Precis

Answer : Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they’re turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then ....

Answer : Recent decades have witnessed an upsurge of literature on Indians settled abroad. Mainly three types of writings can be distinguished: historical, diplomatic and anthropological. The historical works provide an account of the phases of emigration of Indians and their early life situations in foreign lands. The diplomatic works read like country reports on the status and problems of Indians beyond seas. The anthropological works are in the nature of ethnographic accounts with their accent on ....

Answer : Ashoka set an extraordinary example by making himself available at all times for consultation, whether he was relaxing, say, in the palace gardens, or even while being massaged. By hearing and settling disputes he kept in touch with the details of administration. The disputes over water rights and grazing rights, and the problem of money-lending were all familiar to him. To complete the picture of how the emperor and his people lived, it is essential ....

Answer : In Hind Swaraj (1909), a text which is often privileged as an authentic statement of his ideology, Gandhi offered a civilisational concept of Indian nation. The Indians constituted a nation or praja, he asserts, since the pre-Islamic days. The ancient Indian civilisation -”unquestionably the best” - was the fountainhead of Indian nationality, as it had an immense assimilative power of absorbing foreigners of different creeds who made this country their own. This civilisation, which was ....

Answer : The Renaissance in India was not like the Renaissance in Europe. It was not a return to India of the past. It was essentially a matter of spirit, which produced striking changes in the realm of religion, society and culture along with a demand for natural regeneration. There arose a new self-consciousness among the people of India. The soul of India began to unfold itself and break the shackles of the past. It is maintained ....

Answer : The work of a lawyer or a politician must contain in a more delectable form a great deal of the same pleasure that is to be derived from playing bridge. Here, of course, there is not only the exercise of skill but the outwitting of a skilled opponent. Even where this competitive element is absent, however, the performance of difficult feats is agreeable. A man who can do stunts in an aeroplane finds the pleasure ....

Answer : India is essentially a land of knowledge and it must rediscover itself in this aspect. Once this rediscovery is done, it will not require much struggle to achieve the quality of life, strength and sovereignty of a developed nation.

Knowledge has many forms and it is available at many places. It is acquired through education, information, intelligence and experience. It is available in academic institutions, with teachers, in libraries, in research papers, seminar proceedings and in ....

Answer : The means may be equated to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. I am not likely to obtain the result flowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate before Satan. If, therefore, anyone were to say; ‘I want to worship God; it does not matter that I do so ....

Answer : If this century has, in the famous phrase, made the world safe for democracy, the next challenge is to make a world safe for diversity. It is in India’s interest to ensure that the world as a whole must reflect the idea that is already familiar to all Indians - that it shouldn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, the kind of food you eat, the sounds you make when you speak, the ....

Answer : People write and publish autobiographies and autobiographical sketches for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is to put on record the events of a famous or influential career. But not all autobiographies, not even the autobiographies most frequently and widely read, are by famous or extraordinary men. Another reason is to hand on to others, wisdom won through experience and hard labour. Yet many fine autobiographers seem to have little concern to teach ....

Answer : Honesty in business dealings or in other areas is not the only measures of morals and values. The strength of character of a person is also measured by uncompromising aversion to cowardice, intrigue, envy, ambiguity, falsehood, disloyalty, treachery, in short, all undignified actions. There are, in reality, few human beings endowed with a truly spotless character. This is because an almost immaculate character does not exist until the last lives in human form. Educated individuals ....

Answer : Taking into account the compelling and inescapable reality of an increasingly resource constrained world, India needs to link the aspirations of the people and its prospects for accelerated growth to what I would call a “resource-frugal” instead of a “resource-intensive” strategy of development. I believe that such a strategy would enable India to sustain a high rate of growth over a more extended period of time, delivering affluence without waste, and current welfare without sacrificing ....

Answer : ‘While all the religious teachers tell us that compassion gives us a motive for existence, a guide for action and a reason for courage and help us to diminish the sum of human suffering, in the very name of God, who is all compassion, abominable crimes have been committed in the world.

