Awards & Honours Mixed Quiz: Set 2

The rules provide that not more than 120 Padma awards may be conferred in a year, and awards made posthumously and those given to foreigners and non-resident Indians are counted outside that ceiling.

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.

She was the flight purser on a hijacked aircraft at Karachi in 1986 and was killed while shielding passengers as she helped them escape.

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 Bharat Ratna medallion is made in toned bronze in the shape of a peepal leaf, with a platinum sun and the words Bharat Ratna in Devanagari on the front, and the State Emblem of India with the motto Satyameva Jayate on the back.

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.

It is a peacetime gallantry award, given for conspicuous gallantry away from the field of battle, and it may be conferred on civilians as well as on members of the armed forces.

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.

He became eligible because the scope of the award had been widened in December 2011 from art, literature, science and public service to any field of human endeavour, and he is also the youngest person to receive the Bharat Ratna.

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…

Captain Vikram Batra of the 13 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles received it posthumously for the recapture of heights during the Kargil conflict of 1999.

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.

A recipient of the Bharat Ratna is given a Sanad, which is a certificate signed by the President, together with the medallion, and the award is conferred at Rashtrapati Bhavan, usually a few weeks after the names are announced on the eve of Republic Day.

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.

Savitri Khanolkar chose the motif from the old story in which the sage Dadhichi gave up his body so that his bones could be made into the weapon with which Indra defeated his enemy, a symbol of sacrifice that suits the highest award for valour.

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.

Sudarshan Sahoo, the stone and wood sculptor from Puri in Odisha, was given the Padma Vibhushan in 2021 in the field of art. He had already received the Padma Shri in 1988, and his work carries the Odishan temple-sculpture tradition of Konark and Puri into modern studios.

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.

Lata Mangeshkar received the Bharat Ratna in 2001, becoming the second singer after M.S. Subbulakshmi to be given the country's highest civilian honour.

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.