Books and Authors Gk Questions

Correct Answer:-D ( Guiding Soul )
Description:-  Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam usually referred to as Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, is an Indian scientist and administrator who served as the 11th President of India. Kalam was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, studied physics at the St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirappalli, and aerospace engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology (MIT), Chennai. Guiding Souls: Dialogues on the Purpose of Life reveals his spiritual side. He has written poems in Tamil as well. It has been reported that there is considerable demand in South Korea for translated versions of books authored by him. Kalam has also patronized grassroots innovations. He is closely associated with the Honey Bee Network and The National innovation Foundation. The NIF is a body of Government of India and operates from Ahmadabad, Gujarat.

Correct Answer:-B ( Jayadeva )
Description:-  Jayadeva was a Sanskrit poet circa 1200 AD. He is most known for his composition, the epic poem Gita Govinda, which depicts the divine love of Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, and his consort, Radha. This poem, which presents the view that Radha is greater than Hari, is considered an important text in the Bhakti movement of Hinduism. Jayadeva was born to a Hindu Brahmin family. It describes the relationship between Krishna and the gopis (female cow herders) of Vrindavana, and in particular one gopi named Radha. This work has been of great importance in the development of the bhakti traditions of Hinduism.

Correct Answer:-A ( Lectures on Jurisprudence )
Description:-  Leviathan is a sea monster referred to in the Bible. The word has become synonymous with any large sea monster or creature. In literature (e.g., Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick) it refers to great whales, and in Modern Hebrew, it means simply “whale.” It is described extensively in Job 41 and mentioned in Isaiah 27:1.Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December, 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.

Correct Answer:-C ( Khushwant Singh )
Description:-  Khushwant Singh is an Indian novelist and journalist. Singh’s weekly column, “With Malice towards One and All”, carried by several Indian newspapers, is among the most widely-read columns in the country. An Indo-Anglican novelist, Singh is best known for his trenchant secularism, his humor, and an abiding love of poetry. His comparisons of social and behavioral characteristics of Westerners and Indians are laced with acid wit. He served as editor of several literary and news magazines, as well as two broadsheet newspapers, through the 1970s and 1980s. He is a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan the second highest civilian award in India.

Correct Answer:-D ( Kiran Desai )
Description:-  Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author. She is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel ‘The Inheritance of Loss, won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007,and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award. It was written over a period of seven years after her first book, the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Among its main themes are migration, living between two worlds, and between past and present.

Correct Answer:-C ( Narsi Mehta )
Description:-  Narsinh Mehta also known as Narsi Mehta or Narsi Bhagat (1414– 1481) was a poet-saint of Gujarat, India, and a member of the Nagar Brahmins community, notable as a bhakta, an exponent of Vaishnava poetry. He is especially revered in Gujarati literature, where he is acclaimed as its AdiKavi (Sanskrit for “first among poets”). His bhajan, Vaishnav Jan To is Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite and has become synonymous to him. Vaishnavajana to is one of the most popular Hindu Bhajans, written in the 15th century by the poet Narsinh Mehta. It is in the Gujarati language. The bhajan was included in Mahatma Gandhi’s daily prayer.

Correct Answer:-B ( J. M. Keynes )
Description:-  The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creating the terminology and shape of modern macroeconomics. Published in February 1936 it sought to bring about a revolution, commonly referred to as the “Keynesian Revolution”, in the way economists thought – especially in relation to the proposition that a market economy tends naturally to restore itself to full employment after temporary shocks. Regarded widely as the cornerstone of Keynesian thought, the book challenged the established classical economics and introduced important concepts such as the consumption function, the multiplier, the marginal efficiency of capital, the principle of effective demand and liquidity preference.

Correct Answer:-D ( Aurobindo Ghosh )
Description:-  The Life Divine is Sri Aurobindo’s major philosophical opus. It combines a synthesis of western thought and eastern spirituality with Sri Aurobindo’s own original insights. The Life Divine covers topics such as the human aspiration, the emergence of life in the cosmos from out of a Divine Source, the evolution of matter to spirit in the universe, the division and dualities inherent in human consciousness, the way out of man’s ignorance through an evolution of consciousness, and the spiritual destiny of life on earth. The Life Divine was translated into poetic Bengali in “Divya Jeevan Prasanga” by the scholar saint Sri Anirvan.

Correct Answer:-A ( Vikram Seth )
Description:-  Vikram Seth is an Indian author and poet. Two Lives, is a non-fiction family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, and published in October 2005. It focuses on the lives of his great-uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography.

Correct Answer:-C ( Gita Mehta )
Description:-  Gita Mehta (born in 1943) is an Indian writer and was born in Delhi in a renowned Oriya family of freedom fighters. She is the daughter of Biju Patnaik, an Indian independence activist and a Chief Minister in post-independence Orissa. Her younger brother Naveen Patnaik is presently the Chief Minister of Orissa. She completed her education in India and at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. A River Sutra wrote in (1993).

