Prize managers

A prize is something one wins for being superior to others competing with him/her in that particular area. It is a recognition he gets for his efforts which makes him surpass others. It is also an inspiration for everyone to try and excel.

Principally not a bad idea, this one, if it is made to work in the framework it is supposed to work in. However human nature does not let him allow things to take the course they are meant to. He has to manipulate so that they work out to his advantage - prize managers are such human beings.

They are found in all wakes of   life. They are found in parents of school children. Conventional ones will do their children's   projects at home themselves, and let those be submitted as if done by their children. More ambitious types hire professionals to do it. If the assessors do not see through the play, these children win prizes. It does not matter to those parents that genuine competitors have been put aside by unfair means.   For them life is war, and for wining anything in this war, nothing is unfair. Sometimes these prize managers are parents of some of these children. They influence the judges who happen to be their colleagues. They reciprocate when they become judges sometime later when the past judges’ children are competing. These easy prizes give a wrong message to the winners. They expect such managed prizes all through their lives, and do not make any efforts to excel. The children, who should have won but didn't, learn about injustice at a very early age. They do not have the   maturity to forgive, to let go, and continue to make efforts to excel. Some of then give up early, and end as failures. Some of then carry the resentment inside them, and should injustices occur to them again and again, may turn antisocial.

Prize managers fix prizes in colleges, in extracurricular as well as curricular events too. After all, the procedure is the same as that used for school children. They fix games, local, state, national, and international. They fix governmental honors like achievement awards (Padmashree, Padmabhushan), sports achievement awards ( Arjun, Dronacharya etc), and other honors. When there are no personal relatives to be awarded these, they select people who have rendered good service to them. Best teacher's award goes to a teacher who may not be teaching at all, but does administrative work or not even that, but keeps the top brass happy by whatever means.

Prize management has ruined the concept of a prize. Now every prize winner is suspect. If there is any obvious influence, even if it has not been used, people say, 'that's it!' If no influence is obvious, people say, ' it must be there. It will be obvious someone or other.'

Another disadvantage of prize management is devaluation of merit. A neutral observer oblivious of the management involved will feel that all competitors must be very low in merit, since their best one has such low level of merit.