BBA & BHM SEM-2 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

ENGLISH IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

1. How does Schat’z father handle the conflict in the boys mind?
2. Why did Schat’z refuse to let anyone into this room? Do you think he was throwing tantrums becuse he was feeling weak?
3. “What you wear in this world can make you or break you in many situations.” Do you agree with this view? Give reasons?
4. ” Remember your low station”. What does this convey about the attitude of the speaker towards the other member?
5. How do both the Swallow and the Prince progress from a condition of ‘lack’ in the begining to a position of fulfillment in the end?
6. Identify the elements of a fairy tale in the Happy prince?
7. Who is more important charecter in the story, the prince or the Swallow?
8. What are the qualities that distinguish a visonary from an ordinary person? Describe with referance to Narayana Murthy’s life?
9. Sum up the lessons tht Narayana Murthy says he has learnt from the life experiences. Did he learn better from failures or from success? Why?
10. How does the poet describe the movement of the cockroach? What resemblence does this have to the way human beings go about life?
11. The author claims that graphic novels have an important educational component. Do you agree ? Give reasons?
12. What was the main purpose of Barack Obama’s speech? do you think the speaker achiever his purpose? why do you say so?
13. Why does the author warn us about the gradual loss of bio and genetic diversity?
14. What is the message that Octavio paz tries to convey through the story? what might the ‘blue bouquet’ symbolize?
15. How does ‘Real Time’ capture the inner sturggles of an outwardly contented middle class family?

LS 14. MEETING AT NIGHT ROBERT BROWNING (BBA & BHM SEM 2)

LS 14. MEETING AT NIGHT

ROBERT BROWNING

‘The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low:
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!’

Lines 1-2

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;

The poem opens with a description of the landscape: a “grey sea,” “long black land,” and a “half-moon” that is either rising or setting (it is “low” on the horizon).

There are no verbs in these first two lines, so we don’t know what the land is doing; it is just there.

“Black land” and the presence of the moon inform us that it is nighttime (hence the title “Meeting at Night”).

Lines 3-4

And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

The speaker continues describing the features of the landscape; there are “little waves” that, strangely, resemble “fiery ringlets.”

We already know that the speaker is near the ocean, but this description of the waves suggests that maybe the speaker is in a boat.

The “fiery ringlets” of line 3 contrast with the images of darkness we have already encountered (“black land,” the moon, and the “night” of the title).

Lines 5-6

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Finally, someone is doing something in the poem! We learn that the speaker is sailing. He reaches (“gains”) the “cove” (a kind of recess or sheltered space on the coast of an ocean).

The descriptions in lines 1-4 refer to the scene the speaker observes while sailing.

“Quench its speed” is strange, in part because we don’t know what “its” refers to. It seems likely that “its” refers to the boat the speaker is sailing.

“Quench” means to extinguish or stop (like quenching your thirst by drinking Gatorade), so “quench its speed” means to “stop” the boat on the shore, “i[n] the slushy sand.

Summary :

In New York, unemployed and divorced Larry Daley is a complete loser. His son Nick is very disappointed with his father who is going to be evicted. Larry accepts the job of night watchman in the Museum of Natural History and takes the place of three old security guards that have just retired in order to raise some money and pay his bills. On his first shift, Larry soon realizes that everything at the museum is not as it seems as the statues begin to come to life after the sun sets. The Museum transforms into complete chaos with the inexperienced Larry in charge as he learns that an old Egyptian stone that came to the Museum in 1950 brings these statues to life until dawn. When Larry brings his son to spend a night with him, the three old guards break into the Museum to try to steal the magical stone. Larry organizes all the historic characters to help him stop the criminals and save the museum.
Poem: MEETING AT NIGHT

Analytical questions

Q 1) Describe the scene and the journey of the lover as you find it in the poem Meeting at Night.

Answer)

“Meeting at Night” describes the journey of a lover through sea and land to meet his beloved. In the half moon of the night, the sea looks grey while the land looks black. With the yellow moon visible in the sky, which looks large and low, the narrator sails towards the land in a boat. The waves look like flaming ringlets in the moonlight. The narrator secures his boat in the slushy land. Then he walks through the beach which is a mile in length. He also crosses three fields and reaches the farmhouse of his beloved. He reaches the place just to feel the presence of his beloved.

Q 2) Briefly discuss the images that we find in Browning’s poem “Meeting at Night”.

Answer)

Browning’s poem “Meeting at Night” is loaded with images that enhance the sensuousness of the narrative. The images found in the poem are those of the “grey sea”, ” long black land”, “yellow half moon”, “startled… waves”, “slushy sand”, “warm sea scented beach”, and “three fields” together make the description enchanting, adventurous, passionate, daring and sensuous. These images help Browning to catch the longing desire of the couple to meet one another. The narrator makes a great effort to overcome all the obstacles in the way and is rewarded with a meeting with his beloved. With these images and with the daring effort of the narrator, the poet brings home the truth: Amor Vince Omnia which means love conquers all.

