Award – an Honour or Insult !
Award – an Honour or Insult !
An award is a form of honor, a kind of recognition aimed to felicitate one’s excellent contribution in a chosen field. An award is not only a great prestige or a mark of excellence, but is also a tremendous boost for someone to strive and excel higher and aim for even bigger accomplishments in life. It is the ultimate token of recognition of purest of talents and highest of achievements.
Awards can give you a fabulous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are. One of our senior associate to whom we call as MLT, had never thought of any individual award neither in his student life nor in his good standing four decades service.
He passed out his schooling and college, got a job in education department, married with a house wife, blessed with three daughters, all married, retired but did not get even a single award.
To keep himself busy, he joined the social service organizations, also called as non-government organizations (NGOs). He had so many thought and suggested that these should be named as Non-profitable Service Organizations (NSOs) but he always thought that people are so conditioned with the titles that the same are hard to change.
After retirement, the day one was very boring as he used to get up early morning, dress up, go for a regular walk, seen gossiping and enjoying morning tea by the road side on holidays and week -ends and remain busy for many hours a day. But now he had no work to keep myself busy.
From the very beginning, he had the aptitude of writing letters, letters to the editors and write-ups on certain current topics like Science and Religion, 21st Century and Your expectations but it was never in my mind to join journalism. One of his friends advised him to do the PGDMC which will create an interest to continue in writing. He joined the distance education University and joined one daily newspaper. Later on started fortnightly newspaper. His reporting and write-ups were appreciated orally but no official honour was given.
Sometimes, certain questions have come to my mind. As to how people get awards? What are they getting out of it? Why I don’t quite get? There are awards for very important persons (VIPs) but not for very ordinary persons (VOPs).
But when I heard about returning of awards by the eminent writer Nayantara Sahgal returned the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in protest against what she called the “vanishing space” for diversity.
I have also read that the Sahitya Akademi President failed to adopt a resolution condemning the killing of Kannada writer M.M.Kalburgi. But the body remained silent. The Akademi has failed in its duty to stand with the writers and to uphold freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. Expressing solidarity and condemning the killings of writers, the Sahitya Akademi, admonished the protesters to take back their awards.
And it was good that my close friend has not been honoured with this award otherwise he too have to return.
But good luck for him that he joined the some regional news paper and send features on the instant issues. Because of his sincere and instant reporting, he was awarded with life-time achievement award at the age of 80 plus.
Frankly speaking, when I congratulated him for this award, he said, “Award to me is both – honour and insult”. Honour in the sense, his contributions to the society and newspaper have been recognized and insult, with logic that it has been conferred too late.
