Who among the following is the author of the book 'Abode of Love'?

The correct answer is B, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi. The building on Feroze Shah Road, named after Rabindranath Tagore, houses all three of India's national academies, the Sahitya Akademi for letters, the Lalit Kala Akademi for the fine arts and the Sangeet Natak Akademi for the performing arts. The Sahitya Akademi also runs regional offices in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.

Option A, Vigyan Bhavan, is the conference centre used for large government and international meetings. Option C, Shastri Bhavan, houses several Union ministries and their departments. Option D, Nirman Bhavan, houses the health and urban development ministries. All three are well known Delhi government buildings, which is what makes them serviceable distractors, but the literary address is Rabindra Bhavan, and its name itself is the clue.

The correct answer is A, Amrita Pritam. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her Punjabi poetry collection Sunehe, meaning messages, and was the first woman to be honoured by the Akademi. She later became the first Punjabi writer to win the Jnanpith, for the year 1981, so both her firsts are worth remembering as a pair.

Option B, Mahadevi Verma, the Hindi poet, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1942, which is impossible since the Akademi did not exist then; she was honoured by it much later and won the Jnanpith for 1982. Option C, Ashapurna Devi, was the first woman to win the Jnanpith, for 1976, and that neighbouring first is the trap in this question. Option D, Kamala Das, who also wrote as Madhavikutty, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 for her Malayalam short stories. Only Amrita Pritam holds the 1956 first.

The correct answer is B, 21. The Fellowship, not the annual award, is the highest honour the Sahitya Akademi confers, and its rules restrict it to twenty-one living writers at any one time. Because a new Fellow can therefore be elected only when a place falls vacant, Fellows are often described as the immortals of Indian literature.

Option A, 11, is not the figure for either honour. Option C, 24, is the number of languages in which the Akademi gives its annual awards, and mixing the two numbers is exactly the error the question is set to catch. Option D, 31, matches nothing in the Akademi's rules. The distinction to carry into the hall is that the Sahitya Akademi Award is given every year to about two dozen books, one in each recognised language, while the Fellowship is a standing honour for a person and is capped at twenty-one holders.

The correct answer is C, 24. The Sahitya Akademi recognises twenty-four languages and gives one award in each of them every year for the most outstanding book of literary merit, so roughly two dozen names are announced together. The twenty-four are the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution together with English and Rajasthani.

Option A, 18, was the number of languages in the Eighth Schedule before the 92nd Constitutional Amendment of 2003 added Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and it survives in older books. Option B, 22, is the present number of Eighth Schedule languages and so is the most tempting wrong answer; the Akademi's list is wider because it adds English and Rajasthani to it. Option D, 28, matches no list of languages in this context. For work in languages outside the twenty-four, the Akademi gives the Bhasha Samman, instituted in 1996.

The correct answer is C, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Prime Minister was the first President of the Sahitya Akademi, elected when the academy was set up in 1954, and he held the office until his death in 1964. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was its first Vice President and succeeded him as President.

Option A, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, was the first President of India and inaugurated several national institutions of the period, but he did not head the Akademi. Option B, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who later became President of India, was the Akademi's first Vice President and its second President, which makes him the strongest distractor in the set. Option D, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was the first Education Minister of India and the moving spirit behind the three national academies, and he was the first Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, so his name belongs to the same story but to a different chair.