Historians sometimes forget that history is continually being made and experienced before it is studied, interpreted, and read. These latter activities have their own history, of course, which may impinge in unexpected ways on public events. It is difficult to predict when "new pasts" will overturn established historical interpretations and change the course of history.
In the fall of 1954, for example, C. Vann Woodward delivered a lecture series at the University of Virginia which challenged the prevailing dogma concerning the history, continuity, and uniformity of racial segregation in the South. He argued that the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only codified traditional practice but also were a determined effort to erase the considerable progress made by Black people during and after Reconstruction in the 1870's. This revisionist view of Jim Crow legislation grew in part from the research that Woodward had done for the NAACP legal campaign during its preparation for Brown v. Board of Education.
The Supreme Court had issued its ruling in this epochal desegregation case a few months before Woodward's lectures. The lectures were soon published as a book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Ten years later, in a preface to the second revised edition, Woodward confessed with ironic modesty that the first edition "had begun to suffer under some of the handicaps that might be expected in a history of the American Revolution published in 1776."
That was a bit like hearing Thomas Paine apologize for the timing of his pamphlet Common Sense, which had a comparable impact. Although Common Sense also had a mass readership, Paine had intended to reach and inspire: he was not a historian, and thus not concerned with accuracy or the dangers of historical anachronism. Yet, like Paine, Woodward had an unerring sense of the revolutionary moment, and of how historical evidence could undermine the mythological tradition that was crushing the dreams of new social possibilities. Martin Luther King, Jr., testified to the profound effect of The Strange Career of Jim Crow on the civil rights movement by praising the book and quoting it frequently.
Environmental protection and management is deservedly attracting a lot of attention these days. This is a desirable development in the face of the alarming rate of natural resource degradation which greatly hampers their optimal utilization. When waste waters emanating from municipal sewage, industrial effluent, agriculture and land runoffs, find their way either to ground water reservoirs or other surface water sources, the quality of water deteriorates, rendering it unfit for use. The natural balance is distributed when concentrated discharges of waste water is not controlled.
This is because the cleansing forces of nature cannot do their job in proportion to the production of filthy matter. According to the National Environment Engineering and Research Institute (NEERI), a staggering 70 percent of water available in the country is polluted. According to the Planning Commission “From the Dal lake in the North to the Chaliyar river in the South From Damodar and Hoogly in the East to the Thane Creek in the West, the picture of water pollution is uniformly gloomy. Even our large perennial rivers, like the Ganga, are today are heavily polluted”.
According to one study, all the 14 major rivers of India are highly polluted. Beside the Ganga, these rivers include the Yamuna, Narmada, Godaveri, Krishna and Cauvery. These rivers carry 85 percent of the surface runoff and their drainage basins cover 73 percent of the country. The pollution of the much revered Ganga is due in particular to municipal sewage that accounts for ¾ of its pollution load. Despite India having legislation on water pollution [The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974] and various water pollution control boards, rivers have today become synonymous with drains and sewers. th Untreated community wastes discharged into water courses from human settlements account for four times as much waste water as industrial effluent. Out of India’s 3,119 towns and cities, only 217 have partial (209) or full (8) sewerage treatment facilities and cover less than a third of the urban population.
Statistics from a report of the Central Board for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution. Statistics from a report of the Central Board for Prevention and Control of Water Pollution reveal that 1,700 of 2,700 water using industries in India are polluting the water around their factories. Only 160 industries have waste water treatment plants. One estimate suggests that the volume of waste water of industrial origin will be comparable to that of domestic sewerage in India by 2000 AD. Discharges from agricultural fields, which carry fertilizing ingredients of nitrogen, phosphorous and pesticides are expected to be three times as much as domestic sewage. By that date, thermal pollution generated by discharges from thermal power plants will be the largest in volume.
Toxic effluents deplete the levels of oxygen in the rivers, endanger all aquatic life and render water absolutely unfit for human consumption, apart from affecting industrial production. Sometimes these effects have been disastrous. A recent study reveals that the water of the Ganga, Yamuna, Kali and Hindon rivers have considerable concentrations of heavy metals due to inflow of industrial wastes, which pose a serious health hazard to the millions living on their banks. Similarly, the Cauvery and Kapila rivers in Karnataka have been found to contain metal pollutants, which threaten the health of people in riverine towns. The Periyar, the largest river of Kerala, receives extremely toxic effluent that result in high incidence of skin problems and fish kills.
The Godavari of Andhera Pradesh and the Damodar and Hoogly in West Bengal receive untreated industrial toxic wastes. A high level of pollution has been found in the Yamuna, while the Chambal of Rajasthan is considered the most polluted river in Rajasthan. Even in industrially backward Orissa, the Rushikula river is extremely polluted. The fate of the Krishna in Andhra Pradesh, the Tungabhadra in Karnataka, the Chaliyar in Kerala, the Gomti in U.P., the Narmada in M.P. and the Sone and the Subarnarekha rivers in Bihar is no different. According to the W.H.O.- eighty percent of diseases prevalent in India are water-borne; many of them assume epidemic proportions. The prevalence of these diseases heighten under conditions of drought.
It is also estimated that India loses as many as 73 million man-days every year due to water prone diseases, costing Rs.600 crore by way of treatment expenditure and production losses. Management of water resources with respect to their quality also assumes greater importance especially when the country can no more afford to waste water. The recent Clean-the Ganga Project with an action plan estimated to cost the exchequer Rs.250 crore (which has been accorded top priority) is a trend setter in achieving this goal. The action plan evoked such great interest that offers of assistance have been received from France, UK, US and the Netherlands as also the World Bank.
This is indeed laudable. Poland too has now joined this list. The very fact that these countries have volunteered themselves to contribute their mite is a healthy reflection of global concern over growing environmental degradation and the readiness of the international community to participate in what is a truly formidable task. It may be recalled that the task of cleansing the Ganga along the Rishikesh – Hardwar stretch under the first phase of the Ganga Action Plan has been completed and the results are reported to be encouraging. The reasons for the crisis of drinking water resources are drying up and the lowering of ground water through overpumping; this is compounded by the pollution of water sources. All these factors increase the magnitude of the problem.
