26 September 2026 Current Affairs: Asian Games

K.M. Munshi called the Preamble the 'political horoscope of the Indian Constitution' because it foretells the kind of state India set out to build.

Ropar, now Rupnagar in Punjab, stands on the Sutlej, not on the Indus. It was excavated by Y.D.

Venus is wrapped in a dense blanket of carbon dioxide topped by thick white and yellow clouds of sulphuric acid, which is why it shines so brightly in our sky.

The Dowry Prohibition Act was passed by Parliament in 1961 and came into force on 1 July 1961.

Matki is a women's folk dance of the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh, performed at weddings and other happy occasions.

The 42nd Amendment Act, 1976 added three words to the Preamble: Socialist, Secular and Integrity. With them the description of India changed from a 'Sovereign Democratic Republic' to a 'Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic', and 'unity of the Nation' became 'unity and integrity of the Nation'.

Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar was the Chief Justice of India when the nine-judge bench delivered its verdict in Justice K.S.

Jain tradition places the birth of Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, and of Abhinandananatha, the fourth, at Ayodhya in present-day Uttar Pradesh.

Granite forms when magma cools slowly deep inside the crust, so it is an intrusive, or plutonic, igneous rock. The slow cooling lets large crystals of quartz, feldspar and mica grow, which is why granite has a coarse, grainy look you can see with the naked eye.

A hard disk is secondary storage: the CPU cannot work on its contents directly, and data must first be copied into main memory.

The khuang is a hollow wooden drum of the Mizo people, made from a single log with animal hide stretched over both ends and slung from the shoulder while being played with the hands.

A hawkish stand means the central bank is more worried about inflation than about slow growth, so it leans towards raising the policy rate and tightening money.

Windows is proprietary, or closed-source: Microsoft keeps its source code private and sells it under a licence that does not let users study, change or redistribute the code.

The boxer M.C. Mary Kom told her story in Unbreakable, written with Dina Serto and published in 2013, in which she describes her childhood in a farming family in Manipur, her fight to box at a time when few Indian women did, and her return to the ring after becoming…

A seismograph, also called a seismometer, senses the shaking of the ground and draws it as a wavy line called a seismogram.

Brihadratha was the last Mauryan emperor, and about 185 BCE his own commander-in-chief Pushyamitra Shunga killed him while the army was being reviewed, ending the dynasty Chandragupta Maurya had founded around 322 BCE.

Bandhan began in 2001 at Kolkata as a microfinance body serving poor women in eastern India, and its head office has stayed in that city.

Argon is a noble gas whose outer shell already holds eight electrons, so it has no room to take another one easily; adding an electron would mean starting a new shell, and energy has to be supplied rather than released.

P waves, or primary waves, are longitudinal: the particles of the medium move back and forth along the same direction in which the wave travels, squeezing and stretching the rock like a sound wave.

The Bijolia rock inscription, at Bijolia in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan, is dated to 1170 CE, in the reign of Someshvara, and it sets out the family line of the Chahamanas, the Chauhans of Shakambhari.

Persian was the language of the Mughal court and of its records, and Akbar made it the official language of administration in 1582.

A tide is the regular rise and fall of sea level caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon and, to a smaller extent, the Sun, together with the centrifugal force of the spinning earth.

Zero-based budgeting was first put to use in the United States. Peter Pyhrr developed it at Texas Instruments around 1970, and Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia, applied it to a state budget in 1973 and later carried it to the federal government as President.

In Microsoft PowerPoint, pressing Ctrl + M adds a new slide right after the one you are on, using the layout of the current slide.

Kerala: God's Own Country is an illustrated book on the land, people and culture of Kerala, written by Shashi Tharoor with photographs by M.F.

Uttar Pradesh sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha, more than any other state, because seats are allotted in proportion to population and UP is the most populous state.

The name itself says so: in Greek arthros means jointed and podos means foot, so arthropods are the animals with jointed legs.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War, fought in 1817-18 under Lord Hastings, ended Maratha power. Peshwa Baji Rao II was beaten at Khadki, Koregaon and Ashti, the office of Peshwa was abolished, and his lands around Poona were taken over and joined to the Bombay Presidency.

IMPS is an interbank money transfer service run by the National Payments Corporation of India, launched in November 2010. Its great advantage is that it works round the clock, on holidays and at night, and the money reaches the beneficiary within seconds.

The Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was approved in 1983 and run by the DRDO under Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, which is why he is called the Missile Man of India.

The very idea of opening a constitution with a preamble came from the American Constitution of 1787, which begins 'We the People of the United States'.

Mercury is a terrestrial planet, not a Jovian one. The eight planets fall into two groups.

Net Domestic Product is what is left of the domestic product after setting aside the wear and tear of capital.

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 languages. It began with 14 languages in 1950.

The Saraswati Samman is a literary award given for an outstanding work of prose or poetry. It was started in 1991 by the K.K.

Dang is not a South Indian tribe. The name belongs to the Dangs district of southern Gujarat, whose tribal people are mainly Bhil, Warli and Konkana, all of western India.

The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four Vedas, so it describes the earliest Vedic culture. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns arranged in ten books called mandalas, composed in the land of the seven rivers in the north-west.

Dairying takes its produce directly from nature, so it belongs to the primary sector. Economic activity is usually grouped in three sectors.

The Amrita Devi Bishnoi National Award is given for outstanding courage and devotion in protecting wildlife. It was instituted by the Union environment ministry in 1994 and carries a cash prize with a citation.

Of the four countries listed, Australia gave women the vote first, in 1902. Its Commonwealth Franchise Act of that year let women vote in and stand for the federal Parliament, following the colony of South Australia, which had already granted it in 1894.

The First Buddhist Council was held under the patronage of Ajatashatru, the Haryanka ruler of Magadha. It met at Rajgir, in the Sattapanni cave, soon after the Buddha's death, and was presided over by Mahakassapa.

Ustad Ilyas Khan was a sitar player. He was born in Lucknow in 1924 into a family of musicians and belonged to the Etawah or Imdadkhani gharana, the school built up by Imdad Khan and carried forward by Enayat Khan and Vilayat Khan.

The reverse repo rate is what the Reserve Bank pays banks when it takes their surplus cash for a short period.

'Ace against Odds' is the autobiography of the tennis player Sania Mirza, brought out in 2016 and written with her father Imran Mirza and the journalist Shivani Gupta.

Kaal Baisakhi is the name used in West Bengal for the violent evening thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months. They strike in April and May, the Bengali month of Baishakh, with squalls, thunder, lightning and sometimes hail, which is why the name means the calamity of Baishakh.

Amartya Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics.

Bimbisara belonged to the Haryanka dynasty of Magadha, not to the Mauryas. He ruled from Rajagriha in the sixth century BC, was a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavira, and enlarged Magadha through marriage alliances and by annexing Anga.

The Ramappa temple is dedicated to Shiva, worshipped there as Ramalingeswara. It stands at Palampet in the Mulugu district of Telangana and was built in the thirteenth century under the Kakatiya ruler Ganapati Deva by his general Recharla Rudra.

Gol Gumbaz, the tomb of Muhammad Adil Shah, carries the dome long described as the second largest in the world after St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

In a cognizable offence the police may register a case, start an investigation and arrest a person without any order from a magistrate.