Current Affairs

4. Gukesh defeated China's Ding Liren to become World Chess Champion in December 2024, at age 18 — the youngest ever.

Droupadi Murmu became the 15th President of India in July 2022 — the first tribal woman and second woman to hold the position.

No cricketer featured in the 2025 National Sports Awards nominations for any category. The most recent cricketer to receive the Arjuna Award was pacer Mohammed Shami in 2023. India's women's team won the T20 World Cup and reached the ICC Women's World Cup final in the 2025 cycle, but no women's or men's cricketer was included in the panel's recommendations.

Gayatri Gopichand was nominated for the Arjuna Award as a player in the women's doubles badminton category, forming the top-ranked women's doubles pair in India alongside Treesa Jolly. Her father Pullela Gopichand is India's national badminton coach and former All England Open champion (2001).

Divya Deshmukh, a chess grandmaster born in 2005, won the FIDE Women's World Cup in 2025 — making her the first Indian to win that title. She was twenty years old at the time. She was nominated alongside Vidit Gujrathi, giving chess two nominees in the 2025 Arjuna list.

Six hockey players received the Khel Ratna before Hardik Singh's 2025 nomination: Dhanraj Pillay (1999-2000), Sardar Singh (2017), Rani Rampal (2020), P.R. Sreejesh and Manpreet Singh (both 2021, the year India won its first Olympic hockey medal since 1980), and Harmanpreet Singh (2024, Paris bronze). If Hardik Singh is confirmed, hockey will have produced 7 Khel Ratna recipients.

Aarti Pal is the national and Asian champion in yogasana — competitive yoga. Yogasana was formally recognised as a competitive sport by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in 2020, but no yogasana athlete had been recommended for the Arjuna Award in the five years since. Pal's 2025 nomination was the first. Yogasana will feature as a demonstration sport at the 2026 Asian Games.

Hardik Singh was the only athlete nominated for the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna at the National Sports Awards 2025. The nominations were finalised on 24 December 2025. A two-time Olympic bronze medallist (Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024), he had also won the FIH Player of the Year award in 2023 and received the Arjuna Award in 2021.

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.

David Szalay won the Booker Prize 2025 for his novel Flesh, announced on 10 November 2025 at Old Billingsgate, London. He became the first Hungarian-British author in the prize's history to win. Flesh is his sixth work of fiction and follows a man named István across decades — from a Hungarian housing estate to London's elite. Szalay had previously been shortlisted in 2016 for All That Man Is.

The Vigyan Team award under RVP 2025 was given to the CSIR Aroma Mission team for their work in Agricultural Science. The mission introduced aromatic crops (lavender, rose, lemongrass, patchouli) to farmers across northern and northeastern India, demonstrating a pathway to the essential oils market that improved incomes without drastically changing traditional farming practices.

The Vigyan Ratna is the highest category of the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, recognising a lifetime of achievement in science and technology. In 2025, it was awarded posthumously to Prof. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar — the astrophysicist, cosmologist, founder of IUCAA Pune, and science communicator who worked on the Steady State theory with Fred Hoyle. He died in 2025. This was only the second posthumous Vigyan Ratna in the award's history.

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.

María Corina Machado of Venezuela won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights and for unifying a divided political opposition around the demand for free elections and a peaceful transition from authoritarian rule. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called her "one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times."

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.

Mohanlal was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for 2023, presented at the 71st National Film Awards ceremony on 23 September 2025. At 65 years of age at the time of presentation, he is the youngest person to have received the award. He is the second recipient primarily associated with Malayalam cinema, after Adoor Gopalakrishnan (2004).

Educate Girls, an NGO focused on enrolling out-of-school girls in rural India, won the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay Award. This made it the first Indian organisation to receive the prize. India has had approximately 60+ individual winners since 1958, but this was the first time an organisation from India received the honour. The NGO was founded in 2007 by Safeena Husain.