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Kailash Who ? - Indian Punchline
▻http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/10/11/kailash-who

Kailash Who?

The Nobel Prize Committee has partly made up for its colossal failure not to have honored Mahatma Gandhi by honoring a disciple with this year’s peace prize. Kailash Satyarthi is not a famous name among India’s elites — like Nandan Nilekani or Shashi Tharoor. He’s a mere ‘Gandhian’, a vanishing breed.
We have our own native yardstick to judge what merits national attention and what doesn’t. But the Western world took careful note of Satyarthi and is compelling us to be attentive to Satyarthi.
What does this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for Satyarthi mean? Of course, it is an apt recognition of the great work Satyarthi has been doing for three decades running against the mainstream trend of governance that gives low importance to the social sectors of development.
Present-day India attaches far greater importance to the ‘modernization’ of its military than to addressing the humiliating stigma that one child dies every 8 seconds in our country due to malnutrition — or, that 2.1 million Indian children die before reaching the age of 5 every year — four children every minute — mostly from preventable illnesses.
I can go on and on. Therefore, Nobel has done a great thing by making the Indian political class hang its head in shame — although that might not have been its intention.
But then, what has been its intention? To my mind, a compelling message is also being communicated to our subcontinent by bracketing two activists from India and Pakistan to share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The message to our two countries in the subcontinent where Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai live and work is as follows: ‘You guys have got your national priorities all screwed up.’ It’s a stirring message for a rude awakening — and a cause to celebrate at a time when the beating of war drums was beginning to be heard in our region, again.