Awards & Honours: previous-year questions

Answer: (B) The Elephant Whisperers

'The Elephant Whisperers', directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga, won Best Documentary Short Film at the 95th Academy Awards (March 2023), the first Indian production to win in that category. It follows Bomman and Bellie, a tribal couple who raise orphaned elephant calves at the Theppakadu Elephant Camp in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu. At the same ceremony 'Naatu Naatu' from RRR (composer M.M. Keeravani, lyricist Chandrabose) won Best Original Song. Earlier Indian Oscar winners: Bhanu Athaiya (costume, 'Gandhi'), Satyajit Ray (Honorary Award, 1992), and A.R. Rahman, Gulzar and Resul Pookutty ('Slumdog Millionaire'). Options A and C are unrelated film titles.

Answer: (C) Booker Prize is for the books written in English while 'International Booker Prize' is for the books written in other languages and translated in English.

The Booker Prize (established 1969) goes each year to the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland; David Szalay won it in 2025 for 'Flesh'. The International Booker Prize (started 2005; in its present annual form since 2016) goes to a work of fiction translated into English, and its prize money is shared equally between author and translator; in 2025 it went to 'Heart Lamp', short stories by the Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq translated by Deepa Bhasthi, the first Kannada work and the first short-story collection to win. Geetanjali Shree's 'Tomb of Sand' (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) won it in 2022. Indian winners of the Booker Prize: Arundhati Roy (1997), Kiran Desai (2006) and Aravind Adiga (2008). Options A, B and D are baseless.

Answer: (C) The Elephant Whisperers

Kartiki Gonsalves's The Elephant Whisperers, produced by Guneet Monga, won Best Documentary Short at the 2023 Oscars, the first Indian production to win in a documentary category. All That Breathes was nominated for Best Documentary Feature but did not win, and the other two are non-Indian nominees.

Answer: (B) Pratham

The 2021 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development was given to Pratham, the education NGO known for its ASER reports on children's learning. The other organisations were not that year's winners.

Answer: (A) Ravi Kannan

Oncologist Dr R. Ravi Kannan, director of the Cachar Cancer Hospital in Silchar, Assam, was the Indian winner of the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award. Kailash Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, and Adani and Alagh are business figures.

Answer: (B) 11 million Swedish crowns

Answer as of 2023 — this may have changed since.

The Nobel Foundation raised the prize for 2023 by 1 million to 11 million Swedish kronor per prize. The other amounts are wrong.

Answer: (B) Assam

Asom Baibhav, Asom Saurav and Asom Gaurav are the three tiers of civilian awards instituted by the Assam government in 2021, Asom Baibhav being the highest. Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand have different names for their state honours.

Answer: (B) Ricky Kej

Answer as of 2023 — this may have changed since.

Bengaluru-based composer Ricky Kej won his third Grammy in 2023 for the album Divine Tides, making him the only living Indian with three. A. R. Rahman has two Grammys, and Resul Pookutty won an Oscar, not a Grammy.

Answer: (A) Purnima Devi Barman

Assamese wildlife biologist Purnima Devi Barman received the UNEP Champions of the Earth award in 2022 for protecting the greater adjutant stork through her 'Hargila Army' of women. Narendra Modi received the award in 2018, which makes (B) the tempting wrong option.

Answer: (D) Peru

Ardeshir B. K. Dubash, a Mumbai-based industrialist who has been Honorary Consul of Peru in Mumbai since 1973, received the "Order of Merit in the Diplomatic Service of Peru José Gregorio Paz Soldán", among the highest honours of Peru's Foreign Ministry, for strengthening India–Peru ties. Peru facts: capital Lima, currency sol, the Inca site of Machu Picchu, and Lake Titicaca shared with Bolivia. For comparison, France's top honour is the Legion of Honour, Japan confers the Order of the Rising Sun and Canada the Order of Canada.

