TNPSC Current Affairs · 18 October 2026

1. General Science

Syllabus: Prelims Unit I - General Science | Mains GS II - Science and Technology in India's Development

A solid that gives up two fuel gases on warming

• A fuel gas can be carried as a compressed gas, as a liquid under cold, or locked inside a solid that releases it on demand. The third route needs neither high pressure nor deep cold, which is why it is the one being chased.
• The news: scientists at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram made a compound that gives off hydrogen and methane on moderate heating, reported in Science Advances on 7 October.
• The compound is magnesium hydridomethylzincate, built from magnesium, zinc, hydrogen and carbon. Heated in solution to 100 degrees Celsius it gave hydrogen; its crystals heated dry at 80 to 110 degrees Celsius gave both gases.
• Methane came out before hydrogen, which tells the chemist that the release happens in successive steps and not all at once. Each paired unit of the compound can yield two molecules each of the two gases.
• Why hydrogen is wanted at all: burning it releases no carbon dioxide. Its drawback is a very low density, so storing and moving it needs costly technology, and methane is blended in because it slows the flame and cuts the risk of detonation.
• The team has not yet shown reversibility, that is, whether the solid can be refilled once the gases are drawn out, and the compound is sensitive to moisture.

India's first dengue vaccine goes to the field in Tamil Nadu

• Dengue is caused by a virus with four serotypes. Recovery from one leaves lasting immunity to that one alone, so a useful vaccine has to cover all four.
• The news: Health Minister K.G. Arunraj handed the pre-approval letter for the field study at the Kadayanallur government hospital campus in Tenkasi district, making Tamil Nadu the first State in the country to take the vaccine to the field.
• The vaccine is made by the Japanese firm Takeda, is cleared in more than 40 countries, and carries World Health Organization prequalification, the WHO's finding that a product is of acceptable quality for purchase by United Nations agencies.
• In India the approval comes from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, the national drug regulator under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, which has cleared it for ages 4 to 60. It is given in two doses three months apart.
• The field study is run with scientists of the National Institute of Epidemiology, the Indian Council of Medical Research institute at Chennai that studies how disease spreads in populations.

Two draft food regulations, on infant food and on tea

• The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is the regulator set up under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006. It does not legislate; it frames regulations that are published in the Gazette of India in draft, taken for comment, and then finalised.
• The news: two draft amendments were published in the Gazette on Friday, one on infant nutrition and one on pesticide residues in tea.
• The first would bar sucrose and fructose from food meant for infants up to six months. Under the existing Foods for Infant Nutrition Regulations of 2020, lactose and glucose polymers are the preferred carbohydrates, and sucrose or fructose may be added only within prescribed limits.
• The reason given is that early exposure to added sugar shapes dietary preference for life, and that the change supports the recommendation of exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months.
• The second sets a maximum residue limit, the highest level of a pesticide legally allowed in a food: 20 ppm for acetamiprid and 50 ppm for imidacloprid in tea. The acetamiprid limit is lower than Japan's 30 ppm and the United States' 50 ppm; the imidacloprid limit follows the Codex standard.
• Codex Alimentarius is the international food standards body of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. India's own pesticide use averages less than 0.5 kg a hectare against a global average of 2.38 kg.

2. Geography of India

Syllabus: Prelims Unit II - Geography of India | Mains GS IV - Geography of India with Special Reference to Tamil Nadu

The Strait of Hormuz, and why an importer watches it

• A chokepoint is a narrow sea passage that carries a large share of world trade and has no easy substitute. Block it and the cargo does not reroute, it stops.
• The news: two oil tankers caught fire after striking mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards said both were crossing in violation of regulations.
• Hormuz joins the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and so to the Arabian Sea. Iran lies along its northern shore and Oman's Musandam peninsula along its southern shore.
• The other passages in the same trade are the Bab el-Mandeb, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and the Suez Canal at the Red Sea's northern end. A land bypass runs from the strait to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, outside Hormuz.
• Saudi Arabia's own bypass is a pipeline that carries crude across the country to its Red Sea ports, away from the Gulf. Its Gulf loading terminal is Ras Tanura.
• For India the consequence is direct: Gulf oil imports crossed Russian shipments in September for the first time since March, and India buys in large parcels from Brazil, Angola, Nigeria, Venezuela and the United States as availability shifts.

