Who among the following is the author of the book ‘The Little Book of Encouragement’ ?

Correct — A, (a) Dalai Lama. 'The Little Book of Encouragement' is a collection of the words of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, compiled and edited by the sociologist Renuka Singh and brought out in January 2021 by Viking, the Penguin Random House India imprint. It is a short hardback of about 160 pages, curated from his teachings and framed around living with the new realities of a pandemic-stricken world, and it is that publication — weeks before this paper was set — that puts the item in the current-affairs block rather than in a literature one. The Dalai Lama's name attaches to a long shelf of such volumes, which is the thing worth understanding here: 'The Art of Happiness' was built from conversations with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler, 'The Book of Joy' from a week of dialogue with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Renuka Singh had already edited several earlier collections of his teachings for the same publisher. So the question is not asking who sat at a desk and composed the prose; it is asking whose words these are, and on a compiled volume the exam names the speaker as the author exactly as the cover does. Two further facts pin the man for any other item built on him: he is the fourteenth holder of the office, born in 1935 at Taktser in the Amdo region of Tibet, and he has lived in India since fleeing Tibet in 1959, with his residence and the Tibetan administration-in-exile at Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Note also the shape of the option list — four living or recently living Indian and Tibetan figures, each of whom genuinely publishes books, so nothing can be eliminated on the ground that the person does not write. The discrimination has to come from knowing this particular title.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)A.P.J. Abdul Kalam — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was the eleventh President of India, from 2002 to 2007, an aerospace scientist who led the SLV-III launch vehicle programme at ISRO and the guided-missile programme at DRDO, and one of the most published names on any Indian books-and-authors list. 'Wings of Fire' is his autobiography, written with Arun Tiwari; 'India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium' set out a development roadmap; 'Ignited Minds' and 'Turning Points' followed. None of them is this book. The timing is a second check — he died in July 2015, so a title newly published in 2021 cannot be fresh work of his, though collections of his earlier writing have continued to appear under his name, which is why the surer discriminator is that this particular title belongs to a run of Dalai Lama compilations rather than to his shelf.
• (c)Ravi Shankar — The booklet prints the bare name 'Ravi Shankar', which in Indian public life points to two different men, and neither wrote this book. Pandit Ravi Shankar, 1920 to 2012, was the sitar player who carried Hindustani classical music to Western audiences, taught George Harrison, and received the Bharat Ratna in 1999; his own books are the memoirs 'My Music, My Life' and 'Raga Mala'. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar founded the Art of Living Foundation and writes on meditation and stress, in titles such as 'Celebrating Silence' and 'An Intimate Note to the Sincere Seeker'. A candidate who reads the option as the spiritual teacher is reading it in the right family of books but still has the wrong author; the volume in the question is a Dalai Lama collection.
• (d)Jagadish Vasudev — Jagadish Vasudev is the given name of Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, founder of the Isha Foundation at Coimbatore and a Padma Vibhushan awardee of 2017. He is the most tempting of the three wrong options here for a reason worth naming: he too had a book in the news at almost exactly this moment, 'Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny', which appeared in 2021, after 'Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy' in 2016 and 'Death: An Inside Story' in 2020. A candidate who remembers only that a well-known spiritual figure published a widely reviewed book around then can land here honestly. The defence is to carry titles rather than impressions — the phrase 'The Little Book of' is the tell, because it belongs to the series of compiled Dalai Lama volumes.

The category being tested is books and authors in the news, and the skill it rewards is narrower than general reading. What an examiner can key without dispute is the pairing printed on a cover, so the questions are built from titles that were published or widely reviewed in the twelve to eighteen months before the paper. That has two consequences for how a candidate should prepare. First, the useful unit of study is a running list — title, author, one line on what the book is — updated monthly, not a general familiarity with authors. Second, compiled and co-written books have to be understood rather than memorised: a great many spiritual and political titles are assembled by an editor from speeches, letters or conversations, and the convention, on the cover and in the exam, is that the person whose words they are is named as the author while the compiler is credited separately. 'The Little Book of Encouragement' is exactly that kind of book — the Dalai Lama's words, Renuka Singh's editing — and an item can legitimately ask for either name, so both are worth holding. The distractor design here is also instructive: all four names are real, prolific authors, so no option can be knocked out by reasoning about the person. Only the title itself decides.

Key facts

• 'The Little Book of Encouragement' is a collection of the words of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, compiled and edited by the sociologist Renuka Singh, published in January 2021 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House India, as a hardback of about 160 pages.
• The book is curated around encouragement for living with the new realities of a pandemic-stricken world, which is why it appeared in the news pages rather than only in review columns and why it reached a general-ability paper set soon afterwards.
• The fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was born in 1935 at Taktser in Amdo, has lived in India since fleeing Tibet in 1959 with his residence at Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
• Several well-known books carrying his name are collaborations or compilations: 'The Art of Happiness' was built from conversations with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler, and 'The Book of Joy' from a week of dialogue with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
• A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the eleventh President of India, wrote 'Wings of Fire' with Arun Tiwari, along with 'India 2020', 'Ignited Minds' and 'Turning Points'; he died in July 2015, so no book first published in 2021 is fresh work of his.
• Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, whose given name Jagadish Vasudev is what the paper prints, wrote 'Inner Engineering' in 2016, 'Death: An Inside Story' in 2020 and 'Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny' in 2021, the last of which makes him the sharpest distractor.
• Pandit Ravi Shankar the sitar player, who received the Bharat Ratna in 1999, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of the Art of Living Foundation are two different men, and the paper's bare 'Ravi Shankar' does not distinguish them.

Common traps

• Treating a compiled volume as having no author. The convention on the cover and in the exam is that the speaker whose words are collected is named as the author, with the compiler or editor credited separately, so both names are examinable.
• Matching a book to a person because the person publishes in that genre. All four names here belong to genuine authors of spiritual, scientific or musical books, so genre reasoning selects nothing and only the specific title decides.
• Reading the bare name 'Ravi Shankar' as one person. The sitar player and the founder of the Art of Living Foundation share the name, and an item that prints it without an honorific leaves the ambiguity in place.
• Assuming a book published in a given year must be by someone living. Collections of an author's earlier work continue to appear after their death, which is why the date of death is a weaker check than the title's own provenance.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The fourteenth Dalai Lama, whose collected words were published in 2021 as 'The Little Book of Encouragement', was awarded the Nobel Prize in which one of the following categories ?

  • (a)Literature
  • (b)Peace
  • (c)Physiology or Medicine
  • (d)Economic Sciences

  Answer(b) Peace

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The books 'Inner Engineering : A Yogi's Guide to Joy' and 'Death : An Inside Story' were written by whom among the following ?

  • (a)The Dalai Lama
  • (b)Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev
  • (c)Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
  • (d)A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

  Answer(b) Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev