“Beta, when are you going to win the Nobel Prize?” my mom taunted as she half handed, half threw a cup of tea at me.
I made a lame attempt to sound intelligent by explaining the Brownian motion of Chai patti particles in the tea. Yet as soon as the words had left my mouth, I struggled to tell if the angry light in her eyes was a wave or a particle.
My mother wailed, “Diwali is coming! I was hoping to tell the relatives that Vicky has also won the Nobel Prize this year. Instead you keep writing this humour column. Is everything a joke to you?”
My mother’s withering sermon continued for some time, much like the US Fed Chairman's announcement of a 750 basis point hike. Yet as Mom was leaving after a particularly radioactive jibe about Marie biscuit and Marie Curie, I noticed this year’s winners are indeed interesting.
“Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo – this year’s #NobelPrize laureate in physiology or medicine – accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans”, the academy said in its press release.
A lot of this research may have been conducted in India, where extinct relatives keep turning up at your house, gate-crashing your wedding(s), and claiming to have last seen you millions of years ago.
Their demands and world views are also from the stone age, making them worthy of a Nobel prize simply for existing in the modern world. They will belittle you with “You kids have it so easy nowadays. In my time we did not have smartphones and WhatsApp. We had to chuck rocks at each other to say “Good Morning”.
Building increasingly complicated molecules is a desire that drives many chemists. Especially if they follow the Heisenberg principle from Breaking Bad. But for this year's chemistry Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee gave the prize for a phenomenon that makes difficult processes easier. As soon as I heard this, I sold all my shares in management consulting firms.
The Click Chemistry that won Morten Meldal, Barry Sharpless, and Carolyn Bertozzi this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is all about making huge chemical reactions simple. While some Indian mothers can turn a simple thing into a huge chemical reaction.
But perhaps nothing garnered more attention than the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have each conducted ground-breaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Any NRI even thousands of miles away from his extended Indian family will confirm that they remain in a constant state of quantum entanglement for life.
As a proud Indian I say Bollywood should get a Nobel Prize because it figured out this quantum entanglement decades ago when Jaya Bachchan instinctively knew when her son Shah Rukh Khan’s helicopter would land. In Indian family Quantum physics this is called the Maa ki Mamta principle. It is the unknown variable that can violate even Bell’s principle of inequality.
Therefore, I request my readers to like, share and comment on this article so my mother can proudly share it with the family. And reduce their quantum entanglement in my life.
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