Rope bridges over a railway line, and what fragmentation does

• Habitat fragmentation is the breaking of a continuous habitat into isolated pockets by a road, a railway line or a plantation. The animals are not killed outright; the pockets simply hold fewer of them, and over time that brings genetic isolation, inbreeding and decline.
• The news: a dense planting of trees on both sides of a railway line in Assam has grown over fifteen years into a canopy bridge that hoolock gibbons can swing across.
• The hoolock gibbon is India's only ape apart from humans. It lives in the northeast, mostly south of the Brahmaputra, in western and eastern populations that have fallen by 90 per cent in a few decades.
• It is arboreal, moving by swinging from branch to branch on arms longer than its body, which leaves it clumsy and exposed on the ground. The Hoollangapar Gibbon Sanctuary holds about 130 western hoolock gibbons out of a total of 3,000 to 5,000.
• The same remedy is in use in Tamil Nadu. Braided rope bridges for arboreal mammals run from the Melghat Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra's Satpuras to the Srivilliputhur Grizzled Squirrel Sanctuary, which forms part of the Srivilliputhur Megamalai Tiger Reserve, the State's fifth, notified in 2021.
• The lion-tailed macaque, endemic to the Western Ghats, has its habitat around Valparai broken up by coffee and tea estates and the roads between them. The Indian giant squirrel is now seen more often as roadkill than in the wild.

The northeast monsoon reaches Tamil Nadu

• Tamil Nadu is the one State that takes most of its rain from the northeast monsoon, between October and December, when the winds reverse and blow from land to sea, picking up moisture over the Bay of Bengal before reaching the coast.
• The news: Chennai had its first heavy downpour of the season on Saturday evening, and the Regional Meteorological Centre issued a yellow alert for 17 districts.
• The alert colours run yellow, orange and red, in rising order of severity; yellow means be aware and watch for heavy rain. Uthiramerur in Kancheepuram recorded the State's heaviest fall at 15 cm, and Kargil Nagar and Tiruvottiyur in Chennai 12 cm each.
• The spell is being held up by an upper air cyclonic circulation over north Tamil Nadu and the adjoining Andhra coast. A low pressure area is likely over the southwest Arabian Sea around Monday, though it is not expected to bring Tamil Nadu much rain.
• Two days of rain have cut the State's rainfall deficit for the month to 3 per cent, which falls inside the normal category. A fresh system is likely over the Bay of Bengal in the last week of October.

3. History, Culture of India and National Movement

Syllabus: Prelims Unit III - History, Culture of India and National Movement | Mains GS II - Modern History of India and Indian Culture

Teja Singh Samundri and the gurdwara reform movement

• The gurdwara reform movement, also called the Akali movement, was the campaign of the early 1920s to take Sikh shrines out of the control of hereditary custodians, the mahants, and place them under an elected body. It ran as a series of morchas, or non-violent agitations.
• The news: the centenary of Teja Singh Samundri's martyrdom falls this year, and his legacy is being invoked at public rallies ahead of the Punjab Assembly election.
• Samundri was a co-founder of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the elected body that has administered Sikh shrines since 1925. He refused conditional release from British custody and died in 1926, aged 43, in the Lahore Central Jail.
• The morchas he joined were the Chabian da Morcha of 1921 and 1922, over the keys to the treasury of the Golden Temple at Amritsar; the Guru ka Bagh Morcha of 1922, over the gurdwara at Ajnala; and the Jaito da Morcha of 1923, against the British removal of Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha.
• The hall named after him inside the Golden Temple complex marks his place in the movement, and the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav programme of the Union government carries a tribute to him.

Garba, and the UNESCO list it sits on

• A heritage can be tangible, a monument or a site, or intangible, a practice carried by people: a dance, a ritual, a craft, an oral tradition. The two are listed separately by UNESCO.
• The news: Garba was in the news through the Navratri celebrations at the Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara, which draw over 80,000 people a year.
• Garba is a folk dance of Gujarat, performed in concentric circles to devotional songs as an ode to Goddess Amba or Durga, and it is at the heart of the nine-day festival of Navratri.
• It was inscribed in 2023 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which is maintained under the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003.
• India's other entries on the same list include Kutiyattam, the Vedic chanting tradition, Ramlila, Chhau dance, Kumbh Mela and Durga Puja in Kolkata.

