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Read the passage carefully.
A PRIESTLY TALE
As I browsed again, the other day, through
Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India, I wondered how many more
people - Indians and others - had been pushed deeper into puzzlement
by Pokhran II. Puzzlement, both over the idea of India and the reality,
as they might have said to each other, here is a country - "a
country in nothing but the geographical sense." - that draped
itself only the other day, in the dhoti and antediluvian
orthodoxies of Hindutva. And now it sprints across the latest frontiers
of science, refusing to fit into any historical category.
Drawn by this thought, I recalled to mind many authors who have
tried to pigeonhole India and failed. I was surprised to see how
many of them had come to think that, really, there was nothing called
'India' in the real sense. They had come to such thinking simply
because the reality of India was too large or too complex for them
to comprehend. In other words, they had joined the company of the
six proverbial blind men who could not believe that there was any
such thing as an elephant.
If an observer cannot cope with the challenge
that novelty poses to the stereotype, he comforts himself with the
thought that what he cannot define does not exist. Those observers
of India whose intellect was sturdier, baffled though it was by
the whole, tried to explore the totality along the veins of its
parts ; and they have left behind some excellent comprehensions
of these.
For the rest, however, even the parts
proved too large, too complex, and they were left exulting over
the discovery of the parts of some parts, which they took to be
the working principles of the whole. The phenomenon of caste is
an example, or better still, 'Hindu India', a label much displayed
these days, and displayed both by those who hate, and by those who
worship the product.
But there were some among the observers
of India whose intellect was neither so ambitious nor so vain that
they disliked the forest for being more than the sum of its trees.
They were, rather, like the man who is content to understand the
seasons of the tree under whose shade he lives; its fruit, flowers,
leaves and roots, and their benefactions. He does not have to unravel
the forest first, and thereby risk losing the tree.
Let me end this reverie with an episode
that, in my mind at least, links the many layers of the Indian reality,
and links Pokhran-I with Pokhran-II. It was soon after Pokhran I
that this incident took place. I was then editorial director of
the Press Foundation of Asia. It fell to my lot to guide a group
of about twenty Asian journalists through the cultural landscape
of South East and East Asia. Among them was a young Indonesian journalist
whose name, I think, was Trasnio; she worked for Berita Harian,
the newspaper of the Indonesian army.
An early stop on the Indian leg was, of
course, a temple, where we all saw the dhoti clad figures
of Indian priesthood, complete with streaks of sandalwood paste
standing out prominently on their foreheads. But another stop, a
few days later, was the space research complex in Bangalore, which
was at that time, if I remember correctly, under Dr U.R. Rao. The
prize object, he showed us with pride was a multi-functional satellite
that was nearing completion, fitted with cameras of a higher resolution
that India had ever sent up before.
All this was being explained to us as
we walked along the observation gallery. Fifteen feet below, a number
of scientists were working away on the satellite, checking out every
part and its linkages; many of them were dressed in white shirts
and mundus, and on the foreheads of many of them, streaks
of sandalwood paste shone prominently.
As was the daily routine on the tour,
on that day also, all of us assembled in the evening for each to
say what had struck him most during the day. And what had struck
Trasnio was "how you have married religion and science, with
all those priests going round and round the satellite to purify
it for its journey to heaven."
A1.1 Answer the following questions in
your own words as briefly as possible.
(a) What has puzzled many persons in India
and abroad recently?(1)
(b) Why have some of the authors failed in their attempt to rigidly
classify India? (2)
(c) How have observers tried to understand India? What has been
the result of their endeavours? (2)
(d) The phenomena of "caste" and 'Hindu India' are quoted
as examples. What point do they illustrate? (3)
(e) Do you agree with the author's opinion that Indian reality is
complex? (2)
(f) Select words from the above passage which convey a similar meaning
as the following: (2)
(i) Examined books in a casual, leisurely
way
(ii) Of the time before Noah's Flood
(iii) Understand fully
(iv) Rejoining greatly.
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