An assessment of the progress achieved by the end of March 1985, on completion of the first phase of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981 – ’91) reveals that drinking water has been available to 73 percent of the urban population and 56 percent of the rural population only. This means that nearly half the country’s rural population has to get drinking water facilities. This needs to be urgently geared up especially when considered against the Government’s professed objective of providing safe drinking water and sanitation to all by the end of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade i.e. March 1991. The foremost action in this would be to clean up our water resources As per surveys conducted by the NEERI, per capita drinking water losses in different cities in the country range between 11,000 to 31,000 litres annually.
This indicates a waste level of 20 to 35 percent of the total flow of water in the distribution system primarily due to leaks in main and household service pipes. Preventive maintenance programme would substantially reduce losses, wastages and would certainly go a long way in solving the problem. According to the Union Ministry of Works and Housing, of the 2.31 lakhs problem villages most have been provided with at least one source of drinking water as of March, 1986. The balance (38,748) villages are expected to be covered during the seventh plan. A time bound national policy on drinking water is being formulated by Government, wherein the task is proposed to be completed by the end of the seventh plan.
An outlay of Rs.6,522.47 crores has been allotted for the water supply and sanitation sector in the seventh plan period against an outlay of Rs.3,922.02 crores in the sixth plan. Of this, outlay for rural water supply sector is Rs.3,454.47 crores. It is expected that this outlay would help to cover about 86.4 percent of the urban and 82.2 percent of the rural population with safe drinking water facilities by March 1991. Hygienic sanitation facilities would be provided to 44.7 percent and 1.8 percent of the urban and rural population respectively within the same period.
Q.According to NEERI
Ans.b
Q.The degradation of natural resources will necessarily lead to
Ans.a
Q.Which of the following statements has/ have been made by the W.H.O?
Ans.c
Q.Which of the following statements is correct?
Ans.d
Q.Municipal sewage pollutants account for
Ans.b
Q.The crisis of drinking water is caused chiefly by
Ans.c
Q.The cost of the ‘Clean-the –Ganga Pollution’ Project Action Plan is likely to be sourced from
Ans.d
Q.Considerable amounts of metal pollutants are found in the river(s)
Ans.d
Q.Out of the total outlay for water supply and sanitation in the seventh plan, rural water supply sector would receive
Ans.a
Q.The best remedy for shortage lies in
Ans.b
To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. Space may sound a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush hour bus. These experiences of physical space have parallels in our relations with others. On our jobs we know what it is to be pressed and crowded, our working space diminished by the urgency of deadlines and competitiveness of colleagues.
But then there are times when deadlines disappear and colleagues cooperate, when everyone has a space to move, invent and produce with energy and enthusiasm. With family and friends, we know how it feels to have unreasonable demands placed upon us, to be boxed in by the expectations of those nearest to us. But then there are times when we feel accepted for who we are (or forgiven for who we are not), times when a spouse or a child or a friend gives us the space, both to be and to become. Similar experiences of crowding and space are found in education.
To sit in a class where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and focus us into a grim competition for grades – to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning. But to study with a teacher, who not only speaks but also listens, who not only answers but asks questions and welcomes our insights, who provides information and theories that do not close doors but open new ones, who encourages students to help each other learn – to study with such a teacher is to know the power of a learning space. A learning space has three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries and an air of hospitality. To create open learning space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around and within us; we often create them ourselves to evade the challenge of truth and transformation. One source of such impediments is our fear of appearing ignorant to others or to ourselves. The oneness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries.
A learning space cannot extend indefinitely; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation for confusion and chaos. When space boundaries are violated, the quality of space suffers. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care. Because the pursuit of truth can be painful and discomforting, the learning space must be hospitable. Hospitable means receiving each other, our struggles, our new-born ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of truth can form and the pain of its transformation be borne. A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless, but to make painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur, things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.
The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries and hospitality can be approached at several levels. The most basic level is the physical arrangement of the classroom, Consider the traditional classroom setting with row of chairs facing the lectern where learning space is confined to the narrow alley of attention between each student and teacher. In this space, there is no community of truth, hospitality of room for students to relate to the thoughts of each other. Contrast it with the chairs placed in a circular arrangement creating an open space within which learners can interconnect. At another level, the teacher can create conceptual space-space with words in two ways. One is through assigned reading;
the other is through lecturing, assigned reading, not in the form of speed reading several hundred pages but contemplative reading which opens, not fills, our learning space. A teacher can also create a learning space by means of lectures. By providing critical information and a framework of interpretation, a lecturer can lay down boundaries within which learning occurs. We also create learning space through the kind of speech we utter and the silence from which true speech emanates. Speech is a precious gift and a vital tool, but too often our speaking is an evasion of truth, a way of buttressing our self-serving reconstructions of reality. Silence must therefore be an integral part of learning space.
In silence, more than in arguments, our mind made world falls away and we are open to the truth that seeks us. Words often divide us, but silence can unite. Finally teachers must also create emotional space in the class-room, space that allows feelings to arise and be dealt with because submerged feelings can undermine learning. In an emotionally honest learning space, one created by a teacher who does not fear dealing with feelings, the community of truth can flourish between us and we can flourish in it.
Q.The task of creating learning space with qualities of openness, boundaries and hospitality is multidimensional. It involves operating at
Ans.c
Q.The statement ‘the openness of a space is created by the firmness of its boundaries’ appears contradictory. Which of the following statements provides the best justification for the proposition?
Ans.c
Q.According to the author, learning is a painful process because
Ans.d
Q.Understanding the notion of space in our relations with other is
Ans.d
Q.Which of the following statements best describes the author’s conception of learning space?
Ans.d
Q.According to the author, silence must be an integral part of learning space because
Ans.a
Q.Another way of describing the author’s notion of learning space can be summarized in the following manner
Ans.c
Q.According to the author, an effective teacher does not allow
Ans.c
Q.An emotionally honest learning space can only be created by
Ans.b
Q.Conceptual space with words can be created by
Ans.a
Management education gained new academic stature within US Universities and greater respect from outside during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Some observers attribute the competitive superiority of US corporations to the quality of business education. In 1978, a management professor, Herbert A. Simon of Carnegie Mellon University, won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in decision theory. And the popularity of business education continued to grow, since 1960, the number of master’s degrees awarded annually has grown from under 5000 to over 50,000 in the mid 1980’s as the MBA has become known as ‘the passport to the good life’. By the 1980’s, however, US business schools faced critics who charged that learning had little relevance to real business problems. Some went so far as to blame business schools for the decline in US competitiveness.