4. Indian Polity

Syllabus: Prelims Unit IV - Indian Polity | Mains GS III - Indian Polity and Emerging Political Trends

Children and the right to use the Internet

• A right under Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty, has been read over the years to carry within it rights the text does not name, among them privacy, livelihood and a clean environment. The court does this by reading Article 21 together with another provision.
• The news: the Supreme Court held that children, like any other individual, have a fundamental right to access and use the Internet, reading Article 21 with Article 19(1)(a), the freedom of speech and expression.
• The Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Vinod K. Chandran called a blanket ban an unproven measure of proven disproportionality: no jurisdiction has shown that children are safer for it, and its efficacy is at best contested.
• The practical finding is that children do not stop using the Internet when the law forbids it; they move to unregulated platforms, and a hostile atmosphere stops them reporting abuse to parents or guardians, which would defeat the object of the POCSO Act.
• What the court preferred instead: parental consent, guidance and supervision, a dedicated child mode for such accounts, and measures proportionate to the objective of safety. It said its observations are not against age-based restrictions as such.

Ladakh: Article 240, Article 371 and the Sixth Schedule

• A Union Territory without a legislature is governed by the Union. For such territories Article 240 empowers the President to make regulations for their peace, progress and good government, and such a regulation has the force of an Act of Parliament.
• The news: the Union Home Ministry's 32-page proposal for Ladakh was rejected by the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance, and the Chief Secretary said officials had spent three to four weeks preparing it.
• The proposal set out a two-stage approach: first a constitutional amendment, then a regulation under Article 240, with a directly elected Union Territory level body and safeguards on land, natural resources and culture.
• The Chief Secretary pointed to clause (K) under Article 371, the Article that carries special provisions for particular States, as having enough flexibility to give constitutional protection to a region with its own geography and history.
• The local demands are Statehood with a legislature and inclusion in the Sixth Schedule, which provides autonomous district councils for tribal areas and today covers Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Ladakh already has Autonomous Hill Development Councils at Leh and Kargil.
• The Chief Secretary noted why funding shapes the demand: Ladakh depends wholly on the Centre for salaries and pensions, where Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi have separate public accounts and must raise their own revenue.

The Overseas Citizen of India card, and what it does not give

• The Overseas Citizen of India scheme lets eligible foreign nationals of Indian origin register as overseas citizens. It is a long-term residence and entry status, not citizenship: OCI does not confer Indian citizenship, and India allows no dual citizenship.
• The news: an OCI cardholder who is a United States citizen was issued a leave India notice by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office in Mumbai and a separate notice asking why his OCI card should not be cancelled.
• Eligibility sits in Section 7A of the Citizenship Act, 1955: those who were citizens at the commencement of the Constitution on 26 January 1950 or became citizens later, those eligible then, people of territories that joined India after 15 August 1947, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Anyone with a Pakistani or Bangladeshi parent, grandparent or great-grandparent is ineligible.
• Section 7B states what the card withholds: an OCI cardholder cannot vote or contest an election, cannot hold the offices of President, Vice-President, judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court, and cannot take most public employment reserved for citizens. Article 19, which guarantees speech and peaceful assembly, applies only to citizens, so a cardholder cannot claim it.
• What the card does give: a lifelong multiple-entry visa, exemption from registering with the FRRO, parity with Indian nationals on domestic airfares and entry fees to national parks and monuments, and parity with non-resident Indians in buying immovable property other than agricultural land, farmhouses and plantations. Special permission is needed for missionary work, mountaineering and journalism.
• The notice invokes the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, which replaced the Foreigners Act, 1946. Section 7(2)(c) lets the government direct a foreigner not to remain in India, and Section 29 allows removal for violating the Act or on an adverse security report. Section 7D of the Citizenship Act lists the grounds for cancelling an OCI registration.
• The remedy against such a notice is a representation to the office or the Central government, and a writ petition before a High Court under Article 226. A foreigner is not without rights: Article 21 is available to every person, not only to citizens.

