UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Wangala is the post-harvest thanksgiving festival of the Garo of Meghalaya, offered to Saljong, the sun god who grants the harvest.

The Sonepur Mela is held at Sonepur in the Saran district of Bihar, where the Gandak joins the Ganga. It begins on Kartik Purnima, the same full moon as the Pushkar Fair, and is named the Harihar Kshetra Mela after the Harihar Nath temple there, which tradition links to Rama.

The Pushkar Fair is held at Pushkar in the Ajmer district of Rajasthan, on the bank of the Pushkar lake and beside the temple of Brahma.

The Maasai are a cattle-keeping people of East Africa, living in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania around the Rift Valley and the Serengeti.

Bhagta Parab is observed by the tribal communities of Jharkhand in the weeks between spring and summer, and it is dedicated to Budha Baba.

The Toda are a small pastoral people of the upper Nilgiri plateau in Tamil Nadu. They live in hamlets called munds, herd buffaloes and treat dairy work as a sacred duty carried out at the conical or barrel-vaulted temple huts that appear in every photograph of them.

Ali Ai Ligang is the spring sowing festival of the Mising tribe of Assam. The name itself describes the occasion, for it refers to the sowing of roots and seeds, and the festival begins on the first Wednesday of the month of Fagun.

The Ambubachi Mela is held every year at the Kamakhya temple, which stands on Nilachal Hill in Guwahati, the largest city of Assam.

In a scramjet, short for supersonic combustion ramjet, the air taken in from the atmosphere stays supersonic while the fuel is burnt in it, which is what allows sustained flight at hypersonic speed.

CVRDE, near Chennai, is the DRDO laboratory for armoured fighting vehicles, and the Arjun main battle tank was designed there and is produced at the Heavy Vehicles Factory in the same town.

GTRE is the DRDO laboratory for aero engines, and the Kaveri turbofan was taken up there for the Tejas light combat aircraft.

Trishul was designed as a quick reaction weapon to protect warships and forward army positions from low flying aircraft and from sea skimming missiles, so it needed very fast response over a short distance rather than long reach.

In Mission Shakti, on 27 March 2019, an interceptor developed for ballistic missile defence was used to destroy one of India's own satellites in low earth orbit, showing that the country could strike a target in space.

Astra is a beyond visual range air-to-air missile, which means it is fired from a fighter aircraft at an enemy aircraft the pilot cannot see with the eye, using radar to find and follow the target.

Nirbhay flies below the speed of sound but for a much greater distance than BrahMos, staying low to avoid radar, and it can change course in flight and loiter over an area before striking.

DRDO was formed in that year by bringing together the Technical Development Establishment of the Indian Army, the Directorate of Technical Development and Production and the Defence Science Organisation, so that defence research would be done under one roof.

BrahMos is built by BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture formed in 1998 between DRDO and the Russian firm NPO Mashinostroyeniya, and the name joins a great river of each country.

Nag is a third generation anti-tank guided missile of the fire and forget kind, which means that once the seeker has locked on to the target the operator need not keep guiding it, and the crew can move away at once.

The Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme was approved in 1983 and Kalam, then at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory, was made its head.

Shaurya is the land based version of the submarine launched K-15 Sagarika, and it is stored and fired from a sealed canister, which lets it be moved by road and launched at short notice.