Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been awarded the Ig Nobel Prize 2020 for Medical Education. Modi was awarded the prize for "using the COVID-19 pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can".
Besides Modi, the medical education prize was jointly awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan.
Not to be confused with the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical and parody award given out by a magazine Improbable Research every year since 1991.
The award plays on word ‘ignoble’, an antonym of noble. It aims to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think".
Modi became the second Indian Prime Minister to be awarded the Ig Nobel Prize. In 1998, then-PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan were awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs."
This year, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the governments of India and Pakistan for "having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door."
This year, the Ig Psychology Prize was awarded to Miranda Giacomin of Canada and Nicholas Rule from the USA for "devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows."
The Medicine Prize was awarded to 3 people for "diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds."
In 2013, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for making it illegal to applaud in public and to the Belarus State Police for "arresting a one-armed man for applauding."
