Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Nani Palkhivala wrote We, the People: India, the Largest Democracy. Palkhivala was a constitutional lawyer and jurist, famous for arguing Kesavananda Bharati (1973), the case that established the basic structure doctrine.

The book collects his writings and speeches on the Constitution, the economy and civil liberties. T.N. Kaul was a diplomat and wrote memoirs of foreign service, not this title.

Answer: C

Ek Doctor Ki Maut was directed by Tapan Sinha, released in 1990.

Pankaj Kapur plays a doctor who discovers a vaccine for leprosy and is destroyed by professional jealousy and bureaucratic obstruction. It won three National Film Awards.

Answer: A

It was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

Vishabriksha, the poison tree, was published in 1873 and takes as its subject widow remarriage and the destruction that follows a second marriage across social lines - among the first Bengali novels to treat a contemporary social question directly.

Answer: B

The Old Man and the Sea was written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1952.

Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, catches a great marlin and loses it to sharks on the way home. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was cited when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Answer: D

A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back was written by B.G. Deshmukh.

He was Cabinet Secretary and later principal secretary to three prime ministers - Rajiv Gandhi, V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar - and the book records those years from inside the office.

Answer: A

It is Hawthan.

Mahabaleshwar Sail's Konkani novel, on the potters of Goa and the decline of their craft, won the Saraswati Samman for 2016 - the first Konkani work to receive it.

Answer: C

It is the Gita Govinda.

Jayadeva's Sanskrit poem of the twelfth century sings of Radha and Krishna in twenty-four ashtapadis, each set to a raga and tala. It is sung daily before the deity at the Jagannath temple in Puri.

Answer: B

The White Tiger was written by Aravind Adiga and won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

Narrated as a series of letters from Balram Halwai, a driver turned entrepreneur, to the Chinese Premier, it is a satire on class mobility in contemporary India. It was Adiga's debut novel.

Answer: B

The Story of My Experiments with Truth was written by Mahatma Gandhi.

He wrote it in Gujarati in weekly instalments for Navjivan between 1925 and 1929, covering his life to 1921. It is unusually candid about his own failings.

Answer: A

A China Passage was written by J.K. Galbraith, published in 1973.

It records his visit to China with a delegation of American economists just after Nixon's opening, at a time when very few Western observers had seen the country for two decades.