Amidst the criticisms, four distinct arguments may be discerned. The first is that business schools must be either unnecessary or deleterious because Japan does so well without them. Underlying this argument is the idea that management ability cannot be taught, one is either born with it or must acquire it over years of practical experience. A second argument is that business schools are overly academic and theoretical. They teach quantitative models that have little application to real world problems. Third, they give inadequate attention to shop floor issues, to production processes and to management resources. Finally, it is argued that the encourage undesirable attitudes in students, such as placing value on the short term and ‘bottom line’ targets, while neglecting longer term development criteria.
In summary, some business executives complain that MBAs are incapable of handing day to day operational decisions, unable to communicate and to motivate people, and unwillingly to accept responsibility for following through on implementation plans. We shall analyze these criticisms after having reviewed experiences in other countries. In contrast to the expansion and development of business education in the United States and more recently in Europe, Japanese business schools graduate no more than two hundred MBAs each year. The Keio Business School (KBS) was the only graduate school of management in the entire country until the mid 1970’s and it still boasts the only two year masters programme. The absence of business schools in Japan would appear in contradiction with the high priority placed upon learning by its Confucian culture.
Confucian colleges taught administrative skills as early as 1630 and Japan wholeheartedly accepted Western learning following the Meiji restoration of 1868 when hundreds of students were dispatched to universities in US, Germany, England and France to learn the secrets of western technology and modernization. Moreover, the Japanese educational system is highly developed and intensely competitive and can be credited for raising the literary and mathematical abilities of the Japanese to the highest level in the world. Until recently, Japan corporations have not been interested in using either local or foreign business schools for the development of their future executives. Their in-company training programs have sought the socialization of newcomers, the younger the better.
The training is highly specific and those who receive it have neither the capacity nor the incentive to quit. The prevailing belief, says Imai, ‘is a management should be born out of experience and many years of effort and not learnt from educational institutions.’ A 1960 survey of Japanese senior executives confirmed that a majority (54%) believed that managerial capabilities can be attained only on the job and not in universities. However, this view seems to be changing: the same survey revealed that even as early as 1960. 37% of senior executives felt that the universities should teach integrated professional management. In the 1980’s a combination of increased competitive pressures and greater multi-nationalisation of Japanese business are making it difficult for many companies to rely solely upon internally trained managers. This has led to a rapid growth of local business programmes and a greater use of American MBA programmes.
In 1982-83, the Japanese comprised the largest single group of foreign students at Wharton, where they not only learnt the latest techniques of financial analysis, but also developed worldwide contacts through their classmates and became Americanized, something highly useful in future negotiations. The Japanese, then do not ‘do without’ business schools, as is sometimes contended. But the process of selecting and orienting new graduates, even MBAs, into corporations is radically different than in the US. Rather than being placed in highly paying staff positions, new Japanese recruits are assigned responsibility for operational and even menial tasks.
Success is based upon Japan’s system of highly competitive recruitment and intensive incompany management development, which in turn are grounded in its tradition of universal and rigorous academic education, life-long employment and strong group identification. The harmony among these traditional elements has made Japanese industry highly productive and given corporate leadership a long term view. It is true that this has been achieved without much attention to university business education, but extraordinary attention has been devoted to the development of managerial skills, both within the company and through participation in programmes sponsored by the Productivity Center and other similar organizations.
Q.The author argues that the Japanese system
Ans.a
Q.The growth of popularity of business schools among students was most probably due to
Ans.b
Q.According to the passage
Ans.d
Q.A criticism that management education did not face was that
Ans.b
Q.The absence of business schools in Japan
Ans.c
Q.The 1960’s and 1970’s can best be described as a period
Ans.a
Q.US business schools faced criticism in the 1980’s because
Ans.c
Q.Training programmes in Japanese corporations have
Ans.b
Q.The Japanese modified their views on management education because of
Ans.d
Q.The Japanese were initially able to do without business schools as a result of
Ans.a
Q.The main difference between US and Japanese corporations is
Ans.d
Q.The author argues that
Ans.a
I think that it would be wrong to ask whether 50 years of India's Independence are an achievement or a failure. It would be better to see things as evolving. It's not an either-or question. My idea of the history of India is slightly contrary to the Indian idea. India is a country that, in the north, outside Rajasthan, was ravaged and intellectually destroyed to a large extent by the invasions that began in about AD 1000 by forces and religions that India had no means of understanding. The invasions are in all the schoolbooks.
But I don't think that people understand that every invasion, every war, every campaign, was accompanied by slaughter, a slaughter always of the most talented people in the country. So these wars, apart from everything else led to a tremendous intellectual depletion of the country. I think that in the British period, and in the 50 years after the British period, there has been a kind of regrouping or recovery, a very slow revival of energy and intellect. This isn't an idea that goes with the vision of the grandeur of old India and all that sort of rubbish. That idea is a great simplification and it occurs because it is intellectually, philosophically easier for Indians to manage. What they cannot manage, and what they have not yet come to terms with, is that ravaging of all the north of India by various conquerors.
That was ruined not by the act of nature, but by the hand of man. It is so painful that few Indians have begun to deal with it. It is much easier to deal with British imperialism. That is a familiar topic, in India and Britain. What is much less familiar is the ravaging of India before the British. What happened from AD 1000 onwards, really, is such a wound that it is almost impossible to face. Certain wounds are so bad that they can't be written about. You deal with that kind of pain by hiding from it. You retreat from reality. I do not think, for example, that the Incas of Peru or the native people of Mexico have ever got over their defeat by the Spaniards. In both places the head was cut off. I think the pre-British ravaging of India was as bad as that.
In the place of knowledge of history, you have various fantasies about the village republic and the Old Glory. There is one big fantasy that Indians have always found solace in: about India having the capacity for absorbing its conquerors. This is not so. India was laid low by its conquerors. I feel the past 150 years have been years of every kind of growth. I see the British period and what has continued after that as one period. In that time, there has been a very slow intellectual recruitment. I think every Indian should make the pilgrimage to the site of the capital of the Vijayanagar empire, just to see what the invasion of India led to.
They will see a totally destroyed town. Religious wars are like that. People who see that might understand what the centuries of slaughter and plunder meant. War isn't a game. When you lost that kind of war, your town was destroyed, the people who built the towns were destroyed. You are left with a headless population. That's where modern India starts from. The Vijayanagar capital was destroyed in 1565. It is only now that the surrounding region has begun to revive. A great chance has been given to India to start up again, and I feel it has started up again. The questions about whether 50 years of India since Independence have been a failure or an achievement are not the questions to ask.
