Which of the following US states celebrated the 'Kannada Language and Rajyothsava day' on 1st November 2021 ?

Question

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Correct — option (4), Georgia. The Governor of the US State of Georgia, Brian P. Kemp, signed a proclamation on 14 October 2021 recognising 1 November 2021 as Kannada Language and Rajyotsava Day in his State, and the proclamation was formally presented at a ceremony on 27 October 2021 on the northern steps of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, at which the Governor and Marty Kemp were present. It was sought by the Kannada-speaking community in Georgia organised under the banner of Nrupatunga Kannada Koota and was reported as the first proclamation of its kind for the Kannada language anywhere in the United States. The date was not chosen at random. Karnataka Rajyotsava, the formation day of the State, falls on 1 November, and it marks the day in 1956 when the Kannada-speaking areas of southern India that had been scattered across several administrative units were brought together into a single State under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 — first as the enlarged Mysore State, renamed Karnataka on 1 November 1973. The diaspora observance therefore reproduces the home State's own civic anniversary on the same date. Two things are worth noticing about how this question is built. The first is that it belongs to a class of current-affairs items in which a foreign government or sub-national government makes a gesture towards an Indian language, community or festival, and the fact to be recalled is simply which one; there is no reasoning route to the answer, only recall of the news item. The second is the stem's spelling. The paper prints 'Rajyothsava' with a 'th', a transliteration variant of the same word that is usually written Rajyotsava, and it is reproduced here exactly as printed. A candidate should not read anything into a spelling of that kind — Indian names travel through several transliteration conventions in official documents, and the Commission prints them as it received them. The State is Georgia, so option (4) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) California is the answer a candidate reaches by demographic reasoning, and it is the wrong one. The State holds the largest Indian-American population in the United States, its technology industry has drawn a very large number of engineers from Bengaluru in particular, and a proclamation about the Kannada language would seem to belong there more naturally than anywhere else. But the proclamation of 1 November 2021 as Kannada Language and Rajyotsava Day was made by the Governor of Georgia, and the news reports treated it as the first of its kind in the country precisely because no other State had done it. This is the standing hazard of current-affairs questions about the diaspora: the State with the biggest community is not necessarily the State that made the announcement, and the question is about the announcement.  (b) Texas has a large and growing Indian-American population concentrated around the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas, and its cities host many Indian cultural associations, so it carries the same superficial plausibility as California and fails for the same reason. Nothing in the news of October and November 2021 connects Texas with the Kannada proclamation. When an option set consists of four American States and only one of them did the thing described, there is no substitute for having read the item; the useful discipline in preparation is to record such news with the actor named — which Governor, which State, which date — because the question is always built on the actor and never on the plausibility of the setting.  (c) South Carolina is included because it has a well-known Indian-American political association: Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Randhawa in Bamberg in that State, served as its Governor from 2011 to 2017 before becoming the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. A candidate who is looking for the State with the strongest Indian connection in his memory may land on it for that reason. But the association is with a person and a political career, not with a language proclamation, and the Kannada Language and Rajyotsava Day proclamation of 2021 was signed in Georgia by Governor Brian Kemp. Georgia and South Carolina are neighbouring States in the American south-east, which makes the confusion easy for anybody working from a hazy mental map.

Concept: Karnataka Rajyotsava is the formation day of the State of Karnataka and falls on 1 November. The Kannada-speaking country had been divided for most of the colonial period among the princely State of Mysore, the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, the Nizam's dominions and the small province of Coorg, and the movement for its unification — the Ekikarana movement — ran through the first half of the twentieth century. Unification came with the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which redrew India's internal boundaries on linguistic lines with effect from 1 November 1956 and brought the Kannada-speaking areas together in the enlarged Mysore State; the State was renamed Karnataka on 1 November 1973. The same 1 November date is the formation day of several States for the same reason, since the 1956 reorganisation took effect for all of them at once, and later reorganisations reused the date — Punjab and Haryana in 1966 and Chhattisgarh in 2000 among them. Rajyotsava is marked in Karnataka with the hoisting of the red and yellow Kannada flag, the singing of the State anthem and the announcement of the Rajyotsava Awards, and the day travels with the Kannada diaspora, which is why Kannada associations abroad petition local governments to recognise it. Georgia's proclamation of 2021 is an instance of that pattern rather than an isolated event.

State PCS 2021 Q87 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q87 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer