The World Called Him Venki, We Called Him...Too Often

I wonder if we (the Indian media) got maybe a bit too overheated about Indian-American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan's recent Nobel Prize win for chemistry. On the one hand, it is the Nobel prize- they don't give it out just for effort. Ramakrishnan ("Venki") mapped the elaborate atomic structure of the ribosome, a protein-producing structure responsible for DNA production. Ribosomes exist in every cell, the process by which they create DNA (and sometimes mess up) is little understood.

And Ramakrishnan is the first person with an Indian name to win the chemistry Prize in...well...ever. But the gratuitious coverage that followed (the Times of India interviewed first Venki's parents, then his old professors, then finally absolute strangers) hasn't happened since AR Rahman won an Oscar for "Jai Ho."

I think it's fabulous that Venki won his prize, but let's be clear - he isn't an Indian, even though we wish he were. I've combed through the interviews. At no point does he mention his Indian upbringing or thank his Indian professors. I don't think he gave a single interview to an Indian publication. Perhaps the New York Times got to him first?

It's especially interesting because just earlier this year, India's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research announced the Bhatnagar Awards, the nation's highest scientific honors. Guess how many papers salivated over those nominees: 0.

The Nobels are great, but like any highly coveted award, they are a crapshoot. Science is a collaborative enterprise, as Venki himself is reported to have said. In the few short months I've been working as a science writer, I've met brilliant Indian scientists. I've interviewed a doctor who has spent his life researching how diabetes affects South Asians - a minority until recently ignored by medical science - thus saving millions of lives in a population we now know to be at special risk. I've talked to researchers who work around the clock to map the vast genetic linkages of India's population, thereby revealing the secret of how the human population came to cover the globe. I've spoken with a conservationist who has explained to the world the importance of preserving India's key habitats, which contain some of the world's greatest levels of biodiversity.

Every Indian knows Ramakrishnan's work (ribosomes), his hometown (Chidambaram), his current employer (England's MRC), but many Indians don't know what great research is being done by scientists who have never left the subcontinent.

As India becomes a bigger and more visible market and economy (am I being repetitive?) it's unavoidable that more Indians will win prestigious international awards. But I hope Indian achievement isn't defined by them.

(For a newspaper, of course, it's impossible to force anything down the reader's throat without coming off as ineffective and out of touch. Witness the sad state of the New York Times. We in the newsroom like to debate the tradeoff between giving people what they want and giving them what is good for them. If this seems paternalistic, it is, and that's why Indian papers won't carry the Bhatnagar awards, even though in some alternate universe one might argue that they should.)