie for Physics in 1901; Marie solo for Chemistry in 1911; daughter Irene and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie for Chemistry in 1935; and Henry Labouisse -- Irene's daughter Eve's second husband -- accepted on behalf of UNICEF in 1965. No family has won more.
11. Marie Curie's second prize was marred by scandal. Then a widow, Curie had an affair with a married scientist, Paul Langevin -- a former pupil of Pierre Curie. Love letters were involved, eventually leading to a duel between Langevin and the editor of the newspaper that had printed them (no shots were actually fired.) According to NobelPrize.org, when it was suggested that Curie not accept the prize, she wrote a shrewd letter, "which pointed out that she had been awarded the Prize for her discovery of radium and polonium, and that she could not accept the principle that appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by slander concerning a researcher's private life."
12. Singing support --While there's no evidence the Nobel judges can be swayed by theme songs, that hasn't stopped Loriana Lana from composing one for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. "Peace Can" includes the lyrics, "Silvio forever will be / Silvio is reality / Silvio forever! /Silvio gives us trust."
13. Alfred Nobel -- inventor of dynamite -- may have been inspired to create the Nobel Prize after a premature obituary in a French newspaper called him a "merchant of death."
14. Nobel died on December 10, 1896. The formal awards ceremony is held in Stockholm each year on the anniversary of his death. The first awards show took place on December 10, 1901. (These things take time to plan.)
And in case you were wondering just how much of a say Alfred Nobel had in the prize, here's what he wrote in his will:
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way:
"The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
"The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical works by the Caroline Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, so that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not."
Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate
by Øyvind Tønnesson
Nobelprize.org Peace Editor, 1998-2000
1 December 1999
Nobelprize.org Peace Editor, 1998-2000
1 December 1999
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) has become the strongest symbol of non-violence in the 20th century. It is widely held – in retrospect – that the Indian national leader should have been the very man to be selected for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was nominated several times, but was never awarded the prize. Why?
These questions have been asked frequently: Was the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee too narrow? Were the committee members unable to appreciate the struggle for freedom among non-European peoples?" Or were the Norwegian committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?
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| When still alive, Mohandas Gandhi had many admirers, both in India and abroad. But his martyrdom in 1948 made him an even greater symbol of peace. Twenty-one years later, he was commemorated on this double-sized United Kingdom postage stamp. Photo: Copyright © Scanpix |
Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January 1948. The omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". However, the committee has never commented on the speculations as to why Gandhi was not awarded the prize, and until recently the sources which might shed some light on the matter were unavailable.
Mahatma Gandhi – Who Was He?
Mohandas Karamchand – known as Mahatma or "Great-Souled" – Gandhi was born in Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in what is today the state of Gujarat in Western India, where his father was prime minister. His mother was a profoundly religious Hindu. She and the rest of the Gandhi family belonged to a branch of Hinduism in which non-violence and tolerance between religious groups were considered very important. His family background has later been seen as a very important explanation of why Mohandas Gandhi was able to achieve the position he held in Indian society. In the second half of the 1880s, Mohandas went to London where he studied law. After having finished his studies, he first went back to India to work as a barrister, and then, in 1893, to Natal in South Africa, where he was employed by an Indian trading company.
In South Africa Gandhi worked to improve living conditions for the Indian minority. This work, which was especially directed against increasingly racist legislation, made him develop a strong Indian and religious commitment, and a will to self-sacrifice. With a great deal of success he introduced a method of non-violence in the Indian struggle for basic human rights. The method, satyagraha – "truth force" – was highly idealistic; without rejecting the rule of law as a principle, the Indians should break those laws which were unreasonable or suppressive. Each individual would have to accept punishment for having violated the law. However, he should, calmly, yet with determination, reject the legitimacy of the law in question. This would, hopefully, make the adversaries – first the South African authorities, later the British in India – recognise the unlawfulness of their legislation.