Who may be a Census enumerator

• The Census is taken under the Census Act, 1948, and the machinery is laid down in the Census Rules, 1990. The officer in charge is the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, who works under the Union Home Ministry.
• The news: a Census notification of 16 October 2026 authorised the appointment of private schoolteachers and members of institutions, societies and trusts as enumerators.
• The words any person already appear in the Census Rules, 1990, but there is no precedent of private persons being engaged, and a similar suggestion before the 1991 Census was not accepted over concerns about accountability.
• Until now the work was done by government schoolteachers, revenue officials and other State government employees. The reason offered for the change is that government schools have not grown in proportion to the population.
• The Population Enumeration phase, the round in which every household is actually counted, is to be conducted across India in February 2027, a month that also carries the annual school and board examinations.

The National Human Rights Commission takes up a Chennai complaint

• The National Human Rights Commission is a statutory body created by the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, which also created the State Human Rights Commissions and the Human Rights Courts. Its findings are recommendatory: it can inquire, call for reports and recommend relief, but it cannot itself punish.
• The news: the Commission registered a case after residents of Kodungaiyur in north Chennai complained against the proposed waste-to-energy plants there.
• The complaint rests on a documented global pattern of siting waste incinerators in neighbourhoods of low-income groups, indigenous people and other oppressed communities, and says Kodungaiyur holds a high concentration of working-class Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class households.
• Chennai has two dump yards, Perungudi serving Zones 9 to 15 in the south and Kodungaiyur serving Zones 1 to 8 in the north. Perungudi is being fast-tracked for closure, so all the city's waste would reach Kodungaiyur, which sits on a 400-acre marshland.
• The residents want the 50 tonne a day incinerator shut permanently, the dump yard remediated and all new proposals cancelled, including a 2,100 tonne incinerator at Kodungaiyur, a 1,500 tonne one at Tambaram and one at Coimbatore. The Commission is expected to order an independent assessment of human rights, community health, environmental and socio-economic impact.

Reservation after a change of religion

• Caste-based reservation for the Scheduled Castes rests on Article 341, under which the President notifies the castes deemed Scheduled Castes for a State. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 adds a condition: a person professing a religion other than Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism is not deemed a member of a Scheduled Caste.
• The news: after the Supreme Court ruled that reservation cannot be extended to religious converts, the Tamil Nadu Law Minister said a Bill on the subject would be brought before the Assembly, and the PMK president asked the Union government for a constitutional amendment.
• The argument made for change is that reservation in India is given on the ground of social backwardness, that social status does not change on conversion, and that not every conversion is made to rise in status.
• The structural point for a student: the Scheduled Tribes carry no such religion condition, and the Other Backward Classes lists include converts of several faiths. The restriction is specific to the Scheduled Castes order, which is why a change needs either a presidential order amended by Parliament or a statute, not a court's reading.

Form 7 and the machinery of a roll revision

• An electoral roll is kept current through named forms. Form 6 is for a new enrolment, Form 7 is an objection seeking the deletion of a name, and Form 8 is for a correction or a transposition. A Form 7 may be filed on the grounds of death, permanent shifting, duplicate entry, underage enrolment or non-citizenship.
• The news: in the month before the special intensive revision began in Karnataka, more than 1.28 lakh Form 7 applications were filed, of which 45,878 came from third parties, that is from people other than the elector concerned or an election official.
• The field officer in a revision is the Booth Level Officer, who distributes enumeration forms and identifies electors who are Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate or Others, the categories abbreviated ASDDO. Above the BLO sit the Assistant Electoral Registration Officers, and the Chief Electoral Officer heads the machinery in a State.
• Where a name is deleted, the appeal lies to the authorities set out in the law and, in the current round, to the SIR tribunals constituted before the Election Commission of India. In West Bengal the revision ran from October 2025 to February 2026 and deleted 91 lakh names, about 13 per cent of the electors on the roll before it began.