Correct Answer:-B ( Kiran Desai )
Description:-  Kiran Desai (born 3 September, 1971) is an Indian author. She is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from such notable figures as Salman Rushdie. It won the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.

Correct Answer:-B ( Deepak Chopra )
Description:-  Deepak Chopra (born October 22, 1946) is an Indian-born American physician and writer. Chopra has taught at the medical schools of Tufts University, Boston University and Harvard University. He became Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (NEMH) in Massachusetts, before establishing a private practice. In 1985, Chopra met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who invited him to study Ayurveda. Chopra left his position at the NEMH and became the founding president of the American Association of Ayurvedic Medicine, and was later named medical director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. Chopra was sued for copyright infringement by Robert Sapolsky for using a stress endocrine chart without proper attribution, after the publication of Chopra’s book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind(1993)

Correct Answer:-D ( Kiran Bedi )
Description:-  “What Went Wrong?” is a collection of the fortnightly column written by Kiran Bedi who is an Indian social activist and a retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer. Bedi joined the police service in 1972 and became the first woman officer in the IPS. Bedi held the post of Director General at the Bureau of Police Research and Development before she voluntarily retired from the IPS in December 2007. Bedi was the host and judge of the popular TV series “Aap Ki Kachehri” (English, “Your Court”), which is based on real-life disputes and provides a platform for settling disputes between consenting parties.

Correct Answer:-C ( Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay )
Description:-  Devdas (also called Debdas) (1917) is a Bengali Romance novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Essentially, it is a retelling of the Krishna, Radha, and Meera myths, the relationships between its three protagonists – Devdas, Parvati, and Chandramukhi – paralleling the Hindu deities’. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (15 September 1876 – 16 January 1938) is one of the most popular Bengali novelists and short story writers of early 20th century.

Correct Answer:-B ( Subhas Chandra Bose )
Description:-  The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942 : Subhash Chandra Bose. Subhas Chandra Bose, also known as Netaji, was one of the most prominent Indian nationalist leaders who attempted to gain India’s independence from British rule by force during the waning years of World War II with the help of the Axis powers.

Correct Answer:-C ( Bill Gates )
Description:-  To date, Bill Gates has authored two books. The Road Ahead, written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, was published in November 1995, and it summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global information superhighway. Business @ the Speed of Thought was published in 1999, and discusses how business and technology are integrated, and shows how digital infrastructures and information networks can help getting an edge on the competition.

Correct Answer:-D ( V.D. Savarkar )
Description:-  The Indian War of Independence is an Indian nationalist history of the 1857 revolt by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that was first published in 1909. The book, initially written in Marathi, was penned by Savarkar in response to celebrations in Britain of the 50th anniversary of the 1857 Indian uprising with records from India Office archives and the whole project received support from Indian nationalists in Britain including the likes of Madame Cama, V.V.S. Iyer and M.P.T. Acharya, as well as Indian students who had dared not show their support or sympathy for India House openly. Published during Savarkar’s stay in London at the India House, the book was influenced by histories of the French Revolution and the American Revolution, as much as it sought to bring the Indian movement to public attention in Britain as well as to inspire nationalist revolution in India.

Correct Answer:-C ( Panini )
Description:-  Panini a patronymic meaning “descendant of Panini”) was a Sanskrit grammarian from Pushkalavati, Gandhara, in modern day Charsadda District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan (6th century BCE) is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as Ashtadhyayi, meaning “eight chapters”), the foundational text of the grammatical branch of the Vedanga, the auxiliary scholarly disciplines of Vedic religion.

Correct Answer:-C ( Hernando de Soto )
Description:-  Hernando de Soto (born 1941) is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. He is the president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), located in Lima, Peru. In 2009, the ILD turned its attention back to Peru and the plight of the indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon jungle. In response to Peruvian President García’s call to all Peruvians to present their proposals toward solving the problems leading to the bloody incidents in Bagua, the ILD has assessed the situation and presented indigenous peoples of the Amazon, summarizing its findings from indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada and the Peruvian jungle.

Correct Answer:-A ( Bimal Jalan )
Description:-  The Future of India Politics, Economics and Governance (Penguin, 2005).Bimal Jalan (born August 17, 1941) is a former Governor of India’s Reserve Bank and a nominated member of the Upper House of India’s Parliament, the Rajya Sabha during 2003- 2009. Jalan graduated from Presidency College, Calcutta, and later was at Cambridge and Oxford. A leading economic bureaucrat, Jalan held several administrative and advisory positions in the Government of India. He was the Chief Economic Adviser in the 1980s, Banking Secretary between 1985 and 1989 and Finance Secretary, Ministry of Finance.