In fact, I think India is developing quite marvelously, people thought — even Mr Nehru thought — that development and new institutions in a place like Bihar, for instance, would immediately lead to beauty. But it doesn't happen like that. When a country as ravaged as India, with all its layers of cruelty, begins to extend justice to people lower down, it's a very messy business. It's not beautiful, it's extremely messy. And that's what you have now, all these small politicians with small reputations and small parties. But this is part of growth, this is part of development. You must remember that these people, and the people they represent, have never had rights before. When the oppressed have the power to assert themselves, they will behave badly.
It will need a couple of generations of security, and knowledge of institutions, and the knowledge that you can trust institutions — it will take at least a couple of generations before people in that situation begin to behave well. People in India have known only tyranny. The very idea of liberty is a new idea. The rulers were tyrants. The tyrants were foreigners. And they were proud of being foreign. There's a story that anybody could run and pull a bell and the emperor would appear at his window and give justice. This is a child's idea of history — the slave's idea of the ruler's mercy. When the people at the bottom discover that they hold justice in their own hands, the earth moves a little. You have to expect these earth movements in India.
It will be like this for a hundred years. But it is the only way. It's painful and messy and primitive and petty, but it’s better that it should begin. It has to begin. If we were to rule people according to what we think fit, that takes us back to the past when people had no voices. With self-awareness all else follows. People begin to make new demands on their leaders, their fellows, on themselves. They ask for more in everything. They have a higher idea of human possibilities. They are not content with what they did before or what their fathers did before. They want to move. That is marvellous. That is as it should be.
I think that within every kind of disorder now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now. People like Nehru were colonial — style politicians. They were to a large extent created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the people. Politicians now have to begin with the people. They cannot be too far above the level of the people. They are very much part of the people. It is important that self-criticism does not stop. The mind has to work, the mind has to be active, there has to be an exercise of the mind. I think it's almost a definition of a living country that it looks at itself, analyses itself at all times. Only countries that have ceased to live can say it's all wonderful.
Q.The central thrust of the passage is that
India is gearing up for a new awakening.
India is going back to its past status.
India is yet to understand itself.
India's glorious past is a figment of the imagination.
Ans.c
Q.The writer's attitude is
excessively critical of India.
insightful.
cynical.
cold.
Ans.b
Q.The writer has given the example of the Vijayanagar kingdom in order to drive home the point that
Indians should know their historical sites
Indians should be aware of the existence of such a historic past.
it is time that India came to terms with the past
All of these
Ans.c
Q.The writer is against
the child's view of history.
taking a critical stand on history
indulging in the details of the past.
None of these
Ans.a
Q.According to the writer, India's regeneration and revival took place
in the British period
after the British period.
during and after the British period.
a long time after the British left.
Ans.c
Q.According to the passage, self-awareness is followed by
self-righteousness.
a higher idea of human possibilities.
a desire for more in everything
Both (b) and (c)
Ans.d
Q.According to the passage, India's current situation is
bleak.
horrific
primitive and messy.
None of these
Ans.c
Q.For a country to be alive and progressive, it is important that
self-criticism does not stop.
self-criticism does not exceed a certain limit.
it feels that all is right with itself.
None of these
Ans.a
Q.The writer's prognosis for India's future is that
it will be stable
it will be chaotic.
it will reflect the manipulations of the present
it will give way to self-criticism.
Ans.b
Q.One of the main features of the tyranny of foreign rulers was
the decimation of the country's artists.
the decimation of the country's wealth.
the decimation of the country's talented people.
All of these
Ans.c
When talks come to how India has done for itself in 50 years of independence, the world has nothing but praise for our success in remaining a democracy. On other fronts, the applause is less loud. In absolute terms, India hasn't done too badly, of course, life expectancy has increased. So has literacy. Industry, which was barely a fledging, has grown tremendously. And as far as agriculture is concerned, India has been transformed from a country perpetually on the edge of starvation into a success story held up for others to emulate. But these are competitive times when change is rapid, and to walk slowly when the rest of the world is running is almost as bad as standing still or walking backwards.
Compared with large chunks of what was then the developing world — South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, China and what was till lately a separate Hong Kong — India has fared abysmally. It began with a far better infrastructure than most of these countries had. It suffered hardly or not at all during the World War II. It had advantages like an English speaking elite, quality scientific manpower (including a Nobel laureate and others who could be ranked among the world's best) and excellent business acumen. Yet, today, when countries are ranked according to their global competitiveness, it is tiny Singapore that figures at the top. Hong Kong is an export powerhouse.
So is Taiwan. If a symbol were needed of how far we have fallen back, note that while Korean Cielos are sold in India, no one in South Korea is rushing to buy an Indian car. The reasons list themselves. Topmost is economic isolationism. The government discouraged imports and encouraged self-sufficiency.
Whatever the aim was, the result was the creation of a totally inefficient industry that failed to keep pace with global trends and, therefore, became absolutely uncompetitive. Only when the trade gates were opened a little did this become apparent. The years since then have been spent in merely trying to catch up. That the government actually sheltered its industrialists from foreign competition is a little strange.
For, in all other respects, it operated under the conviction that businessmen were little more than crooks who were to be prevented from entering the most important areas of the economy, who were to be hamstrung in as many ways as possible, who were to be tolerated in the same way as an inexcisable wart.
The high, expropriatory rates of taxation, the licensing laws, the reservation of whole swathes of industry for the public sector, and the granting of monopolies to the public sector firms were the principal manifestations of this attitude. The government forgot that before wealth could be distributed, it had to be created. The government forgot that it itself could not create, but only squander wealth. Some of the manifestations of the old attitude have changed. Tax rates have fallen. Licensing has been all but abolished.
And the gates of global trade have been opened wide. But most of these changes were forced by circumstances partly by the foreign exchange bankruptcy of 1991 and the recognition that the government could no longer muster the funds to support the public sector, leave alone expand it. Whether the attitude of the government itself, or that of more than a handful of ministers, has changed, is open to question. In many other ways, however, the government has not changed one whit. Business still has to negotiate a welter of negotiations.