5. Indian Economy and Development Administration in Tamil Nadu

Syllabus: Prelims Unit V - Indian Economy and Development Administration in Tamil Nadu | Mains GS IV - Indian Economy, Current Trends and Global Impact

How the price of a medicine is controlled

• Drug price control works through the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013, an order issued under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority administers it. A scheduled drug has a ceiling price fixed for it; a non-scheduled drug does not, and its maker may raise the price by up to 10 per cent a year.
• The news: the Authority has carried out trade margin rationalisation on 137 non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs, capping the trade margin at 30 per cent of the maximum retail price. The revised prices take effect from 9 November.
• A trade margin is the difference between the price at which the maker sells to the distributor and the price the patient pays. Capping it is a lighter touch than fixing a ceiling price: the maker keeps its own price, only the mark-up down the chain is limited.
• The maximum retail price of the listed drugs is expected to fall by up to 70 per cent, depending on each one's existing price structure. The list is carried on the Authority's website, and retail prices can be checked on the Pharma Sahi Daam application.

The 2026 economics Nobel: the economy is made of the people in it

• The prize is formally the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and not one of the original Nobel prizes.
• The news: the 2026 prize went to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford for giving macroeconomics its microeconomic underpinnings, Hall on the demand side and Woodford on the supply side.
• Hall's central idea, set out in a landmark paper of 1978, is that if a household's consumption is governed by its expectations of future income, then today's consumption is itself an accurate indicator of those expectations, and changes in consumption cannot be predicted because new information cannot be predicted.
• Where that rule breaks, it breaks for a reason: a household living hand to mouth, which cannot borrow and has no savings, spends exactly what it earns, so its consumption is entirely predictable. From this, policymakers can measure what share of a population lives hand to mouth.
• Woodford showed that inflation at the aggregate level is the outcome of pricing decisions by individual firms, which are forward-looking and whose prices are sticky, that is, not changed each time demand or input costs move.
• The policy consequence is the one a student sees every two months: because firms look ahead, their expectations about future interest rates matter more than today's rate, so a central bank's communication must be credible and transparent. That is why the Reserve Bank of India Governor sets out the reasoning and the outlook when announcing a rate decision.
• The background to both: the Phillips Curve held that unemployment and inflation move inversely, and stabilisation policy after the Great Depression rested on Keynes. The oil shock of the 1970s broke the relationships, and Robert E. Lucas, the 1995 laureate, showed that working with aggregates alone was not the way.

The Cauvery delta's samba crop waits on the monsoon

• The delta grows three paddy crops by season. Kuruvai is the short early crop, samba the long main crop, and thaladi follows samba on the same land. The water for kuruvai comes from the Mettur release; samba can lean on the northeast monsoon.
• The news: the Stanley Reservoir at Mettur was opened for irrigation only on 1 September, after a delay of 80 days, and the discharge was cut to 8,000 cusecs from 15,000 on 15 October as the storage dipped.
• The dam's normal calendar is the fact to carry: it is opened for irrigation on 12 June every year and closed on 28 January. It was opened this year at a storage of 54.45 tmc ft against a full capacity of 93.47 tmc ft.
• The crop at stake runs to about 18 lakh acres across Tiruchi, Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam, Cuddalore, Mayiladuthurai, Pudukottai, Ariyalur and Perambalur. Tail-end villages fed by the Kaduvaiyaru, Odampokki and Manjalaru got water late and thin.
• Two mechanisms appear in the farmers' demands. One is crop insurance under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, under which compensation for the kuruvai loss has not yet reached them. The other is a formal declaration of drought for the delta districts, without which the State cannot seek relief funds from the Centre.
• Upstream the same river carries a second dispute. Karnataka proposes a balancing reservoir at Mekedatu on the Cauvery in Ramanagara district, which Tamil Nadu opposes and which has not received the Centre's approval. Karnataka says the project would submerge 5,000 hectares of Forest Department land.

