GK Questions

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.

Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station over one day of their nine-month mission. Judge chair Edmund de Waal described it as a book about a wounded world. Samantha Harvey was the first woman to win the Booker since 2019. The trophy was presented to her by 2023 winner Paul Lynch at a ceremony in London on 12 November 2024.

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.

P.V. Narasimha Rao served as India's ninth Prime Minister (1991–1996). He took office when India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to barely two weeks of import cover. His government, working with Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, initiated the landmark 1991 liberalisation — abolishing industrial licensing, reducing import tariffs, allowing FDI, and devaluing the rupee. He steered these reforms through a minority government without losing the floor of the House. Beyond economics, he was a scholar who read and wrote in several languages.

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.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan — known as the Frontier Gandhi — was a Pashtun leader from Pakistan who received the award in 1987. Nelson Mandela of South Africa received it in 1990. Mother Teresa, though born in present-day North Macedonia, held Indian citizenship from 1950 and is therefore NOT counted as a non-citizen recipient.

Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's second Prime Minister, died in Tashkent on 11 January 1966 after signing the Tashkent Declaration ending the 1965 India-Pakistan War. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna the same year, making him the first posthumous recipient. The rules originally did not allow posthumous awards; an amendment in 1966 made this possible.

The three economists used colonial history as a natural experiment to show that institutional quality — not geography or culture — is the main driver of national wealth. Where colonisers settled in large numbers and built inclusive institutions, countries tended to prosper; where extractive institutions were established to concentrate wealth, those patterns persisted for generations after independence. Their book Why Nations Fail (2012) brought these ideas to a general audience.

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.

Han Kang is a South Korean author whose novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts brought her international recognition. The 2024 Nobel made her the first Korean writer of any nationality to receive the prize in Literature.

Nihon Hidankyo — a confederation of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Founded in 1956, the organisation has spent nearly seven decades giving personal testimony about the human consequences of nuclear weapons, contributing to the international norm against their use.

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.

Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. He was assassinated on 30 January 1948 — just days before the prize committee met. The committee chose not to award the Peace Prize that year, citing lack of a suitable living candidate. In later years, the Nobel Committee published a reflection stating that Gandhi's exclusion was an omission they regretted.

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.

C.V. Raman first documented the inelastic scattering of light (the Raman Effect) on 28 February 1928 at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta. India declared 28 February as National Science Day in 1987 to mark this discovery. Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.