Transparency is still a longer way off. And there is no exit policy. In defending the existing policy, politicians betray an inability to see beyond their noses. A no-exit policy for labour is quivalent to a no-entry policy for new business. If one industry is not allowed to retrench labour, other industries will think a hundred times before employing new labour. In other ways too, the government hurts industries. Public sector monopolies like the department of telecommunications and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. make it possible for Indian businesses to operate only at a cost several times that of their counterparts abroad.
The infrastructure is in shambles partly because it is unable to formulate a sufficiently remunerative policy for private business, and partly because it does not have the stomach to change market rates for services. After a burst of activity in the early nineties, the government is dragging its feet. At the rate it is going, it will be another 50 years before the government realises that a pro-business policy is the best pro-people policy. By then of course, the world would have moved even farther ahead.
Q.The writer's attitude towards the government is
critical.
ironical.
sarcastic
derisive
Ans.a
Q.The writer is surprised at the government's attitude towards its industrialists because
the government did not need to protect its industrialists
the issue of competition was non-existent
the government looked upon its industrialists as crooks
the attitude was a conundrum
Ans.c
Q.The government was compelled to open the economy due to
pressure from international markets
pressure from domestic market.
foreign exchange bankruptcy and paucity of funds with the government
All of these
Ans.c
Q.The writer ends the passage on a note of
cautious optimism
pessimism
optimism.
pragmatism.
Ans.b
Q.According to the writer, India should have performed better than the other Asian nations because
it had adequate infrastructure.
it had better infrastructure.
it had better politicians who could take the required decisions.
All of these
Ans.b
Q.India was in a better condition than the other Asian nations because
it did not face the ravages of the World War II.
it had an English speaking populace and good business sense
it had enough wealth through its exports
Both (a) and (b)
Ans.d
Q.The major reason for India's poor performance is
economic isolationism.
economic mismanagement.
inefficient industry.
All of these
Ans.a
Q.One of the features of the government's protectionist policy was
encouragement of imports.
discouragement of exports.
encouragement of exports
discouragement of imports.
Ans.d
Q.The example of the Korean Cielo has been presented to highlight
India's lack of stature in the international market
India's poor performance in the international market.
India's lack of creditability in the international market.
India's disrepute in the international market.
Ans.b
Q.According to the writer,
India's politicians are myopic in their vision of the country's requirements
India's politicians are busy lining their pockets
India's politicians are not conversant with the needs of the present scenario.
All of these
Ans.a
When Deng Xiaoping died a few months ago, the Chinese leadership barely paused for a moment before getting on with the business of governing the country. Contrast that with the chaotic contortions on India's political stage during the past month, and it is easy to conclude that democracy and democratic freedoms are serious obstacles to economic progress. When the Chinese leadership wants a power plant to be set up, it just goes ahead. No fears of protracted litigation, of environmental protests, or of lobbying by interested parties. It — or the economy — is not held to ransom by striking truckers or air traffic controllers. Certainly, there is much that is alluring about an enlightened dictatorship. But there the trouble begins.
First, there is no guarantee that a dictatorship will be an enlightened one. Myanmar has been ruled by a dictator for decades, and no one would claim that it is better off than even Bangladesh which has itself suffered long stretches of dictatorship. Nor can Mobuto Sese Seko, much in the news these days, be described as enlightened by any reckoning. The people of Israel, almost the only democracy in a region where dictatorships (unenlightened ones) are the norm, are much better off than their neighbours.
Second, dictatorships can easily reverse policies. China was socialist as long as Mao Zedong was around. When Deng Xiaoping took over in what was essentially a palace coup, he took the country in the opposite direction. There is little to ensure that the process will not be repeated. In India such drastic reversals are unlikely. Six years ago Indian politicians agreed that industries should be de-licensed, that imports should be freed or that investment decisions should be based on economic considerations. Now few think otherwise.
Almost all politicians are convinced of the merits of liberalisation though they may occasionally lose sight of the big picture in pandering to their constituencies. India has moved slower than China on liberalisation, but whatever moves it has made are more permanent. Democracies are also less likely to get embroiled in destructive wars. Had Saddam Hussain been under the obligation of facing free elections every five years, he would have thought ten times before entangling his people in a long confrontation with the West. Germany, Italy and Japan were all dictatorships when they launched the World War II.
The price was paid by the economies. Democracies make many small mistakes. But dictatorships are more susceptible to making huge ones and risking everything on one decision — like going to war. Democracies are the political equivalent of free markets, Companies know they can't fool the consumer too often; he will simply switch to the competition. The same goes for political parties. When they fail to live up to their promises in government, the political consumer opts for the competition. Democratic freedoms too are important for the economy, especially now that information is supreme.
Few doubt that the Internet will play an important part in the global economy in the decades to come. But China, by preventing free access to it, is already probably destroying its capabilities in this area. As service industries grow in importance, China may well be at a disadvantage though that may not be apparent today when its manufacturing juggernaut is rolling ahead. India has stifled its entrepreneurs through its licensing policies. That was an example of how the absence of economic freedom can harm a country. But right-wing dictatorships like South Korea erred in the opposite direction.
They forced their businesses to invest in industries, which they (the dictators) felt had a golden future. Now many of those firms are trying to retreat from those investments. Statism is bad, no matter what the direction in which it applies pressure. At this moment, China and other dictatorships may be making foolish investment decisions. But as industries are subsidized and contrary voices not heard, the errors will not be realised until the investments assume gargantuan proportions. India's hesitant ways may seem inferior to China's confident moves. But at least we know what the costs are. That is not the case with China.
It was only years after the Great Leap Forward and only such experiments that the cost in human lives (millions of them) became evident to the world. What the cost of China's present experiments is we may not know for several years more. A nine per cent rate of growth repeated year after year may seem compelling. But a seven per cent rate of growth that will not falter is more desirable. India seems to be on such a growth curve, whatever the shenanigans of our politicians.
Q.According to the passage,
India needs a benevolent dictatorship.
India has failed as a democracy.
India should go the way of China.
None of these
Ans.d
Q.The passage says that
benevolent dictators are not easy to find.
not all dictators will be enlightened.
dictators can make or break a country.
an enlightened dictatorship is better than a corrupt democracy.
Ans.b
Q.It can be implied from the passage that
a lower rate of growth is preferred to a higher rate of growth.
a higher rate of growth is preferred to a lower rate of growth.
a low but stable rate of growth is preferred to a high rate of growth.
a low but faltering rate of growth is a sign of stability amidst growth.