How an airport is cleared, and the one proposed for Rameswaram

• A new civil airport is not sanctioned in one step. The State applies to the Ministry of Civil Aviation for site clearance; an Obstacle Limitation Surface survey then establishes what stands in the approach path and whether it can be removed; and only after site clearance does the State apply for in-principle approval.
• The news: Tamil Nadu has sent the site clearance application for an airport for Rameswaram at Manikaneri, near Keelakarai in Ramanathapuram district, where a little over 600 acres has been earmarked.
• The airport is planned for Code C aircraft, the category that covers the Airbus A320 and the Boeing 737, the workhorses of Indian domestic aviation. Site clearance is expected to take about 10 to 12 months.
• The Airports Authority of India, the statutory body that manages civil airports and air navigation services, evaluated five sites; the State shortlisted Uchipuli and Manikaneri, and the Authority's pre-feasibility study recommended Manikaneri as technically feasible.
• The site sits about 120 km from Madurai airport and 140 km from Thoothukudi airport; high-tension lines cross it and waterbodies lie nearby. The stated purpose is to strengthen tourism and upgrade connectivity.

Rice at a fixed price through the cooperative shop

• A cooperative society is a member-owned body registered under a State cooperative societies Act. Its retail outlets give a State a price-stabilising arm outside the public distribution system: the State can sell a commodity at a set price without altering the ration entitlement.
• The news: Tamil Nadu began selling sona masuri rice at Rs. 30 a kg through cooperative shops, launched by the Food and Cooperation Ministers at Raja Annamalaipuram in Chennai.
• The sale runs through 201 cooperative shops, of which 49 are in Chennai, in 30 kg bags, with about 25,000 metric tonnes earmarked for it.
• The price it answers: a 26 kg bag of sona masuri has gone from about Rs. 1,600 to Rs. 1,900 in three months. The other lever is a stock limit on traders under the Essential Commodities Act, which makes holding beyond a fixed quantity an offence of hoarding and lets officers inspect godowns and lorries.

Tamil Nadu's assured pension, and the deduction it has stopped

• Pension schemes come in three shapes. A defined benefit pension promises a fixed share of the last pay; a defined contribution scheme promises only what the accumulated corpus buys; an assured pension sits between them, taking contributions but guaranteeing an outcome.
• The news: Tamil Nadu has withdrawn its order of 11 September restricting the interim monthly pension payout to Rs. 10,000 plus dearness relief, and has ordered that any recovery already begun be stopped at once.
• The arrangement now reverts to the Government Order of 16 June, and it covers employees who retired on or after 1 January 2006. College teachers and government employees had demonstrated on Friday and submitted representations to the Chief Minister against the September order.
• The assured scheme that the interim payout anticipates runs from 1 January 2026, needs 10 years of service, and pays 50 per cent of the average basic pay of the last 12 months, with a floor of Rs. 10,000 a month and 60 per cent of it to the family.

6. History, Culture, Heritage and Socio-Political Movements in Tamil Nadu

Syllabus: Prelims Unit VI - History, Culture, Heritage and Socio-Political Movements in Tamil Nadu | Mains GS III - Tamil Society, Culture and Heritage

Uthiramerur, and how a Chola village chose its committees

• A Chola village governed itself through the sabha, the assembly of a brahmadeya village, which worked through standing committees called variyams. The assembly did not merely advise; it ran tanks, gardens, temples, gold and justice through those committees.
• The news: Uthiramerur in Kancheepuram district recorded Tamil Nadu's heaviest rainfall of the week at 15 cm, which puts the village back in the headlines.
• The inscriptions on the wall of the Vaikunta Perumal temple there, from the reign of the Chola king Parantaka I, are the fullest surviving account of village self-government in India. They set out the qualifications, the disqualifications and the method.
• The method was the kudavolai, the pot ticket. The village was divided into kudumbus, or wards; the names of eligible men were written on palm-leaf tickets, put into a pot, and a young boy drew them out, so that the drawing could not be managed.
• The qualifications were specific: ownership of land above a stated extent, a house on one's own site, an age band, and a knowledge of the Vedas or of administration. The disqualifications were sharper still: anyone who had not submitted accounts of a committee he had served on, and his close relatives, were barred.