When Gandhi came back to India in 1915, news of his achievements in South Africa had already spread to his home country. In only a few years, during the First World War, he became a leading figure in the Indian National Congress. Through the interwar period he initiated a series of non-violent campaigns against the British authorities. At the same time he made strong efforts to unite the Indian Hindus, Muslims and Christians, and struggled for the emancipation of the 'untouchables' in Hindu society. While many of his fellow Indian nationalists preferred the use of non-violent methods against the British primarily for tactical reasons, Gandhi's non-violence was a matter of principle. His firmness on that point made people respect him regardless of their attitude towards Indian nationalism or religion. Even the British judges who sentenced him to imprisonment recognised Gandhi as an exceptional personality.
The First Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize
Among those who strongly admired Gandhi were the members of a network of pro-Gandhi "Friends of India" associations which had been established in Europe and the USA in the early 1930s. The Friends of India represented different lines of thought. The religious among them admired Gandhi for his piety. Others, anti-militarists and political radicals, were sympathetic to his philosophy of non-violence and supported him as an opponent of imperialism.
In 1937 a member of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament), Ole Colbjørnsen (Labour Party), nominated Gandhi for that year's Nobel Peace Prize, and he was duly selected as one of thirteen candidates on the Norwegian Nobel Committee's short list. Colbjørnsen did not himself write the motivation for Gandhi’s nomination; it was written by leading women of the Norwegian branch of "Friends of India", and its wording was of course as positive as could be expected.
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| An ordinary politician or a Christ? In this photo Gandhi listens to Muslims during the height of the warfare which followed the partition of India in 1947. Photo: Copyright © Scanpix |
The committee's adviser, professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi, was much more critical. On the one hand, he fully understood the general admiration for Gandhi as a person: "He is, undoubtedly, a good, noble and ascetic person – a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by the masses of India." On the other hand, when considering Gandhi as a political leader, the Norwegian professor's description was less favourable. There are, he wrote, "sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (...) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician."
Gandhi had many critics in the international peace movement. The Nobel Committee adviser referred to these critics in maintaining that he was not consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. This was something that had happened during the first Non-Cooperation Campaign in 1920-1921, e.g. when a crowd in Chauri Chaura, the United Provinces, attacked a police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police station.
A frequent criticism from non-Indians was also that Gandhi was too much of an Indian nationalist. In his report, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own doubts as to whether Gandhi's ideals were meant to be universal or primarily Indian: "One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse."
The name of the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was to be Lord Cecil of Chelwood. We do not know whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee seriously considered awarding the Peace Prize to Gandhi that year, but it seems rather unlikely. Ole Colbjørnsen renominated him both in 1938 and in 1939, but ten years were to pass before Gandhi made the committee's short list again.
1947: Victory and Defeat
In 1947 the nominations of Gandhi came by telegram from India, via the Norwegian Foreign Office. The nominators were B.G. Kher, Prime Minister of Bombay, Govindh Bhallabh Panth, Premier of United Provinces, and Mavalankar, the President of the Indian Legislative Assembly. Their arguments in support of his candidacy were written in telegram style, like the one from Govind Bhallabh Panth: "Recommend for this year Nobel Prize Mahatma Gandhi architect of the Indian nation the greatest living exponent of the moral order and the most effective champion of world peace today." There were to be six names on the Nobel Committee's short list, Mohandas Gandhi was one of them.
The Nobel Committee's adviser, the historian Jens Arup Seip, wrote a new report which is primarily an account of Gandhi's role in Indian political history after 1937. "The following ten years," Seip wrote, "from 1937 up to 1947, led to the event which for Gandhi and his movement was at the same time the greatest victory and the worst defeat – India's independence and India's partition." The report describes how Gandhi acted in the three different, but mutually related conflicts which the Indian National Congress had to handle in the last decade before independence: the struggle between the Indians and the British; the question of India's participation in the Second World War; and, finally, the conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities. In all these matters, Gandhi had consistently followed his own principles of non-violence.