Ans.c
Q.Vis-a-vis democracies, dictatorships run the risk of
losing all for a single mistake.
making bigger mistakes
making huge mistakes and risking everything
None of these
Ans.c
Q.The writer's conclusion in the passage is that
under no circumstances should a country encourage a corrupt democrat
under no circumstances should statism be a welcome move
a statist will not give due importance to the voice of the people
a statist will always look to his own welfare.
Ans.b
Q.Democracy has been compared to the free market, as
both have a high degree of competition.
both offer a multitude of options to choose from
consumer satisfaction plays an important role in both.
All of these
Ans.d
Q.It can be inferred from the passage that
China stands to lose out in the global market because it has blocked the Internet
India stands to gain in the global market because of its policy vis-à-vis the Internet.
Internet will play a crucial role in the global market in the years to come.
All of these
Ans.c
Q.According to the passage, a democratic set up works as a check on the
actions and decisions of its leaders.
functioning of its economy
Both (a) and (b)
None of these
Ans.d
Q.India's moves on liberalisation are more permanent than China's because
India's politicians are in agreement over the need for reforms.
India is not at the mercy of dictators
unlike China, India is unlikely to have drastic policy reversals.
India is not in a hurry to reform
Ans.b
Q.According to the passage,
Israel is the only democracy in West Asia
Israel is better off than Bangladesh or Myanmar
Israel does not face policy reversals.
None of these
Ans.d
Of each of the great leaders, it is said by his followers, long after he is gone, he made us do it. If leadership is the art of persuading your people to follow your bidding, without their realising your involvement, the archetype of its practice is N. R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman and managing director of the Rs. 143.81 crore Infosys Technologies (Infosys). For, the 52-year-old CEO of the globalised software corporation — which he founded with six friends, and a combined capital of Rs. 10,000 in 1981 and which now occupies the front ranks of the country's most admired corporations, leads with the subtlest of weapons: personal example.
Infosys ranks only 578th among the country's listed companies, and sixth in the software sector, in terms of its turnover. But it is setting new standards for India Inc. through its practices of inter alia awarding stock options to its employees, putting the value of its intellectual assets and its brands on its balancesheet, and conforming to the disclosure standards of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the US. Behind all this is the stubborn personal subscription of its CEO to the underlying causes of wealthcreation-people-power and transparency.
"What were choices earlier are compulsions now," asserts Murthy. In fact, the mirror images of Murthy, the Man, can be found all over Infosys, his company. His egalitarianism — which finds expression in such habits as using the same table and chair as anyone else in the organisation — is practised firmly when it comes to charting a course for the company's future: everyone has a voice.
"We have no hierarchy just for the sake of control." Brimming with the conviction that customer satisfaction is the key to success, Murthy has built a fleetfooted human resource management system that treats employees as customers, using the resources of the organisation to meet their professional and personal needs. His instruments are not just top-of-themarket salaries, but also operational empowerment as well as every facility that an employee needs to focus on the job.
Just what methods does Murthy use to ensure that his DNA is replicated in his company? Not for him are the classical leadership genre — transactional or transformational, situational or visionary. His chosen style, instead, is to lead by example, ensuring that the CEO's actions set the template for all Infoscions. Murthy believes that the betterment of man can be brought about through the ‘creation of wealth, legally and ethically’. The personal example that he has set enabled his company to mirror those beliefs, tying his own rewards, and measuring his value to the company, to his ability to create wealth, and erecting systems for the company's wealth to be shared by its people. Sums up Nandan Nilekani, 41, deputy managing director, Infosys:
"This is the future model of the corporation. Run an excellent company, and let the market increase its value to create wealth." Although Murthy is one of the prime beneficiaries of the philosophy — his 10 per cent stake in Infosys is worth Rs. 130 crore today — in his book, the leader leads not by grabbing the booty but by teaching others to take what they deserve. That's why, on the Infosys' balancesheet, the value of Murthy's intellectual capital is nowhere near the top, on the rationale, that the CEO, at 52, is worth far less to his company than, say, a bright young programmer of 26. To spread the company's wealth, Murthy has instituted stock options — the first to do so in the country — for employees, creating 300 millionaires already.
By 2000, he wants the number to climb to 1000. To act as a beacon for his version of the learning organisation, Murthy not only spends an hour a day surfing the Internet to learn about new technological developments in his field, he also makes as many luncheon appointments as he can with technical people and academicians — dons from the Indian Institutes of Technology for instance — systematically plumbing their depths for an understanding of new developments in infotech. Murthy's objective is not just to stay abreast of the state-of-the-art, but also to find a way to use that knowledge for the company. Following Murthy's example, Infosys has set up a technology advancement unit, whose mandate is to track, evaluate, and assimilate new techniques and methodologies. In fact, Murthy views learning not just as amassing data, but as a process that enables him to use the lessons from failure to achieve success.
This self-corrective loop is what he demonstrates through his leadership during a crisis. In 1995, for example, Infosys lost a Rs. 15 crore account — then 20 per cent of its revenues — when the $69 billion GE yanked its business from it. Instead of recriminations, Murthy activated Infosys' machinery to understand why the business was taken away and to leverage the learning for getting new clients instead. Feeling determined instead of guilty, his employees went on to sign up high profile customers like the $20 billion Xerox, the $7 billion Levi Strauss, and the $14 billion Nynex.
"You must have a multi-dimensional view of paradigms," says the multi-tasking leader. The objective is obvious: ensure that Infosys' perspective on its business and the world comes from as many vantage points as possible so that corporate strategy can be synthesised not from a narrow vision, but from a wide angle lens. In fact, Murthy still regrets that, in its initial years, Infosys didn't distil a multi-pronged understanding of the environment into its strategies, which forced it onto an incremental path that led revenues to snake up from Rs. 0.02 crore to just Rs. 5 crore in the first 10 years.
It was after looking around itself instead of focusing on its initial business of banking software, that Infosys managed to accelerate. Today the company operates with stretch targets setting distant goals and working backwards to get to them. The crucial pillar on which Murthy bases his ethical leadership is openness. Transparency, he reckons, is the clearest signal that one has nothing to hide. The personal manifestations of that are inter alia the practice of always giving complete information whenever any employee, customer, or investor asks for it:
the loudly proclaimed insistence that every Infoscion pay taxes and file returns: and a perpetually open office into which anyone can walk. But even as he tries to lead Infosys into cloning his own approach to enterprise, is Murthy choosing the best future for it? If Infosys grows with the same lack of ambition, the same softness of style, and the same absence of aggression, is it not cutting off avenues of growth that others may seize? As Infosys approaches the 21st century it is obvious that Murthy's leadership will have to set ever-improving role models for his ever-learning company. After all, men grow old; companies shouldn't.
