Ramon Magsaysay, Pulitzer and Booker: Indian Winners

The correct answer is C, the Philippines. Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an aircraft crash in March 1957. The award was created in his memory later that year, and it is given at Manila, the Philippine capital, on 31 August, his birth anniversary.

Option A, Indonesia, is wrong; no pan-Asian award of this standing is named after an Indonesian head of state. Option B, Malaysia, is wrong for the same reason, although the country's closeness to the Philippines makes it a natural distractor. Option D, Thailand, is wrong as well. A candidate can reason this out from the award's own description: it honours greatness of spirit in service to the peoples of Asia, and the Foundation that gives it sits in Manila, so the country in the answer must be the Philippines.

The correct answer is C, 1957. The trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of New York set up the award in 1957, the year in which President Ramon Magsaysay died, and the first awards were given in 1958. Vinoba Bhave, honoured in that first year, was the first Indian to receive it.

Option A, 1947, is the year of Indian independence and has no bearing on this award. Option B, 1952, precedes Magsaysay's death and so cannot be the founding year. Option D, 1962, is the year in which Mother Teresa received the award for peace and international understanding, which is why it is placed among the options. Fix the sequence in mind: the award was founded in 1957 and first conferred in 1958, on Vinoba Bhave among others.

The correct answer is B, Vinoba Bhave. He received the award in 1958, in the very first year it was given, for community leadership, in recognition of the Bhoodan movement in which he walked from village to village asking landowners to give land to the landless. No Indian received it before him.

Option A, Mother Teresa, received the award in 1962 for peace and international understanding, four years after Bhave. Option C, Jayaprakash Narayan, received it in 1965 for public service. Option D, C. D. Deshmukh, who had been Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Finance Minister, received it in 1959 for government service, which makes him the closest distractor because he is only one year behind. The order to remember is Bhave 1958, Deshmukh 1959, Mother Teresa 1962.

The correct answer is A, Asia's Nobel Prize. The description is used because the award honours a lifetime of selfless service in Asia, in fields such as government service, public service and community leadership, in the manner in which the Nobel Prizes honour service to humanity. It is the phrase newspapers and question papers both use.

Option B is wrong because the Booker Prize is a British award for a work of fiction, which is a narrow literary field and not public service. Option C is not a phrase in use for any award. Option D is wrong because the Pulitzer Prize is American and belongs to journalism, letters, drama and music; a comparison with it would not describe an award for social work in Asia. When a question asks which award is called Asia's Nobel Prize, the answer is always the Magsaysay.

The correct answer is B, Columbia University. Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher who owned the New York World, left money in his will both for a school of journalism and for the prizes, and Columbia University in New York administers the awards on the advice of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Option A, Harvard University, and Option C, Yale University, are older American universities with no role in these prizes, and they are offered simply because they are the best-known American names. Option D, the Library of Congress, awards the Gershwin Prize in music and appoints the Poet Laureate of the United States, but it does not run the Pulitzers. Remember the founder and the seat together: Joseph Pulitzer's will, Columbia University, New York, first awarded in 1917.

The correct answer is B, 1917. Joseph Pulitzer died in 1911 and provided for the prizes in his will; the first awards were made in 1917 by Columbia University. The prizes cover journalism in American news organisations along with books, drama and music, and the Public Service award in journalism is a gold medal.

Option A, 1901, is the year the Nobel Prizes were first awarded, and papers plant it here to see whether the two are being confused. Option C, 1929, is the year of the Great Depression's onset and has nothing to do with the prize. Option D, 1945, marks the end of the Second World War. The three founding years worth keeping in one line are 1901 for the Nobel, 1917 for the Pulitzer and 1969 for the Booker.

The correct answer is B, Siddhartha Mukherjee. He is a physician and researcher of Indian origin, and his book The Emperor of All Maladies is a history of cancer written for general readers. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 2011, and he later wrote The Gene and The Song of the Cell.

Option A, Amartya Sen, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and wrote The Argumentative Indian and Development as Freedom. Option C, Abhijit Banerjee, shared the Nobel in Economic Sciences in 2019 and wrote Poor Economics. Option D, Atul Gawande, is a surgeon of Indian origin and a well-known writer of books such as Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto, which makes him the strongest distractor in a medical question of this kind, but the Pulitzer of 2011 belongs to Mukherjee.

The correct answer is C, 1969. The prize was begun in 1969 with the firm Booker McConnell as its sponsor, which is where the name comes from, and it is given each year for a work of fiction written in English. It was called the Man Booker Prize from 2002 to 2019 and is now supported by Crankstart.

Option A, 1917, is the year of the first Pulitzer Prizes. Option B, 1957, is the year the Ramon Magsaysay Award was established, and mixing the founding years of these three awards is the standard trap. Option D, 1981, is the year Salman Rushdie won the Booker for Midnight's Children, so it belongs to the prize's history but is not its founding year. Keep the winner's year and the award's year separate in your notes.

The correct answer is B, a work of fiction written in English. The Booker Prize is a British literary award given each year to one novel. Until 2014 only writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible; since then any novel originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom may be considered, and the winner receives fifty thousand pounds.

Option A, journalism, belongs to the Pulitzer Prize, which is American. Option C, scientific research, belongs to the Nobel Prizes and, in India, to awards such as the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize. Option D, public service in Asia, describes the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Note also that the International Booker Prize is a separate award, given for a book translated into English, with the money shared equally between author and translator.

The correct answer is C, Arundhati Roy. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, set in Kerala, and no Indian woman had won it before her. She wrote her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, twenty years later.

Option A, Anita Desai, reached the Booker shortlist three times but never won the prize, which is exactly why she is placed here. Option B, Kiran Desai, is Anita Desai's daughter and did win, but in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, nine years after Roy. Option D, Jhumpa Lahiri, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an American award, and not the Booker. The sequence of Indian-origin Booker winners is Naipaul 1971, Rushdie 1981, Roy 1997, Kiran Desai 2006 and Adiga 2008.

The correct answer is B, Geetanjali Shree. Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi was translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2022. It was the first book in any Indian language to win that prize, and the money was shared equally by the author and the translator, as the rules require.

Option A, Mridula Garg, is a well-known Hindi writer who received the Sahitya Akademi Award, but not this prize. Option C, Krishna Sobti, was a major Hindi novelist and a winner of the Jnanpith Award, and her stature makes her a plausible answer. Option D, Mannu Bhandari, wrote Aapka Bunty and other landmarks of Hindi fiction. All four are Hindi writers of standing, so the question rests on remembering the single name attached to 2022.

The correct answer is B, Satyajit Ray. He received the award in 1967 in the category of journalism, literature and creative communication arts, for his films. His first film, Pather Panchali, had appeared in 1955, and he was later given the Bharat Ratna and an honorary Academy Award.

Option A, Bimal Roy, directed Do Bigha Zamin and Madhumati and won National Film Awards, but not the Magsaysay. Option C, Mrinal Sen, was a leading director of the same period, known for Bhuvan Shome and Akaler Sandhane, and is the closest distractor because he belongs to the same Bengali cinema. Option D, Ritwik Ghatak, directed Meghe Dhaka Tara and is honoured in film history but received no such award. Among Indian recipients of the Magsaysay, Ray is the one from cinema.