by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

Give only posthumous awards


In India, we are ever glad to shower people who are currently the flavour of the month with great platitudes, accolades and even honours.  And when it comes back to biting us, we do a sheepish huh-huh!

We give a padma shri award to Barkha Dutt, bhushan to Ratan Tata, a bhushan to a hotelier of questionable achievements and a shri to  a militant with dubious record and bhushan to Gavaskar whom even the BCCI distrusts now.

Just look at the record -
  • 2 of them have achievements or records that are questionable
  • other 2 are mired in IndiTape controversy without any good explanation
  • one is distrusted by his own home sports body
And that is just random samples.  I’ve neither the time nor the inclination, right now, to delve completely into the list and do a check. 

So what is that we are trying to do?

Create a coterie of people who are ‘padmas’?

Eff it!

I say Mr. Morarji Desai (even though on many, in fact almost all, points, my views and his never would have been in agreement) had the right idea.  Abolish this absurdity.

Now that we are in the CAG audit mood set -
  • can we have a CAG audit on how long minds have been applied w.r.t awardees and their achievements?
  • if it is too low - like 15 minutes per awarded, it is too low
  • if the whole process took 15 bureaucrats and 5 ministers better part of a week, it was too much.
  • if it is anywhere in between, it is nothing which we have to spend money or time on
Hence do away with them!

Else there is an alternative:

Create a new award called ‘Padma Surya’ and at the same time abolish all other padma awards.  And put in the criteria that ‘Padma Surya’ will only be awarded posthumously and the group to decide will consist of the Prime Minister, the HRD Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

image

And make sure the letters are in English too - or else all the recognised languages of India.

BTW, my Mischievous half murmurs, ‘maddie, do you know what you have done?  You’ve just ruled yourself out of padma shri awards for 2011!’
:-E

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