Q 3) Write a note on the significance of the title of the poem “Meeting at Night”.

Answer)

The poem by Robert Browning is about the secret meeting of the lover and his beloved at midnight. The poem describes the journey of the lover and his desperation to meet his beloved. We are given to understand that the beloved also waits eagerly for the lover and the meeting at night is a moment of fulfilment the wish of both. Though the actual meeting is described in only the last four lines, it has been done so with great mastery of description which makes them intensely passionate and exciting. The joy and excitement of the meeting is represented by the beating of their hearts together. The title, thus, is appropriate and well thought out which points towards the theme and meaning of the poem.

Q 4) How does the poet describe the sea in the poem “Meeting at Night”? How does the poet describe the night?

Answer)

In the poem “Meeting at Night”, the poet describes the sea as both enchanting and romantic. The sea seems to be grey and the waves are startled at the disturbance made by the boat of the narrator. There is a cove and slushy sand which is followed by a warm sea scented beach.
The night is also enchanting with a yellow half moon which makes the sea look grey and the land look dark. It is the time when there is nobody around and only those who have a mission to accomplish venture out. In the dark night, the blue spurt of a lighted match could be seen clearly which is a symbol that the darkness of the land has ignited the passion of the lovers who meet secretly under the cover of the night.

Q 5) “As I gain the cove with pushing prow / And quench it’s speed in the slushy sand” What is a cove? What do you mean by ” quench its speed “?

Answer)

Cove may be defined as a sheltered place in the shore. In this poem it signifies that the narrator has reached the shore.
By the expression “quenching it’s speed”, here the poet means the gradual slowing down and eventually stopping of the boat of the lover. The lover, in his mission to meet his beloved has travelled all the way to the shore in his boat and now he pulls the boat in the slushy sand by taking it out of the water. The word “quench” means gratification of the thirst. Taking out the boat from the sea disconnects its from water source. Hence it has been poetically referred to as quenching of speed.

In the first stanza of Robert Browning’s poem Meeting at Night how is the speaker travelling? 

LS. 16 THE BLUE BOUQUET (BBA & BHM SEM 2)

THE BLUE BOUQUET

 

SUMMARY

 

The short story unfurls the catastrophic confrontation of an ordinary man in a strange and mysterious world in the hands of a maniac who set out in pursuit of fulfilling the strange need of gifting his beloved with a blue bouquet.

 

The narrator who was staying in a hotel room woke up from his slumber fully drenched in sweat . As the heat inside the room was so intense, he decided to go out for a walk. Inside the room was so dark and creatures like scorpion, bugs are common there. After listening to the vast and feminine breathing of the night for a while standing at the window, he got dressed first making sure that no bugs had got into the seams of his clothes. As he reached downstairs, he saw the strange looking glum, reticent, one eyed hotel keeper sitting at the door smoking cigarette, forewarned him that he had better stay in since everything was closed up by then and he also added that there were no street lights. Disregarding the forewarning, the narrator who was highly romantic and poetic, though so dark was the night, waded into the darkness without knowing that he was going to fall prey to the maniacal exercise of the predomination of the flimsy fancies of love over intellect.

 

The nature received him with sweet and mild moonlight and colorful twinkling of stars orchestrated with the vocals of crickets and with the accompaniment of sounds of leaves and insects. He felt that the whole universe was a grand system of signals where himself was only a part of that macrocosm. The starry and moony night with the fragrance of the tamarind trees took him in to a world of illusion where he could hear the great lips pronouncing so clearly and joyously that he felt safe and free though he was alone in that street. He felt that the night was a garden of eyes.

 

All on a sudden, the narrator sensed that he was being followed by someone. Though he tried to run, he couldn’t. Before he could defend himself, he heard a voice saying “Don’t move senor or you are dead” and felt a point of knife against his back. So strange was the demand of the stranger, he wanted blue eyes to make a blue bouquet for his beloved. The stranger was a short and slight man wearing a palm sombrero half covering his face. The narrator offered him everything for his life, but everything was in vain. Though the narrator told him that his weren’t blue, he wasn’t moved by his request. He asked the narrator to light a match. In its light he saw a long machete glittering in his hands. After several attempts the stranger realized that the eyes weren’t blue. Throwing the narrator into a quagmire of mystery and terror, he disappeared in to the darkness after a polite ”

Excuse Me”.

After this horrible experience the narrator ran through the deserted street and reached the hotel. The hotel keeper was still sitting there. Without uttering anything he went inside and fled from that mysterious town.