Deva, who carried gaana into Tamil cinema

• Gaana is a folk song form of the working-class neighbourhoods of north Chennai, sung at funerals and gatherings to a strong percussive beat, in the everyday Tamil of the city rather than a literary register.
• The news: the composer Deva, who brought gaana into mainstream Tamil cinema, died on Saturday aged 75, and the Chief Minister announced that state honours would be accorded at his funeral.
• Born Devanesan Chokkalingam, he worked in the Public Works Department of the Tamil Nadu government before entering films. His debut as a film composer was Mattukkara Mannaru in 1986, and Vaikasi Poranthachu, released in 1990, won him his first Tamil Nadu State Film Award for Best Music Director.
• He was known by the title Thenisai Thendral, conferred on him by former Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. His range ran from the gaana of Autokaran to compositions with Sirkazhi Govindarajan, P. Susheela, M. Balamuralikrishna and Madurai Somu, and a devotional piece still heard in temples at dawn.
• The point a student should keep: a folk form moving into a mass medium changes both. Gaana gained a national audience through the Rajinikanth films Annamalai, Arunachalam and Baashha, and Deva's own soft melodies were often mistaken for other composers' work.

Karthigai Deepam at Tiruvannamalai, and the girivalam path

• Girivalam is circumambulation of a hill rather than of a shrine, walked barefoot along a fixed path around the Annamalai hill at Tiruvannamalai. The hill itself is treated as the deity, which is why the walk, and not only the temple, is the observance.
• The news: the Karthigai Deepam festival at the Arunachaleswarar temple will run from 12 to 28 November, with the Deepam itself on 24 November 2026, and permits for devotees will be issued online through a website.
• The temple is one of the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams, the five shrines that stand for the five elements, and it represents fire. The others are Thiruvanaikaval for water, Kanchipuram for earth, Kalahasti for air and Chidambaram for space.
• The temple is administered by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, the State department that administers temples under the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1959. About 50 lakh devotees are expected.
• Alongside, work has begun to clear encroachments on the girivalam path under orders of the Madras High Court, with the next hearing on 29 November.

The Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka, 17 years on

• Sri Lanka's Northern and Eastern Provinces are the Tamil-majority provinces and were the zone of the armed conflict that ended in 2009. Mullaitivu district saw the final battle, and the Palk Strait separates the north from Tamil Nadu.
• The news: the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka reported that militarisation remains a persistent feature of governance and land use there, pointing to a sustained pattern of land appropriation, denial of access to traditional livelihoods and intimidation.
• The Commission asked the government to expedite the return of military-occupied lands, to restore property rights and livelihoods, and to stop invoking national security as a blanket justification for acquiring land where that falls disproportionately on minority communities.
• The report covers enforced disappearances, mass graves, memorialisation, state surveillance, the resettlement of northern Muslims expelled by the LTTE in 1990, freedom of religion and development projects, and notes military involvement in agriculture and pre-school teaching through the Civil Security Department.
• The return of people's land was among the promises made to the Tamil people by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who is also Minister of Defence, before the general election of November 2024; his National People's Power won all but one of the five electoral districts in the north and east.
• The Tamil Nadu side of the same question appeared the same day: a demand that the Union government act to release nine Tamil Nadu fishermen held in Sri Lanka, and the standing demand to retrieve Katchatheevu, the islet ceded under the agreements of 1974 and 1976.

Recall: the one-liners the paper asks

• Recall: the 2026 economics Nobel went to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford.
• Recall: the Ramanujan Prize went to Mahesh Kakde of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, for work on noncommutative Iwasawa theory and the Gross-Stark and Brumer-Stark conjectures.
• Recall: Chief Justice of India Surya Kant spoke at the 34th convocation of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, of which he is the Chancellor.
• Recall: applications are open for the Anna Medal for acts of bravery, which carries Rs. 1 lakh and is presented on Republic Day; the last date is 15 November.
• Recall: at the Asian Para Games in Nagoya, Thulasimathi Murugesan and Manasi Joshi assured India of a badminton medal in the women's doubles SL3-SU5.
• Recall: India and the West Indies shared the T20I series 2-2, the decider at Bengaluru having been abandoned to rain.
• Recall: Chennai district stood first with 12 golds at the Chief Minister's Trophy 2026, the State's district-level sports meet.
• Recall: the book The Dravidian Phoenix, a concise history of the AIADMK, is by the law student Sanjay Senthilnathan.