Correct Answer:-A ( Lectures on Jurisprudence )
Description:-  ‘Lectures on Jurisprudence’ is a book of Adam Smith’s lectures, comprising notes taken from his early lectures, plus an early draft of The Wealth of Nations. Published as part of the 1976 Glasgow Edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith, it consists of two sets of lecture notes that were apparently taken from Smith’s lectures of the 1760s, along with an ‘Early Draft’ of The Wealth of Nations. The same material had also appeared as An Early Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations and as Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms. The documents are generally accepted as authentic, though this cannot be proved absolutely.

Correct Answer:-D ( Kapil Dev )
Description:-  After retirement from cricket in 1994, Kapil Dev took up golf. Kapil was the only Asian founding member of Laureus Foundation in 2000. Ian Botham and Vivian Richards were the other two cricketers on the founding member council of 40. Steve Waugh was added to the Academy members in 2006 when it was expanded from 40 to 42. He has written three autobiographical works. By God’s Decree came out in 1985 and Cricket my style in 1987. He released his most recent autobiography, titled Straight from the Heart in 2004.

Correct Answer:-C ( 1867)
Description:-  Karl Heinrich Marx, (5 May, 1818 – 14 March, 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the establishment of the social sciences and the development of the socialist movement. He is also considered one of the greatest economists in history. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894). He often worked closely with his friend and fellow revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels. Marx’s theories about society, economics and politics—collectively known as Marxism—hold that all societies progress through the dialectic of class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class which controls production and a lower class which produces the labour for goods.

Correct Answer:-B ( A House for Mr. Biswas )
Description:-  A House for Mr. Biswas has been authored by Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad “V. S.” Naipaul who is a Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Trinidadian heritage of Kanyakubja Brahmin known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire’s colonialism. He has also written works of non-fiction, such as travel writing and essays. J. M. Coetzee, writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, described Naipaul as “a master of modern English prose”. In 2008, The Times ranked Naipaul seventh on their list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Correct Answer:-B ( Witness the Night )
Description:-  Kishwar Desai is an Indian author. Her first novel, Witness the Night, won the Costa Book Award in 2010 for Best First Novel. Her latest novel Origins of Love was published in June 2012.Both novels feature a feisty Indian middle-aged social worker Simran Singh, who gets involved in social problems and tries to find a resolution. In the first novel, Witness the Night, she tries to rescue a young girl accused of a horrific crime in Punjab (India) and while trying to help her stumbles upon the frightening and still prevalent tradition of female foeticide and infanticide in India. The judges of the Costa Award (Anita Rani, Anneka Rice and Mark Thornton) said about ‘Witness the Night’, “Kishwar Desai pulls off a remarkable trick, transplanting a country-house murder to modern-day India in a book that’s not afraid to tackle serious themes” The book was also longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Correct Answer:-A ( Earth and Ashes )
Description:-  He was born in 1962 in Kabul to a senior public servant and attended high school in Lycée Esteqlal. Following the Soviet invasion, Rahimi fled Afghanistan, taking refuge in Pakistan for a year and then relocating to France after receiving political asylum. He wrote Earth and Ashes, 2003.On completion of his studies at the Sorbonne, Rahimi joined a Paris-based production company where he produced seven documentaries for French television, as well as several commercials. Taking time off in the late 1990s,Rahimi embarked on his first writing project. His 2000 Dari/ Persian book, Earth and Ashes, was an instant bestseller in Europe and South America.

Correct Answer:-D ( Tonight This Savage Rite )
Description:-  Kamala Surayya was a major Indian English poet and littérateur and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the fiery poems and explicit autobiography. Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune, but has earned considerable respect in recent years.

Correct Answer:-A ( Joseph Lelyveld )
Description:-  Joseph Lelyveld (born April 5, 1937) was executive editor of the New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and interim executive editor in 2003 after the resignation of Howell Raines. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Reviews of Lelyveld’s “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India” claimed that the book portrays Gandhi as a bisexual with a relationship with one of his disciples, the German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder Hermann Kallenbach, a charge that Lelyveld insists is incorrect. Since the controversy broke out, Lelyveld has consistently denied claims that his book portrays Gandhi as a bisexual, or a racist, etc. “It does not say Gandhi was bisexual. It does not say that he was homosexual. It does not say that he was a racist. The word bisexual never appears in the book and the word racist only appears once in a very limited context; relating to a single phrase and not to Gandhi’s whole set attitudes or history in South Africa. I didn’t say these things, So I can hardly defend them.”

Correct Answer:-D ( The Ground Beneath Her feet )
Description:-  The famous novels of Salman Rushdie include: Grimus (1975); Shame (1983); The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995); and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). His most recent book is Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses. It was published in September 2012.

Correct Answer:-D ( Arun Shourie )
Description:-  Worshipping False Gods is a book by Arun Shourie. In this book, he criticized B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of Dalits, for alleged complicity with the British and lust for power and wealth. In Pune, his face was blackened by Dalit peoples for criticizing Ambedkar in his book.