 

Is love a reality? Love is often something beyond reality so that the demands of love may transcend the boundaries of reason and human cognition . A man overpowered by the overwhelming fancies of love may go to any extant of exploring the world even only for the sake of it alone. This short story unfurls how one’s rationale is enslaved before the strange and mysterious fancies of love.

 

ls. 18. The Chimney Sweeper Mary Alcock (bba &bhm sem )

ls. 18. The Chimney Sweeper

 Mary Alcock

“The Chimney Sweeper” is a poem of Mary Alcock. This  poem is about poverty and unkindness. In the first stanza, we find that the speaker is a very young boy who is a chimney sweeper. During the period of Blake, in England little boys were employed for sweeping chimneys.

 

The teen ages boy lost his mother and his father sold him to a master-sweeper. He carried a brush and shouted searching work of chimney sweeping. He was sold when he was unable to pronounce the word ‘sweep’.Thus a note of tragedy is struck at the very beginning of the poem. The child pronounced ‘weep’ in stead of ‘sweep’ because he was put into a condition to weep or children of his age weeps to attract attention of parents or others. It conveys distress of a little chimney sweeper.

 

we can also see this way that children of poor parents are not fed unless they cry. In England at the time of Blake people might have lost sense of christianity and employed such children to work who were suppose to be in charity school. A child sleeping in soot suggests that the morality of English people got darkened.

 

Then in the second stanza, a such teen aged sweeper named Tom Dacre who had nice curley hair was shaved his head in order not to catch fire. Also, his beautiful hair will not get spoilled by the soot, was a statement of giving consolation to the boy.

 

In the third stanza we see that Tom Dacre went to sleep at night and he dreamt a dream that thousand of teen aged sweeper like him were locked in coffins of black.

In the fourth stanza, the boy dreamt that an angel with abright key opened the coffins and set them all free. The boys ran towards the river leaping and laughing and took bath there and they emerged bright.

In the fifth stanza we see that those boys left their brown bags behind and played with the wind and the angel told Tom that God would be his father if he had been a good boy and then he would want joy never.

In the last stanza it is told that Tom woke up next day morning when it was dark and went to work with his brush and bag happily in a warm mood.

Real Time by Amit Chaudhuri (BBA &BHM SEM II)

“Real Time” by Amit Chaudhuri

The short story Real Time by Amit Chaudhuri revolves around a memorial service for a young woman, Anjali Poddar (nee Taluktar,) who committed suicide by jumping off the third-story balcony of her parents’ apartment building in an unnamed city in India. The story is narrated in the third-person subjective mode from the point of view of the main character, Mr Mitra, a rather uninspired, bored, middle-aged, professional man who, with his wife, is attending the shraddh for Anjali. He is there as a duty and not because he feels any genuine sympathy for what the family is going through. He is keen for this duty to be over so that he can return home, back to the routines and small pleasures that constitute his life (going to the club, buying cookies for tea on the way home, visiting New Market, lunch of daal, rice and fish).

Not much happens plot wise in Real Time and the little action there is occurs over a couple of hours. Some background information is filtered into the story to provide a few details of Anjali’s back-story by way of Mr Mitra speculations and vague memories of her. No flashbacks – in the real sense of the word – are used to fill in the missing information and the reader is left wondering about what really happened to make Anjali take such a tragic and drastic step.

We discover that the realness of time promised by the title is an attempt to provide the reader with a sense of how real time looks and feels – its little bits and pieces of observations, half thoughts, seemingly random shifts from the serious to the banal, thoughts of ‘growling stomachs’ and desires to pee are all mixed in with vague speculations about the death of a daughter – the thing which never seems to gather to it the weight and force of being real in any way at all: the pain of loss and grief remain completely understated/avoided so as to seem almost unfelt/unreal.

The story opens with Mr and Mrs Mitra in their chauffeur-driven Ambassador car on their way to the shraddh – the memorial ceremony for Anjali – and Mr Mitra is petulantly enquiring of his wife what the correct procedure is ‘in a case like this’. Ultimately, he buys a bunch of tuberoses to give to the family. Abdul, the driver, drives in the general direction of the Talukdars’ flat, Nashant Apartments, but no one seems to know the way and they are forced to ask for help a few times. A loiterer, a boy and a watchman are brought into the story momentarily to provide directions. Finally, they reach the apartment building, use a lift to go up to the apartment and Mr Mitra hands over the tuberoses without saying anything, no words of condolence are given, then he around the rooms rather aimlessly, his mind resting on one object or another briefly before shifting on to something else – a Mickey Mouse pencil-box, a portrait, a thought of Anjali’, someone hanging out washing, food being served, and so on.