It is not enough to believe in God of love but we must love. The rains that make the lower plains fertile are ....

Answer : In many respects Sakuntala is comparable to the more idyllic comedies of Shakespeare, & Kanva’s hermitage is surely not far from the Forest of Arden. The plot of the play, like many of the Shakespeare plot, depends much on happy chances and on the super-natural, which, of course, was quite acceptable to the audience for which Kalidasa wrote. Its characters, even to the minor ones, are happily delineated individuals. Kalidasa makes no pretence to realism, ....

Answer : There are, of course, many motivating factors in human behaviour, but we would claim that nationalism is particularly worthy of study. Why is it particularly significant? Its significance lies in its power to arouse passionate loyalties and hatreds that motivate acts of extreme violence and courage; people kill and die for their nations. Of course it is not alone in this: people are driven to similar extremes to protect their families, their extended families or ....

Answer : Make a precis out of the following passage in about one-third of its original length. It is not necessary to suggest a title. Failure to write within the word limit may result in deduction of marks. The precis must be written on the separate precis sheets provided for the purpose; they must then be securely fastened inside the answer-book:

Love of play is the most obvious distinguishing mark of young animals, whether human or otherwise. In ....

Answer : What part should reading play in our lives? It should certainly not be a substitute for action, not for independent thinking, nor for conversation; but it may be a help and stimulant to action; thought and talk; and it is capable of providing almost infinite pleasure. There on our bookshelves or on summons from a library are wits, wisdom, and adventure, romance from all ages and from all over the world. Is there any wonder ....

Answer : We all show our feelings on issues by the way we look and react. This has been referred to as body language. We tend to lean forward, hand on chin when we are interested, or turn away when disinterested. Our hands and arms can indicate we are open to what is being said by being relaxed, or show that we are not by being clenched or crossed. We are, therefore, making body pictures of what ....

Answer : Gautama, the Buddha, has suffered as much as anyone from critics without a sense of history. He has been cried up, and cried down, with an equal lack of historical imagination. Buddhism came to be widely known in the west in the latter part of the 19th century when a wave of scepticism spread over the world as a result of the growth of science and enlightenment. Positivism, agnosticism atheism and ethical humanism found wide ....

Answer : There is some similarity between Italy and India. Both are ancient countries with long traditions of culture behind them, though Italy is a newcomer compared to India, and India is a much more vast country Both are split up politically, and yet the conception of Italia, like that of India, never died, and in all their diversity the unity was predominant. In Italy the unity was largely a Roman unity, for that great city had ....

Answer : Some wars in the past were quite as disorganizing and as destructive of the civilization of devastated areas as was the Second World War. North Africa has never regained the level of prosperity that it enjoyed under the Romans. Persia never recovered from the Mongols nor Syria from the Turks. There have always been two kinds of wars, those in which the vanquished incurred disaster, and those in which they only incurred discomfort. We seem, ....

Answer : N.B.: Marks will be deducted if your précis is much longer or shorter than the prescribed length. (75)

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” asked Henry David Thoreau. More than century later the Earth seems to be literally falling to pieces - recent environmental set-backs include billions of tonnes of ice shelves breaking off in the Antarctic and unusually warm temperatures in different parts ....

Answer : No amount of improvement and reconstruction in education will bear much fruit if our schools and colleges are undermined by indiscipline. An impartial examination makes it clear that students and teachers alike need more of the spirit of discipline. If proper education is to be given, acts of indiscipline prevalent in our educational institutions have to be checked. Indiscipline may take the shape of group indiscipline or individual indiscipline.

Group indiscipline is the worse of ....

Answer : It has been estimated than the human population of 600 B.C. was about five million people, taking perhaps one million years to get there from two and a half million. The population did not reach 500 million until almost 8,000 years later-about 1650 A.D. This means it doubled roughly once every thousand years or so. It reached a billion people around 1850, doubling in some 200 years. It took on1y 80 years or so for ....