Q.One of the ways in which Infosys spreads the company's wealth among its employees is
by awarding stock options
by giving an extravagant bonus at the end of each year.
Both (a) and (b)
None of these
Ans.a
Q.According to the passage, at Infosys
control is exerted through a system of hierarchy.
control is not exerted through a system of hierarchy.
hierarchy does not have pride of place
popular opinion is the most respected voice.
Ans.b
Q.Murthy believes in
betterment of man through learning.
betterment of man through ethical creation of wealth.
betterment of man through experimentation.
All of these
Ans.b
Q.The example of the Rs. 15 crore account highlights
Murthy's ability to see his company through a crisis
Murthy's ability to turn failure into success.
Murthy's potential to handle a crisis.
All of these
Ans.d
Q.According to Murthy, learning is
the essence of a employee
the art of amassing data
a process that helps him to learn from failure.
All of these
Ans.c
Q.According to the passage,
Infosys could not have succeeded without working backward.
Infosys succeeded because it worked backwards.
working backwards contributed to Infosys' success
working backwards is a hallmark of Infosys' functioning today.
Ans.d
Q.Openness at Infosys includes
the payment of taxes
giving complete information.
sharing secrets.
Both (a) and (b)
Ans.d
Q.It is evident from the passage that
Infosys will have to devise new strategies to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Infosys will stagnate if it does not become aggressive.
Infosys may have to become more aggressive in order to retain its market.
None of these
Ans.a
Q.The cornerstone of Murthy's human resource management system is
the employee as God.
optimum utilization of human potential.
customer satisfaction.
satisfaction of personal needs.
Ans.d
Q.According to the passage,
Infosys is a reflection of its CEO.
Infosys brings the best out in Murthy.
Infosys and Murthy are synonymous.
Murthy, the man, and Murthy the CEO are incompatible.
Ans.a
Last fortnight, news of a significant development was tucked away in the inside pages of newspapers. The government finally tabled a bill in Parliament seeking to make primary education a fundamental right. A fortnight earlier, a Delhi-based newspaper had carried a report about a three-month interruption in the Delhi Government's ‘Education for All’ programme.
The report made for distressing reading. It said that literacy centres across the city were closed down, volunteers beaten up and enrolment registers burnt. All because the state government had, earlier this year, made participation in the programme mandatory for teachers in government schools.
The routine denials were issued and there probably was a wee bit of exaggeration in the report. But it still is a pointer to the enormity of the task at hand. That economic development will be inherently unstable unless it is built on a solid base of education, specially primary education, has been said so often that it is in danger of becoming a platitude. Nor does India's abysmal record in the field need much reiteration. Nearly 30 million children in the six to ten age group do not go to school — reason enough to make primary education not only compulsory but a fundamental right.
But is that the solution? More importantly, will it work? Or will it remain a mere token, like the laws providing for compulsory primary education? It is now widely known that 14 states and four Union Territories have this law on their statute books. Believe it or not, the list actually includes Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Rajasthan, where literacy and education levels are miles below the national average. A number of states have not even notified the compulsory education law.
This is not to belittle the decision to make education a fundamental right. As a statement of political will, a commitment by the decision-makers, its importance cannot be undervalued. Once this commitment is clear, a lot of other things like resource allocation will naturally fall into place. But the task of universalizing elementary education (UEE) is complicated by various socio-economic and cultural factors which vary from region to region and within regions. If India's record continues to appall, it is because these intricacies have not been adequately understood by the planners and administrators.
The trouble has been that education policy has been designed by grizzled mandarins ensconced in Delhi and is totally out of touch with the ground reality. The key then is to decentralise education planning and implementation. What's also needed is greater community involvement in the whole process. Only then can school timings be adjusted for convenience, school children given a curriculum they can relate to and teachers made accountable. For proof, one has only to look at the success of the district primary education programme, which was launched in 1994.
It has met with a fair degree of success in the 122 districts it covers. Here the village community is involved in all aspects of education — allocating finances to supervising teachers to fixing school timings and developing curriculum and textbooks — through district planning teams. Teachers are also involved in the planning and implementation process and are given small grants to develop teaching and learning material, vastly improving motivational levels.
The consequent improvement in the quality of education generates increased demand for education. But for this demand to be generated, quality will first have to be improved. In MP, the village panchayats are responsible for not only constructing and maintaining primary schools but also managing scholarships, besides organising non-formal education. How well this works in practice remains to be seen (though the department claims the schemes are working very well) but the decision to empower panchayats with such powers is itself a significant development.
Unfortunately, the Panchayat Raj Act has not been notified in many states. After all, delegating powers to the panchayats is not looked upon too kindly by vested interests. More specifically, by politicians, since decentralisation of education administration takes away from them the power of transfer, which they use to grant favours and build up a support base.
But if the political leadership can push through the bill to make education a fundamental right, it should also be able to persuade the states to implement the laws on Panchayat Raj. For, UEE cannot be achieved without decentralisation. Of course, this will have to be accompanied by proper supervision and adequate training of those involved in the administration of education. But the devolution of powers to the local bodies has to come first.
Q.One of the problems plaguing the education system in India is
poverty.
diverse cultural and socio-economic factors.
male chauvinism.
All of these
Ans.b
Q.In the context of the passage, the term 'grizzled mandarins' means
old hags.
decrepit men.
ineffective old men
None of these
Ans.d
Q.One of the reasons contributing to India's poor performance on the education front is that
its leaders do not have the conviction required to improve the education system.
male members of society do not want their female counterparts to be educated
administrators in charge of education are out of touch with ground realities.
the country does not have the law for implementation of education policies in its statute books.
Ans.c
Q.The only way in which the education system can be improved is by
decentralising education planning and implementation.
introducing fresh blood in the planning body.
injecting funds into the exchequer solely for the purpose
educating the people on the need for primary education.
Ans.a
Q.Very low education levels are visible in
Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh
Rajasthan, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.
Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Ans.c
Q.The district primary education programme
was launched in 1994 in 22 states.
was launched in 1994 in 12 states
launched in 1994 has been successful in 122 districts.
launched in 1994 has met with dubious success.
