Obama???!!!

That was my friend in India’s Facebook status about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Seven hours later he was obviously rethinking the whole thing.

His status changed.

Obama’s prize gives me hope, in a sense. It means you can be awarded for BEING someone, rather that DOING something. And that’s good news for non-doer individuals like me.

That is hopeful, indeed.

As another Indian journalist friend quipped – Perhaps I can get a Nobel for literature too. I haven’t written a book but I might some day.

Phew that’s a relief. I’ve often written about the pressure of Indians being projected as a super achieving minority. You can’t just write a book, you must win the Booker. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first Indian (and Asian) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Generations later Indians are still trying to climb out of his shadow. I read recently that his Nobel prize was stolen from the library where it was housed. I wonder if it was some poor wanna-be writer tired of always being compared to the great man. Unfavorably.

I have gone through the chagrin of winning a prize in school and being sent to the neighbor kids to display the prize so that their mothers could shame their less fortunate children.

But for that you had to actually DO something like win a spelling bee. Now you can just talk about doing it. This is a prize for potential.

Cynics could say it might just be insurance. If you give him the Peace Prize maybe he won’t start any new wars. It’s the pre-emptive peace prize.

My friend Dr. Meera Srinivasan thinks Obama should just write a humble letter rejecting the prize and then “and then selecting someone trying to find real peace in Africa or South America, or numerous other places, where violence and poverty and dictatorships have killed and imprisoned thousands of social workers, social activists and social reformers who have committed their entire life to bringing real peace.”

True. That would be the Nobel thing to do. But it’s too late for that now. When the elections were happening in the United States, it was clear that almost anywhere in the world (except the U.S.) Obama would win by a landslide. Now the Nobel committee is giving him that symbolic crown.

Obama has become the global equivalent of the “teacher’s pet.” I guess that’s better than the Bush-style you-are-with-us-or-against-us “schoolyard bully.” But where does that leave America?

I imagine him going from country to country being forced to show off his medal while the Sarkozys and Browns and Chavezes glower resentfully.

“Look at that Obama, not even a year in office, and he’s already won a medal. Why can’t you win something nice?”

But what will happen if he really manages to end war, pass health insurance and immigration reform?

Nobel of Nobels?

Sainthood?

Umm, can we just have our president back?

And before he gets too cocky, Obama can remind himself that lots of people who do something instead of being someone have never won the Peace Prize. He quotes one of them often. His name is Mahatma Gandhi.