Who was recognised as the 'Miracle Mom from Chandigarh' ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), Mann Kaur. The centenarian sprinter from Chandigarh is usually recorded as Man Kaur, and she is the person the epithet in this stem belongs to; the reference works give her nickname as 'the Miracle from Chandigarh', and the fuller form used in press coverage, the one the Commission has printed, adds the word that everybody who wrote about her used — she competed alongside her own son, who was himself in his late seventies, and the pair were reported as mother and son at every meeting they entered. Her life supplies the reason for the name. Born on 1 March 1916, she took up athletics only at the age of ninety-three, at the urging of her son Gurdev Singh, and went on to hold world records in the age categories above a hundred. She was the fastest centenarian at the American Masters Games in 2016; at the World Masters Games in Auckland in 2017, aged a hundred and one, she completed the hundred metres in seventy-four seconds; in 2019 she took four gold medals at a meeting in Poland and won gold in the two hundred metres and the shot put at the Asian Masters championship in Malaysia. The Government of India recognised her with the Nari Shakti Puraskar, conferred by the President in 2020, and she died on 31 July 2021 at the age of a hundred and five — six months before this paper was written, which is why she appears in its current-affairs block. Two details of the printing are worth noting and neither changes the answer. The English option prints 'Mann Kaur' with a doubled consonant where reference works print 'Man Kaur', and the Marathi column prints her name as मन कौर. The Marathi column also prints option (1) as निरजा भानोत rather than नीरजा, and the Marathi stem ends with the non-standard verb form ओळखले जाई. All are reproduced as the paper printed them.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is by far the strongest distractor, because Neerja Bhanot really was from Chandigarh — she was born there in 1963 — and she is much the more famous of the two women. She was the head purser on Pan Am Flight 73 when it was hijacked at Karachi on 5 September 1986, and she was killed shielding passengers during the attack, two days short of her twenty-third birthday; she was posthumously awarded the Ashok Chakra, India's highest decoration for gallantry other than in the face of the enemy, and a widely seen film was made about her. A candidate who reads only the words 'from Chandigarh' and reaches for the most celebrated woman associated with the city will take this option and lose the mark. The discriminating word in the stem is 'Miracle', and it belongs to the centenarian athlete, not to the flight purser. Note that the Marathi column prints her name as निरजा भानोत rather than नीरजा — a printing slip, reproduced as it stands.  (b) Sada Kaur belongs to a different century altogether. Born about 1762 and dying in 1832, she was chief of the Kanhaiya misl from 1789 and the mother-in-law of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose marriage to her daughter in 1786 tied the two houses together; she acted as his guide and regent after his father's death in 1792, and on 7 July 1799 the two of them attacked Lahore with twenty-five thousand troops, the campaign that put him on the road to the Sikh empire. Their alliance ended badly, and in 1821 Ranjit Singh imprisoned her and confiscated her possessions. She is a significant figure of Punjab's political history and has no connection with Chandigarh, a city that did not exist until it was built as a new capital after the partition of 1947. The option is here to reward a candidate who can separate a historical figure from a contemporary one.  (c) Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh, who lived from 8 August 1876 to 22 August 1948, was a British suffragette. She was a daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the Sikh empire, who had been deposed as a child and taken to England, and Queen Victoria was her godmother; she campaigned for votes for women, taking a leading part in the Women's Tax Resistance League and taking part in the Women's Social and Political Union. Her life was lived in Britain, and her fame rests on the suffrage movement rather than on anything Indian and contemporary. Like the other two wrong options she is a real and notable woman with a Punjab connection, which is the pattern of this option set: four genuine figures, one of whom answers the specific epithet in the stem.

Concept: Masters athletics is competitive sport organised by age band, normally for athletes over thirty-five, with records kept separately for each five-year category. It is the framework that makes a phrase like 'world record holder aged a hundred' meaningful — the record is held within the age group, not against the open field — and it is why an athlete who begins in her nineties can accumulate international medals within a few years. Man Kaur's career is the best-known Indian example. She began at ninety-three, competed at the American Masters Games, the World Masters Games and the Asian Masters championship, and became the standard illustration in India of late-life fitness, appearing in public campaigns on the subject. The Nari Shakti Puraskar she received in 2020 is the Government of India's highest civilian honour for women, conferred by the President, normally around International Women's Day on 8 March, on individuals and institutions for exceptional work towards the empowerment of women. Knowing what that award is worth doing for its own sake, because it recurs in current-affairs papers and its recipients each year are a small and checkable list.

State PCS 2021 Q88 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q88 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer