Books and Authors in News Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The author is Varun Gandhi.

The Indian Metropolis: Deconstructing India's Urban Spaces, published in 2023, is Varun Gandhi's study of urbanisation in India, covering housing, migration, urban governance and the development models of Indian cities.

Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh and Madhav Gadgil are well-known authors, but this book is not theirs; Gadgil is known for his work on ecology and the Western Ghats, and Ghosh for his novels and writing on climate.

Answer: C

The correct pair is 'Water in a Broken Pot' - Yogesh Maitreya.

Water in a Broken Pot (2023) is a memoir by the Dalit poet, translator and publisher Yogesh Maitreya, about growing up in Nagpur and coming to writing.

The other pairs are swapped or wrong. Raw Umber is a novel by Sara Rai, and Smoke and Ashes is Amitav Ghosh's history of the opium trade, so the first two options exchange their authors. Indrani Mukherjee's 2023 memoir is titled Unbroken, not Homeless.

Answer: A

The correct match is a-iv, b-iii, c-ii, d-i.

• Mahatma Gandhi wrote Guide to London in the early 1890s for Indians going to study in England.
• Jawaharlal Nehru wrote Whither India? in 1933.
• Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), later published as Pakistan or the Partition of India.
• Lala Lajpat Rai wrote The Political Future of India (1919).

Option B swaps Ambedkar's and Lajpat Rai's books, and options C and D credit Gandhi with Ambedkar's book on Pakistan.

Answer: A

The prize went to The English Patient.

To mark the Booker Prize's fiftieth anniversary in 2018, the 'Golden Man Booker' was awarded to the best of the 51 winning novels, chosen in a public vote from a shortlist of five, one for each decade. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the joint winner of 1992, was announced the winner in July 2018.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy won the regular prize in 1997 but not the Golden Man Booker. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie was longlisted in 2017 and was never a winner, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) predates the prize by almost a century.

Answer: A

The book was written by Surendra Kumar.

Modi's Midas Touch in Foreign Policy is a 2016 book on the foreign policy of the Narendra Modi government.

The other names are writers on different subjects. Shashi Tharoor, a Congress MP, is a critic of the government and his 2016 book was An Era of Darkness. Sunita Narain heads the Centre for Science and Environment and writes on environmental policy, and Dhrubajyoti Borah is an Assamese novelist.

Answer: A

The author is R. Nagaswamy.

Dr. R. Nagaswamy, the archaeologist and epigraphist who was the first Director of the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, wrote Tamil Nadu: The Land of Vedas (2016), arguing that Vedic tradition was deeply rooted in ancient Tamil culture. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2018.

The other names are look-alike distractors and are not the author of this book.

Answer: B

The book was written by Shashi Tharoor.

An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016) grew out of his widely shared Oxford Union speech of 2015 arguing that Britain owes reparations to India. It argues that colonial rule impoverished and divided India.

Amartya Sen is an economist and Nobel laureate, N. Ram a journalist and former editor of The Hindu, and Taslima Nasrin a Bangladeshi writer; none wrote this book.

Answer: A

The book was written by Sanjaya Baru.

1991: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Made History (2016) describes the political and economic crisis of 1991 and Rao's role in the reforms. Baru, a journalist and economist, had earlier been media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and wrote The Accidental Prime Minister.

Shashi Tharoor's 2016 book was An Era of Darkness, Arun Jaitley was Finance Minister, and Kapila Vatsyayan was a scholar of Indian art and culture.

Answer: B

The book The Romance of Salt, about Gandhi's Dandi March, is by Anil Tharkar (Anil Dharker), the key gives, option B.

Anil Kakodkar is a nuclear scientist, N.K. Singh an economist and M.S. Swaminathan an agricultural scientist. The author's name follows the key.

The Romance of Salt is a book on Gandhi's Dandi March and the salt tax, and the key names Anil Tharkar as the author. The other three persons are well known in their fields, a nuclear scientist, an economist and an agricultural scientist, and are not authors of this book.

Answer: D

The key marks pairs (3) and (4) as incorrect. Amitav Ghosh wrote Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories and William Dalrymple wrote The Golden Road, so (1) and (2) are correct.

The remaining two author attributions are not accepted by the key, so (3) and (4) are the incorrectly paired ones. Options naming (1) or (2) as incorrect are rejected.

The Golden Road, published in 2024, is by William Dalrymple and Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh (2023), so these two attributions are the standard ones.