Awards & Honours Mixed Quiz: Set 1

Narthaki Nataraj is a Bharatanatyam dancer from Madurai in Tamil Nadu and, in 2019, became the first transgender person to receive the Padma Shri, which she got in the field of art. Thrown out of her home as a teenager, she trained for years under Guru K. P. Kittappa Pillai…

It is given for the most conspicuous act of bravery or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy, on land, at sea or in the air, and its name means the wheel of the ultimate brave.

The Dhyan Chand Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sports and Games was instituted in 2002 to honour sportspersons who not only performed well in their playing days but kept serving the sport after retiring.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award was established in April 1957 by the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York, with the agreement of the Philippine government, in memory of Ramon Magsaysay, the third President of the Philippines, who had died in an air crash in March that year.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy of music, dance and drama, was created by a government resolution of 31 May 1952 and formally inaugurated on 28 January 1953 by President Rajendra Prasad.

Both honours were instituted on 2 January 1954 by President Dr. Rajendra Prasad, and the first Bharat Ratna was conferred in the same year on C. Rajagopalachari, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman.

It is awarded for the most conspicuous bravery or an act of daring or self-sacrifice of the highest order away from the field of battle, and it may be given to civilians as well as to members of the armed forces.

The order of precedence of the civilian honours runs Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the Padma Vibhushan is given for exceptional and distinguished service.

His company held off a much larger body of raiders and kept them from reaching the airfield, which allowed reinforcements to continue arriving in Kashmir.

All three were honoured in 1954, the first year of the award. Rajagopalachari was the last Governor-General of India, Radhakrishnan was a philosopher who later became President, and Raman was the physicist who discovered the effect that carries his name.

Born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and a Hungarian mother, she married an officer of the Indian Army, took Indian citizenship and made a deep study of Indian languages and tradition, which she drew on for the design of the medal and its vajra motif.

Until then the honour had been given only to living persons.

The three wartime awards were instituted on that date but were given effect from 15 August 1947, so that acts of bravery in the fighting in Kashmir could be recognised.

She was Prime Minister at the time, and the award followed the events of that year.

The three wartime awards have three peacetime counterparts in the same order: Param Vir Chakra with Ashoka Chakra, Maha Vir Chakra with Kirti Chakra and Vir Chakra with Shaurya Chakra.

Known as the Frontier Gandhi, he led the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the North-West Frontier Province and remained a citizen of Pakistan after partition, which makes him the first recipient who was not an Indian national.

The Shaurya Chakra is the third of the peacetime gallantry awards and therefore corresponds to the third of the wartime awards, the Vir Chakra, both being given for acts of gallantry that rank below the first two grades.

Because of it, the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards may not be used as a prefix or suffix to a recipient's name, and the awards were challenged on this ground before the Supreme Court upheld them in the Balaji Raghavan case.

The three peacetime gallantry awards were instituted in 1952 as the Ashoka Chakra of the first, second and third class, and in January 1967 the second and third were renamed the Kirti Chakra and the Shaurya Chakra, while the first kept the name Ashoka Chakra.

The Padma Awards Committee is constituted afresh by the Prime Minister each year and is headed by the Cabinet Secretary, with the Home Secretary, the Secretary to the President and a number of eminent persons as members.