Medium Level – GK Questions

The Khel Ratna was instituted in 1991–92 as the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award. On 6 August 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced it would be renamed to the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award, honouring the hockey legend born on 29 August 1905 — the date observed as National Sports Day.

Murlikant Petkar lost the use of his right arm in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. He then trained as a para-swimmer and won India's first-ever Paralympic gold medal at the 1972 Heidelberg Games in the 50m freestyle swimming event. At the 2025 ceremony (age 80), he received the Lifetime Arjuna Award and the room gave him a standing ovation. He was personally received by President Murmu.

V.K. Murthy — Varahalu Venkateshwara Murthy — received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2008 at the 56th National Film Awards. He was the first cinematographer to receive the award in its forty-year history. He is best known for his collaboration with director Guru Dutt, particularly the visual style of Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962).

Four sibling pairs have received the award: B.N. Reddy (1974) and B. Nagi Reddy (1986); Raj Kapoor (1987) and Shashi Kapoor (2014); Lata Mangeshkar (1989) and Asha Bhosle (2000); B.R. Chopra (1998) and Yash Chopra (2001). The Lata-Asha pair is the most frequently asked in exams because both are widely known to the general public.

Prithviraj Kapoor received the award posthumously in 1971 — the award was presented to his son Raj Kapoor at the 19th National Film Awards. Raj Kapoor himself then won the award sixteen years later in 1987. Vinod Khanna died in April 2017 and the award for that year was given to him posthumously. These are the only two posthumous awards in the prize's entire history.

The 58th Jnanpith Award for 2023 was given jointly to Gulzar (the poet-lyricist-filmmaker, for Urdu literature) and Jagadguru Rambhadracharya (Sanskrit scholar, devotional poet, and founder of Tulsi Peeth at Chitrakoot, for Sanskrit literature). Gulzar had previously received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2013. This was the sixth joint award in the prize's history.

Amitav Ghosh received the 54th Jnanpith Award in 2018. English was added to the list of eligible languages in 2013, and Ghosh became the first — and, as of 2025, the only — writer in English to win the award. His novels engage with colonialism, migration, and environmental history across the Indian Ocean world.

18. Vairamuthu was named the recipient of the 60th Jnanpith Award for 2025, announced by Bharatiya Jnanpith in March 2026. He is the third Tamil writer to receive the award after Akilan (1975) and Jayakanthan (2002), and the first to be honoured primarily for poetry rather than prose. The selection committee was chaired by Pratibha Ray, who herself won the Jnanpith in 2011.

The Gandhi Peace Prize jury is chaired by the Prime Minister of India. The other members are the Chief Justice of India, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (or the leader of the largest opposition party), the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and two eminent persons appointed for a three-year term. This is a common exam question because it is unusual for a PM to chair an awards jury — it reflects the prize's status as a high-level national honour with diplomatic significance.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was withheld from 2006 to 2012 inclusive — a period of seven consecutive years. The jury, which has the explicit authority to withhold the award if no nominee meets the required standard, exercised this authority for this entire stretch. The prize resumed in 2013 when it was given to Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Note: the 2004 prize was NOT withheld — it was given to Coretta Scott King of the USA. Some older sources incorrectly list 2004 as withheld.

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.