Scant attention is paid to the matter of the suicide, avoided as if by design; all he comes up with are a few disjointed snippets of memory: Anjali’s qualifications, her husband’s wealth and businesses, the good match she made. Thoughts about what could have prompted her suicide are also kept vague, superficial and cold. We learn that her marriage had not been happy (she’d left her husband before) and this time she had asserted that she had no intention of going back to him. Her parents were said to be a little unsympathetic and the end result was that she killed herself.

Mr Mitra eats a sandesh, drinks a Fanta, has a chat with an acquaintance, urinates and, at the end, catches his wife’s eye to indicate that it was time to leave and that it had all been a waste of time. No sympathy, no condolences, no real concern about the tragic loss suffered by the Taluktars.

That is all that happens in the story of Real Time. Not very much action-wise, you’d agree, I’m sure. Although, the detail that Chaudhuri does give as Mr Mitra’s experiences in and observations of that short time at the shraddh seems to add tedium to the texture to the slow passing of time.  Chaudhuri manages to create a real sense of time moving on – as it must – and people experiencing what it is they do, see or encounter – as they must – with the hugely significant (e.g. death and loss) sitting alongside the incidental (the desire to urinate, observing a mickey-mouse pencil-box, etc.).

 

Title:             Real Time

Author:        Amit Chaudhuri

Year:            2002

Important Characters:

Mr. Mitra – He is an uninspired, bored, middle-aged, and professional man. Along with his wife, they’re going to Anjali’s funeral. Which he doesn’t seem too convinced about the relationship with Anjali and his wife.  He also, seems to have an unsatisfying feeling when he leaves the Shraddh.

Mrs. Mitra – She is the curt wife of Mr. Mitra and distant relative to Anjali. Seems to be more convinced than her husband about the culture of the funeral. She has very different views, than her husband’s. However, she is also uninterested on going to the funeral.

Anjali – She is an unhappily married young woman that committed suicide. She didn’t really know Mr. Mitra and Mrs. Mitra, but nonetheless her relatives were there for her funeral.

Mr. Talukdar – He is a tall, heavy, and old man who is a professional business man and the father of Anjali. Has three kids, two sons who live in America, an Anjali, the only daughter.

Setting:
The story takes place in the late 1940s , at an unknown location in India, where a couple is driving to the Shraddh of Anjali.
“They passed an apartment building they knew, Shanti Nivas, its windows open but dark and remote. […] Usually, it’s said that Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, or learning, two sisters, don’t bless the same house; but certainly that wasn’t true of the Poddars, who had two bars-at-law in the generation preceding this one, and a social reformer in the lineage, and also a white four-storeyed mansion on a property near Salt Lake where they used to have garden parties” (Chaudhuri, Lines 34-41).
The Shraddh seemed out of place, and so did the people who attended. Especially Mr. Mitra, who felt like “The hubbub common to shraddh ceremonies was absent” ( Chaudhuri, Line 141). Also, he felt that there was no point for his presence or for the funeral, if this culture wasn’t around everybody, this is why the setting didn’t feel right for him.

Point of View:
The point of view in this story, is third person omniscient. The narrator knew everyone, and what they were thinking or feeling in the Shraddh. However, the main focus was on Mr. Mitra, although the narrator would talk about the other characters, they would always seem less important to the narrator than Mr. Mitra.
“As they passed a patrol pump, Mr. Mitra wondered what iew traditional theology took of this matter, and how the rites accommodated an event such as this- she had jumped from a third-floor balcony- which couldn’t, after all, be altogether uncommon. Perhaps there was no ceremony. In his mind’s eye, when he tried to imagine the priest, or the long rows of tables at which people were fed, he saw a blank. But Abdul couldn’t identify the lane” (Chaudhuri, Lines 43-48).

Summary:
A man and his wife, Mr. Mitra and Ms. Mitra, are on their way to a Shraddh. They are attending Anjali Poddar’s funeral, a young women who has an unhappy marriage and who committed suicide by jumping off a balcony. They get lost while on their way to the Shraddah, and Mr. Mitra already is uninterested in attending. Throughout the whole ceremony, he finds it pointless to be there. Indian culture revolves around this story, however it seems absent in the funeral. Mr. Mitra in the end, decides to leave with an unsatisfying feeling.

Theme:    Destination can be hard to find.

When on their way to the Shraddh, Mr. Mitra and Mrs. Mitra, were lost trying to find the apartments where it will be headed. “What preoccupied him now was not getting there, but the negotiations involved in how to get there” (Chaudhuri, Lines 62-64). They eventually found their destination, but it was a hard one to find.
As for Anjali, her destination was never found. She “had been living with her parents for a month after leaving her husband. She’d left him before, but this time she’d said her intentions were clear and final” (Chaudhuri, Lines 202-204). She didn’t have a destination since she was back and forth living with her parents and then her husband. As a result, it was rumored because of her unhappiness life, she committed suicide and that was her ultimate destination.