India’s quest for Nobel Prize completes a cycle of sorts

• More than 100 years after Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 1913, India’s quest for the Nobel Prize has attained a certain philosophical completeness under all categories for which it is awarded, with Kailash Satyarthi of India being chosen along with Malala of Pakistan for the Nobel Peace Prize 2014.
• While C.V. Raman won the Nobel for Physics in 1930, Har Gobind Khorana bagged it under the category of Medicine in 1968. Khorana shared his prize with Robert W. Holley and Marshall W. Nirenberg.
• The Albanian-born Mother Teresa who later worked out her spiritual destiny in Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, even as India was again crowned with the Nobel Physics in 1983 in the hands of Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar. He shared it with William Alfred Fowler.
• If in 1998 Amartya Sen won extraordinary laurels for India by winning the prize for Economics “for his contributions to Welfare Economics,” it was then followed by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan chosen for the Nobel Chemistry in 2009. Dr. Ramakrishnan shared it with Thomas A Steitz and Ada E. Yonath.
• Five years later, an Indian has again bagged the Nobel Peace, this time sharing it with a courageous Pakistani girl, rounding off a rare sub-continental partnership to work together for suffering humanity at large.