He asked for a loan and the register said he was dead

1976. Lal Bihari, twenty-one years old, a farmer from Amilo in the Indian district of Azamgarh, walks into a bank office in Uttar Pradesh to ask for a small loan against the family land: less than an acre — some four thousand square metres — in Khalilabad. The clerk checks the register and tells him he can't be lent anything, because the owner of that land is recorded as deceased. The owner is him. An uncle had paid an official to register him as dead and take over the plot.

1980. Four years of petitions later, Lal Bihari makes the only decision that pays: if the state says he is dead, he will sign as a dead man. He adds to his name the word "mritak", which in Hindi means exactly that, and from then on introduces himself everywhere as Lal Bihari Mritak. He also stages his own funeral, procession included, and files an application for a widow's pension in the name of his wife, who is alive and sitting beside him. The administration never answers the application, and it sends nobody to the funeral either.

1988. He changes tactics and moves into politics, where the paperwork does get looked at. He stands for election against V. P. Singh, who would go on to become prime minister of India. Along the way he discovers his case is not rare: he finds a hundred or so neighbours buried on paper by a relative in a hurry, and founds with them the Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People, which has come to claim more than twenty thousand members across India and which, twenty-four years after it was born, had managed to legally resurrect exactly four.

1989. He tries again, this time against Rajiv Gandhi in Amethi, Gandhi's own constituency. He loses both times. What he wins happens away from the ballot box: for the first time someone with a microphone has to explain in public why a candidate is listed as dead in the land register.

1994. Eighteen years after that visit to the bank, the administration gives him his life back: the register is corrected and Lal Bihari once again counts as an existing person, entitled to ask for a loan, to inherit and to vote for himself.

2003. The magazine Annals of Improbable Research awards him the Ig Nobel Peace Prize — the prize for achievements that first make you laugh and then make you think — at its ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, "for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and for creating the Association of Dead People."

Madhu Kapoor had to collect the prize on his behalf, and a few weeks later it was handed to him in India, at a ceremony of his own. To get to Harvard he had applied for an Indian passport, which by then he could apply for without arguing with anybody, and the problem turned out to be a different one: nine years after convincing his own country that he was alive, the United States would not let him in.