Mahatma Gandhi may never have won a Nobel, but Gauri Nanda makes it all ok.

The Ig Nobels are the Hasty Puddings of the science world. They’re given out for the most pointless or humorous scientific research, like one winning paper on how leeches react to beer and sour cream. (Like humans, I’m guessing they swell up and die.)

Nanda won last night for her annoying, you-must-get-out-of-bed alarm clock. She’ll make a perfect desi mom someday Congrats, Gauri!

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, October 6, at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre… [Link]

Note that last night was their 15th ‘First Annual’ ceremony, like it’s my friends’ tenth 21st birthdays  Here’s more on Nanda. Past South Asia-related winners:

MATHEMATICS: K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report “Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants…”

PHYSICS: Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness. [REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra’s books “Quantum Healing,” “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” etc.]…

PEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People…

PHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping…

ECONOMICS: Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of “The Great Depression of 1990” ($17.95) and “Surviving the Great Depression of 1990” ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse…

PUBLIC HEALTH : Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents…

PEACE : Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs…

ECONOMICS: The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India…

MEDICINE: Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa… for their invigorating study entitled “The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition…”

Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India… Filmmaker Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life) of Lal Bihari. [Link]

And some of my favorite Ig Nobels, present and past:

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters — General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others — each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles — artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness…

PUBLIC HEALTH: Jillian Clarke… for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it’s safe to eat food that’s been dropped on the floor…

PEACE: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower…

BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson… for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting…

CHEMISTRY: Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research, in Champaign, Illinois, for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table…

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons… for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars…”

MEDICINE: James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell… medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report, “Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis…”

LITERATURE: The editors of the journal “Social Text,” for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist…

STATISTICS: Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, “The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size…”

ART: Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster “Penises of the Animal Kingdom,” and to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book…

LITERATURE: E. Topol, R. Califf… and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages…

ARCHEOLOGY: Eclaireurs de France, the Protestant youth group… fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for erasing the ancient paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave near the French village of Bruniquel…

PHYSICS: David Chorley and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for their circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops…

MATHEMATICS: Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds… that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist. [Link]