Awards – Medium Level – GK Questions

The 2000 Gandhi Peace Prize was given jointly to Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa who led the post-apartheid democratic transition, and to Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the microfinance institution founded by Muhammad Yunus. This was the only joint award between recipients from two different countries in the prize's history. It is also the only year where the prize went simultaneously to an individual political leader and to a financial institution.

From 1958 to 2008, the Ramon Magsaysay Award was given in six specific categories: Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism/Literature/Creative Communication Arts, Peace and International Understanding, and Emergent Leadership. From 2009 onwards, five of these fixed categories were discontinued and the award began to be given without prescribed categories — judges simply look for the best exemplars of the award's spirit. Emergent Leadership, which was added only in 2000 via a Ford Foundation grant and is limited to individuals or organisations aged 40 or under, was retained as a distinct track.

Ramon Magsaysay died on 17 March 1957 in a plane crash. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed the award in April 1957 and the Foundation was formally established in May 1957 with a founding board of seven Filipinos. The first awards were then given on 31 August 1958 — Magsaysay's birth anniversary — after a full selection cycle had been completed. This is why the award is described as "established 1957, first given 1958."

The Booker Prize was originally open only to writers from the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, and Zimbabwe. From 2014 onwards, the prize opened to any work written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, regardless of the author's nationality. This brought in American and other non-Commonwealth authors for the first time and sparked significant debate about whether it would dominate the prize.

The four double Booker winners are J.M. Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012), and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). Ian McEwan has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize six times — among the most nominations ever — but has only won once, for Amsterdam in 1998. He is a very common wrong answer in this type of question.

Arundhati Roy, born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, won the 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things — her debut novel set in a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. She was the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize. The novel has sold millions of copies worldwide and remains one of the most widely taught South Asian novels in English.

Article 18(1) prohibits the State from conferring any title except military or academic distinctions. A common misconception is that the Bharat Ratna therefore violates the Constitution. The Supreme Court, in the Balaji Raghavan case (1996), held that Bharat Ratna and Padma Awards are not titles within the meaning of Article 18(1) and do not violate the Constitution.

In 2024, five individuals received the Bharat Ratna: Karpoori Thakur, L.K. Advani, P.V. Narasimha Rao, M.S. Swaminathan, and Chaudhary Charan Singh. Four of the five were posthumous; only L.K. Advani was living. This broke the record set in 1999, when four were given: Jayaprakash Narayan, Amartya Sen, Gopinath Bordoloi, and Ravi Shankar.

Sachin Tendulkar received the Bharat Ratna in 2014, the year he retired from international cricket. He was 40 years old at the time, making him the youngest person to have received the award. He is also the first and only sportsperson in the award's history — no other cricketer, athlete, or player of any sport has received it before or since.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA while studying C. elegans roundworms in the early 1990s. They found that the lin-4 gene produces a short RNA molecule (not a protein) that switches off another gene by binding to its messenger RNA. This post-transcriptional regulation mechanism was later found to be universal across animals, including humans.

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind developed AlphaFold, which in 2020 solved the protein folding problem — predicting how a protein's amino acid sequence folds into its specific 3D shape. This 50-year-old challenge had been tested in the CASP competition since 1994. AlphaFold 2 achieved experimental-grade accuracy at CASP14 and later deposited structures for over 200 million proteins in a public database.

Hopfield and Hinton won the 2024 Physics Nobel for the theoretical foundations of artificial neural networks — specifically the Hopfield network (associative memory model) and the Boltzmann machine (a learning algorithm). These tools underpin modern machine learning. Note: this is 2024 Physics — quantum computing was Physics 2025.

Sen's 1981 book Poverty and Famines examined historical famines in Bengal (1943), Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and the Sahel and found that food supplies had not necessarily collapsed during these events. People starved because they lost the entitlements — wages, property, purchasing power — that allowed them to access food that was physically present. This entitlement framework changed how economists and aid agencies approach famine prevention.

Satyarthi founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) in 1980 to combat child labour in India. His organisation conducted raids to free children from bonded labour and helped draft the ILO's Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (1999). He shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan.

Chandrasekhar moved to the United States as a young man and became a US citizen. He received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics as an American, not an Indian citizen. The Indian-citizen laureates were Tagore, Raman, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen, and Kailash Satyarthi.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi won the 2025 Chemistry Nobel for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous molecular structures with enormous internal surface areas. One gram of MOF can have a surface area larger than a football field, making them valuable for gas storage, separation, and removing environmental pollutants.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established in 1968 by Sweden's central bank — 72 years after Nobel's death in 1896. The original five prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace) date from 1901. This distinction is a common exam trap in "which is NOT original" questions.

Norway's Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, won the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. The film also received acting and other nominations that night.

Sinners received 16 nominations at the 98th Academy Awards, breaking the previous all-time record of 14, which had been held jointly by All About Eve (1951), Titanic (1998) and La La Land (2017). Despite 16 noms, Sinners won four awards.

The copper plaque handed to every Sahitya Akademi winner was designed by Satyajit Ray — the celebrated Bengali filmmaker was also an accomplished graphic artist and designer.