Answer: (B) Shinjo Abe

The Netaji Research Bureau, housed at Netaji Bhawan on Elgin Road in Kolkata, gave its Netaji Award 2022 to former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on 23 January 2022, Netaji's 125th birth anniversary; the Japanese Consul General received it on his behalf. Abe, Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister, also received the Padma Vibhushan in 2021 and was assassinated in July 2022. Fumio Kishida was the serving (not former) Prime Minister of Japan; Barack Obama was a US President, not a Prime Minister.

Answer: (C) 2001

Lata Mangeshkar, the 'Nightingale of India', received the Bharat Ratna in 2001, the same year as shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan. She had earlier received the Padma Bhushan (1969), the Dadasaheb Phalke Award (1989) and the Padma Vibhushan (1999); she passed away on 6 February 2022, which is why the question was asked. M. S. Subbulakshmi (1998) was the first musician to receive the Bharat Ratna.

Answer: (A) Namita Gokhale

Namita Gokhale, co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival, won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2021 in English for her novel 'Things to Leave Behind'. Other 2021 winners appear as options: Khalid Hussain won in Punjabi and Kiran Gurav in Marathi; the Bengali award went to Bratya Basu for 'Mirjafar O Ananya Natak'. Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize (1997) for 'The God of Small Things' and declined the Sahitya Akademi Award of 2005.

Answer: (A) Balkrishna Doshi

Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927-2023) received the Royal Gold Medal 2022 of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), one of the world's highest honours in architecture. He had worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, and was the first Indian to win the Pritzker Prize (2018). His works include IIM Bangalore, CEPT University and Amdavad ni Gufa in Ahmedabad, and the Aranya low-cost housing at Indore. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 2023.

Answer: (A) Louise Glück

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature went to the American poet Louise Glück for her 'unmistakable poetic voice'; her collections include The Wild Iris (Pulitzer Prize, 1993) and Averno. Peter Handke (Austria) won the 2019 prize, announced together with the delayed 2018 prize of Olga Tokarczuk (Poland). John Dranow is a writer who was Glück's former husband, and Peter Ackroyd is an English novelist and biographer - neither is a Nobel laureate. The 2021 prize went to Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania/UK).

Answer: (D) Rohit Sharma

The Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna for 2020 went to five sportspersons - cricketer Rohit Sharma, para-athlete Mariyappan Thangavelu, table-tennis player Manika Batra, wrestler Vinesh Phogat and hockey player Rani Rampal. Rohit was the fourth cricketer to receive it, after Sachin Tendulkar (1997-98), M. S. Dhoni (2007) and Virat Kohli (2018, with Mirabai Chanu). Shikhar Dhawan received the Arjuna Award in 2021; Suresh Raina has received neither. In August 2021 the award was renamed the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna; its first recipient (1991-92) was Viswanathan Anand.

Answer: (B) Science and Technology

The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, instituted in 1958 by CSIR in memory of its founder-director Dr S. S. Bhatnagar, was India's highest multidisciplinary science award for scientists below 45, given in seven disciplines (physical, chemical, biological, mathematical, medical, engineering, and earth-atmosphere-ocean sciences). From 2024 it continues as the 'Vigyan Yuva - Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar' category of the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar. For peace there is the Gandhi Peace Prize, and medical sciences are only one of the Bhatnagar disciplines; it is not an economics award.

Answer: (B) Professor Amartya Kumar Sen

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, becoming the first Indian-born laureate in this category (Abhijit Banerjee, an Indian-born American economist, later shared the prize in 2019).

Answer: (C) Rajnikanth

Answer as of 2020 — this may have changed since.

Superstar Rajinikanth was honoured with the IIFA Icon of the Golden Jubilee Award in 2019.

No option is correct as printed — this question is disputed. No printed option is correct (source answer key: none).

None of the printed options is actually correct: the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the 90th Academy Awards (held in March 2018, honouring 2017 films) went to Gary Oldman, for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in "Darkest Hour". The listed names won in other categories that year — Sam Rockwell won Best Supporting Actor (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Lee Smith won Best Film Editing (Dunkirk), Alexandre Desplat won Best Original Score (The Shape of Water), and Richard King won Best Sound Editing (Dunkirk).