State Exams GK Questions 2026

The two giant Buddhas were carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan valley, on the branch of the Silk Route that carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia, and they were destroyed in 2001; the valley remains on the World Heritage list for the surviving caves and paintings.

Ashoka sent his son Mahendra, known in the Pali chronicles as Mahinda, to Sri Lanka, where the king of the island received the teaching, and afterwards the nun Sanghamitra came with a branch of the Bodhi tree, which was planted at Anuradhapura.

The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya.

Borobudur was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Sailendra rulers of Java as a Buddhist monument in the form of a stepped pyramid whose galleries carry carved panels of the life and teaching of the Buddha, with seated Buddha images in open stupas on the upper terraces.

The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the…

Raymond, the textile and apparel company whose mill began at Thane, has used The Complete Man since the 1990s, with advertisements that showed a man as father, husband and colleague rather than only as a buyer of suiting fabric.

Doordarshan, India's public service television broadcaster under Prasar Bharati, carries the motto Satyam Shivam Sundaram, meaning the true, the auspicious and the beautiful.

LIC, created by an Act of Parliament in 1956 when life insurance in India was nationalised, carries the Sanskrit motto Yogakshemam Vahamyaham, taken from the Bhagavad Gita and usually rendered as your welfare is our responsibility.

Amul, the brand of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation born out of the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers' Union at Anand, uses The Taste of India.

Tata Steel, set up at Jamshedpur in 1907 as Tata Iron and Steel Company, used the line We Also Make Steel to say that besides steel it had built a town, schools, hospitals and institutions, so the product was only part of the story.

Bank of India, founded at Mumbai in 1906 by a group of businessmen and nationalised in 1969, uses Relationships Beyond Banking.

Union Bank of India, which was inaugurated at Mumbai in 1919 by Mahatma Gandhi, uses Good People to Bank With.

Canara Bank, founded at Mangaluru in 1906 by Ammembal Subba Rao Pai, uses Together We Can, and the line is easy to fix in memory because the last word repeats the bank's own name.

Bank of Baroda, founded in 1908 by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda, calls itself India's International Bank because it has long carried the widest network of overseas branches among Indian public sector banks.

Punjab National Bank, founded at Lahore in 1894 and the first Indian bank started wholly with Indian capital, uses the line The Name You Can Bank Upon, which plays on the word bank as both a noun and a verb.

The Ranji Trophy, begun in 1934-35 and named after Ranjitsinhji, is India's premier first-class cricket championship, played between teams representing states and a few institutional sides selected by the BCCI, not between privately owned city franchises.

The Hockey India League began in 2013 under Hockey India, and Ranchi Rhinos won the first final; the league was notable for buying the world's best players at auction and for bringing international hockey to Indian cities for several weeks each winter.

Ultimate Kho Kho was launched in 2022 as the first franchise league for kho kho, and the Odisha Juggernauts won the inaugural season.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India launched the Women's Premier League in 2023 with five franchises, and Mumbai Indians won the first final against Delhi Capitals at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai.

The Kolkata franchise, then partnered with the Spanish club Atletico Madrid, beat Kerala Blasters in the 2014 final with a goal in stoppage time, and the club was later renamed ATK.