The Seip report was not critical towards Gandhi in the same way as the report written by Worm-Müller ten years earlier. It was rather favourable, yet not explicitly supportive. Seip also wrote briefly on the ongoing separation of India and the new Muslim state, Pakistan, and concluded – rather prematurely it would seem today: "It is generally considered, as expressed for example in The Times of 15 August 1947, that if 'the gigantic surgical operation' constituted by the partition of India, has not led to bloodshed of much larger dimensions, Gandhi's teachings, the efforts of his followers and his own presence, should get a substantial part of the credit."
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| The partition of India in 1947 led to a process which we today probably would describe as "ethnic cleansing". Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred and millions had to move; Muslims from India to Pakistan, Hindus in the opposite direction. Photo shows part of the crowds of refugees which poured into the city of New Delhi. Photo: Copyright © Scanpix |
Having read the report, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee must have felt rather updated on the last phase of the Indian struggle for independence. However, the Nobel Peace Prize had never been awarded for that sort of struggle. The committee members also had to consider the following issues: Should Gandhi be selected for being a symbol of non-violence, and what political effects could be expected if the Peace Prize was awarded to the most prominent Indian leader – relations between India and Pakistan were far from developing peacefully during the autumn of 1947?
From the diary of committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, we now know that when the members were to make their decision on October 30, 1947, two acting committee members, the Christian conservative Herman Smitt Ingebretsen and the Christian liberal Christian Oftedal spoke in favour of Gandhi. One year earlier, they had strongly favoured John Mott, the YMCA leader. It seems that they generally preferred candidates who could serve as moral and religious symbols in a world threatened by social and ideological conflicts. However, in 1947 they were not able to convince the three other members. The Labour politician Martin Tranmæl was very reluctant to award the Prize to Gandhi in the midst of the Indian-Pakistani conflict, and former Foreign Minister Birger Braadland agreed with Tranmæl. Gandhi was, they thought, too strongly committed to one of the belligerents. In addition both Tranmæl and Jahn had learnt that, one month earlier, at a prayer-meeting, Gandhi had made a statement which indicated that he had given up his consistent rejection of war. Based on a telegram from Reuters, The Times,on September 27, 1947, under the headline "Mr. Gandhi on 'war' with Pakistan" reported:
"Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war, the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union."
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| Gandhi saw "no place for him in a new order where they wanted an army, a navy, an air force and what not". In the picture, Gandhi's spiritual heir, Prime Minister Pandit Nehru, Defense Minister Sardar Baldev Singh, and the Commanders-in-Chief of the three Services, are inspecting a Guard of Honour at the Red Fort, Delhi, in August, 1948. Fifty years later, both India and Pakistan had developed and tested their own nuclear weapons. Photo: Copyright © Scanpix |
Gandhi had immediately stated that the report was correct, but incomplete. At the meeting he had added that he himself had not changed his mind and that "he had no place in a new order where they wanted an army, a navy, an air force and what not".
Both Jahn and Tranmæl knew that the first report had not been complete, but they had become very doubtful. Jahn in his diary quoted himself as saying: "While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the nominees – plenty of good things could be said about him – we should remember that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot. (...) Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an excellent jurist and a lawyer." It seems that the Committee Chairman suspected Gandhi's statement one month earlier to be a deliberate step to deter Pakistani aggression. Three of five members thus being against awarding the 1947 Prize to Gandhi, the Committee unanimously decided to award it to the Quakers.
1948: A Posthumous Award Considered
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the closing date for that year's Nobel Peace Prize nominations. The Committee received six letters of nomination naming Gandhi; among the nominators were the Quakers and Emily Greene Balch, former Laureates. For the third time Gandhi came on the Committee's short list – this time the list only included three names – and Committee adviser Seip wrote a report on Gandhi's activities during the last five months of his life. He concluded that Gandhi, through his course of life, had put his profound mark on an ethical and political attitude which would prevail as a norm for a large number of people both inside and outside India: "In this respect Gandhi can only be compared to the founders of religions."
Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. Thus it was possible to give Gandhi the prize. However, Gandhi did not belong to an organisation, he left no property behind and no will; who should receive the Prize money? The Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, August Schou, asked another of the Committee's advisers, lawyer Ole Torleif Røed, to consider the practical consequences if the Committee were to award the Prize posthumously. Røed suggested a number of possible solutions for general application. Subsequently, he asked the Swedish prize-awarding institutions for their opinion. The answers were negative; posthumous awards, they thought, should not take place unless the laureate died after the Committee's decision had been made.
On November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate". Chairman Gunnar Jahn wrote in his diary: "To me it seems beyond doubt that a posthumous award would be contrary to the intentions of the testator." According to the chairman, three of his colleagues agreed in the end, only Mr. Oftedal was in favour of a posthumous award to Gandhi.
Later, there have been speculations that the committee members could have had another deceased peace worker than Gandhi in mind when they declared that there was "no suitable living candidate", namely the Swedish UN envoy to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, who was murdered in September 1948. Today, this can be ruled out; Bernadotte had not been nominated in 1948. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that Gandhi would have been invited to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had he been alive one more year.
Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.
There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.
In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.
During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Muslims which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn's diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.
Dynamite the Nobel prize in economics
October 9th, 2009
Christopher Swann, Reuters
Did you know that worms cause cancer? They don’t, of course, yet in 1926 Johannes Fibiger won a Nobel Prize in medicine for this “discovery.”
The Nobel committees for science prizes rarely make such amusing blunders, but those awarding the medal for economics have a long history of endorsing ideas that are useless, incorrect and even dangerous.
With the latest winner of the $1.4 million windfall due to be named on Monday, the case is stronger than ever for scrapping the prize altogether. The economics award — created in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank — has always been the odd man out.
Far from celebrating those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” as Alfred Nobel intended, the economics prize has done more harm than good.
The prize has fostered a faith in economists that is often misplaced. Friedrich Hayek, who won in 1974, said he would have advised against creating the award. The title, he said, “confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.”
Laureates, he suggested, should be required to take “an oath of humility … never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.”
Sadly, economists, as a caste, have showed no such humility. The Nobel imprimatur has encouraged us to exaggerate the scientific quality of the dismal science.
Unlike their counterparts in physics, chemistry and medicine, economists have precious little predictive power. Lately, there has been much soul searching about the failure of economists to anticipate the 2008 meltdown. But given the profession’s history it would have been surprising if they had.
Over the past 20 years economists have failed to forecast any of the major twists and turns of the U.S. economy. Economists, as labor leader George Meany once grumbled, is “the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right.”
Worse still, the Nobel committee has set its seal on ideas that have been extremely toxic. Nobel Prize-winning theories were behind the biggest market meltdowns since the Great Depression.
In 1987, wide acceptance of the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model helped turn a market stumble into the worst one-day fall in Wall Street history, threatening the entire system. The model was rejected by traders, yet a decade later Robert Merton and Myron Scholes picked up their check from the Riksbank.
Or take Value at Risk models — backed by the Nobel Prize-winning portfolio theories of Harry Markowitz — which was culpable in both the panics of 1998 and 2008. These models helped justify skimpy capital ratios in the run-up to 2008.
“These theories have managed to transform tranquillity into turbulence, creating crises out of nowhere,” says Pablo Triana, author of “Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets?” He adds: “The Nobel Prize helped give them respectability.”
And Nobel-endorsed economic theories helped justify the aversion to regulation showed by policy makers like Alan Greenspan. A long list of laureates from the Chicago school from Gary Becker to Edward Prescott helped promote the idea that governments should stand aside.
If the Swedish central bank wants to give away 10 million kronor a year, that is their business. But the prize should not be allowed to coast on the prestigious Nobel brand. Surviving relatives of Nobel are right to ask that their name be taken off the prize.
Aside from a new name, the prize should also come with a label:
WARNING: These theories should not be used by everyone. Side effects can include: financial crises, turbulent stock markets and banking collapse.
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