Of Awards and Honours

William Hazlitt counselled his son to keep the people around him happy if he was to rise to prominent positions in life. “Without their support, you may rise but very heavily.” That is how the advice remains in my memory. If you want to rise in career, you need other people’s support. When I was teaching this lesson, my class eleven students immediately commented merrily: “Chamchagiri,” flattery. I was teaching in a residential school in Delhi at that time.

Residential schools are like extended families. Everybody knows everybody else too well just like in a family. Hence they suffer one another too just like in a family. Otherwise residential schools will crumble like a house of cards. When you live with other people 24x7, you know everyone too well to point a finger at anyone openly. That sort of knowledge builds up relationships too. You love and you hate. It’s all part of the game and the game goes on much better than in day schools. Flattery plays an immense role in such a system.

Flattery could win you many benefits, positions and awards. Everyone in the school knew that as well. A teacher who never cared to enter his classroom at any time was awarded the ‘Best Teacher’ by no less an agency than the Government of India. The school recommended him for the award because he had the best connections with those in power in the school. The same school that had declared an internal award for teachers who secured outstanding results in the Board exams never gave me that award until I questioned. Of course, I didn’t know the art and craft of Chamchagiri. I haven’t learnt it even now, what an idiot am I! 

I did receive two awards in that school, however. They were given by an external agency which conducted a survey among students. Students see the world quite differently from the adults. Or, maybe, I was not enough of an adult to play the adult games and the students liked my immaturity which put me in their company. Even today, with one foot in the vicinity of the grave, I feel totally out of place in the world of adults. But I’m not worried about it anymore because I have seen the futility of it all at my age. You need awards and honours when you have the time for rising to positions in life. What will you do with awards and honours in your grave?

Nowadays I see a lot of people receiving all sorts of awards. The social media is full of awards. Every contact of mine wins an award every other day. I too win some of them and I too post it boastfully in the social media. So I’m not carping, okay. On this beautiful Sunday morning, when the sun is shining outside with the heartless mirth of children as I sit in my study with the two mango trees in front of my house providing all the soothing balm I require, I happened to be bothered by a thought that was triggered by an article I read this morning on Magzter app, lying in bed since sleep abandoned me too early. 

Adoor Gopalakrishnan

The article, in a Malayalam periodical, was about a man who won more awards and honours than anyone else in the world, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. He has won the Kerala Film Award 17 times, 16 other better known film awards, Padma Sri (1984), Dada Saheb Phalke in 2004, Padma Vibhushan, J C Daniel Award, and so on. This great and admirable man is the chairman of the K R Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts in Kerala. The students of that Institute are on strike now because of the caste discrimination being practised there under the supervision of the man who has won all those awards and honours. The students from the lower castes are discriminated against, it is alleged.

Ironically, the Institute is named after K R Narayanan, former president of India, who hailed from a family of untouchables. Narayanan was born in a mud-hut as the fourth son of the seven children of very poor parents. He knew hunger and poverty and discrimination. But he studied sincerely even though there was no light in his hut in the nights. He walked kilometres in order to study. It was a tough life indeed. But sheer hard work, dedication and intelligence stood him in good stead. He won many a scholarship and became what he did, the President of India. It was not an easy journey. Even when he passed BA (Hons) with first rank, he was denied a teacher’s job in a school on account of his caste.

Today, in the Institute that is run in his name, a man of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s calibre is practising discrimination! I have been an admirer of Adoor. His films are a class apart. He is a genius. He deserves all those awards and honours he has received. But he is not a good human being, it seems.

Adoor’s first movie, Swayamvaram, did not win any award in Kerala but it won the national award. He must have learnt the lessons of personal connections then. It has helped him ever since. Of course, that is not to deny his genius. But genius alone won’t get you anywhere in this world unless it is in science where personal connections don’t matter more than scientific evidence.

Anyone who has worked in any industry or profession will agree that awards and honours are not given most of the time to people who deserve them but to those who know how to grab them.

So, what’s the point I’m trying to make on this beautiful Sunday morning? Let people grab awards and honours. If you get them, well and good. If you don’t get them, it doesn’t mean that you are no good. It may at best mean that you don’t know how to flatter the right people. That’s not a fault really. Go on doing what you love to do. Your happiness is the best award and reward. And if you want to get awards, keep the right people happy. Simple.