Ans.c
Q.The village panchayats in Madhya Pradesh are responsible for
implementing adult education policies for the villages.
organising non-formal education.
scholarships and construction and maintenance of primary schools.
Both (b) and (c)
Ans.d
Q.The successful implementation of education policies is obstructed by
vested interests.
panchayat officials
politicians.
bureaucrats
Ans.c
Q.Primary education
is a fundamental right
will be made a fundamental right.
is only for the privileged sections of society.
None of these
Ans.d
Q.One of the ways in which education policy can be successfully implemented as mentioned in the passage, is
greater community involvement.
greater community development.
greater community awareness.
Both (a) and (b)
Ans.a
The current debate on intellectual property rights (IPRs) raises a number of important issues concerning the strategy and policies for building a more dynamic national agricultural research system, the relative roles of public and private sectors, and the role of agribusiness multinational corporations (MNCs). This debate has been stimulated by the international agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), negotiated as part of the Uruguay Round. TRIPs, for the first time, seeks to bring innovations in agricultural technology under a new worldwide IPR regime. The agribusiness MNCs (along with pharmaceutical companies) played a leading part in lobbying for such a regime during the Uruguay Round negotiations.
The argument was that incentives are necessary to stimulate innovations, and that this calls for a system of patents which gives innovators the sole right to use (or sell/lease the right to use) their innovations for a specified period and protects them against unauthorised copying or use. With strong support of their national governments, they were influential in shaping the agreement on TRIPs, which eventually emerged from the Uruguay Round. The current debate on TRIPs in India — as indeed elsewhere — echoes wider concerns about ‘privatization’ of research and allowing a free field for MNCs in the sphere of biotechnology and agriculture. The agribusiness corporations, and those with unbounded faith in the power of science to overcome all likely problems, point to the vast potential that new technology holds for solving the problems of hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the world.
The exploitation of this potential should be encouraged and this is best done by the private sector for which patents are essential. Some, who do not necessarily accept this optimism, argue that fears of MNC domination are exaggerated and that farmers will accept their products only if they decisively outperform the available alternatives. Those who argue against agreeing to introduce an IPR regime in agriculture and encouraging private sector research are apprehensive that this will work to the disadvantage of farmers by making them more and more dependent on monopolistic MNCs.
A different, though related apprehension is that extensive use of hybrids and genetically engineered new varieties might increase the vulnerability of agriculture to outbreaks of pests and diseases. The larger, longer-term consequences of reduced biodiversity that may follow from the use of specially-bred varieties are also another cause for concern. Moreover, corporations, driven by the profit motive, will necessarily tend to underplay, if not ignore, potential adverse consequences, especially those which are unknown and which may manifest themselves only over a relatively long period. On the other hand, high-pressure advertising and aggressive sales campaigns by private companies can seduce farmers into accepting varieties without being aware of potential adverse effects and the possibility of disastrous consequences for their livelihood if these varieties happen to fail.
There is no provision under the laws, as they now exist, for compensating users against such eventualities. Excessive preoccupation with seeds and seed material has obscured other important issues involved in reviewing the research policy. We need to remind ourselves that improved varieties by themselves are not sufficient for sustained growth of yields. In our own experience, some of the early high yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice and wheat were found susceptible to widespread pest attacks; and some had problems of grain quality.
Further research was necessary to solve these problems. This largely successful research was almost entirely done in public research institutions. Of course, it could in principle have been done by private companies, but whether they choose to do so depends crucially on the extent of the loss in market for their original introductions on account of the above factors and whether the companies are financially strong enough to absorb the ‘losses’, invest in research to correct the deficiencies and recover the lost market. Public research, which is not driven by profit, is better placed to take corrective action. Research for improving common pool resource management, maintaining ecological health and ensuring sustainability is both critical and also demanding in terms of technological challenge and resource requirements.
As such research is crucial to the impact of new varieties, chemicals and equipment in the farmer’s field, private companies should be interested in such research. But their primary interest is in the sale of seed material, chemicals, equipment and other inputs produced by them. Knowledge and techniques for resource management are not ‘marketable’ in the same way as those inputs.
Their application to land, water and forests has a long gestation and their efficacy depends on resolving difficult problems such as designing institutions for proper and equitable management of common pool resources. Public or quasi-public research institutions informed by broader, long-term concerns can only do such work. The public sector must therefore continue to play a major role in the national research system. It is both wrong and misleading to pose the problem in terms of public sector versus private sector or of privatization of research. We need to address problems likely to arise on account of the public-private sector complementarity, and ensure that the public research system performs efficiently.
Complementarity between various elements of research raises several issues in implementing an IPR regime. Private companies do not produce new varieties and inputs entirely as a result of their own research. Almost all technological improvement is based on knowledge and experience accumulated from the past, and the results of basic and applied research in public and quasi-public institutions (universities, research organizations).
Moreover, as is increasingly recognised, accumulated stock of knowledge does not reside only in the scientific community and its academic publications, but is also widely diffused in traditions and folk knowledge of local communities all over. The deciphering of the structure and functioning of DNA forms the basis of much of modern biotechnology. But this fundamental breakthrough is a ‘public good’ freely accessible in the public domain and usable free of any charge. Varieties/techniques developed using that knowledge can however be, and are, patented for private profit.
Similarly, private corporations draw extensively, and without any charge, on germ plasm available in varieties of plants species (neem and turmeric are by now famous examples). Publicly funded gene banks as well as new varieties bred by public sector research stations can also be used freely by private enterprises for developing their own varieties and seek patent protection for them. Should private breeders be allowed free use of basic scientific discoveries? Should the repositories of traditional knowledge and germ plasm be collected which are maintained and improved by publicly funded institutions?
Or should users be made to pay for such use? If they are to pay, what should be the basis of compensation? Should the compensation be for individuals or for communities/institutions to which they belong? Should individuals/ institutions be given the right of patenting their innovations? These are some of the important issues that deserve more attention than they now get and need serious detailed study to evolve reasonably satisfactory, fair and workable solutions.
Finally, the tendency to equate the public sector with the government is wrong. The public space is much wider than government departments and includes cooperatives, universities, public trusts and a variety of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Giving greater autonomy to research organizations from government control and giving non-government public institutions the space and resources to play a larger, more effective role in research, is therefore an issue of direct relevance in restructuring the public research system.
Q. Which one of the following statements describes an important issue, or important issues, not being raised in the context of the current debate on IPRs?
The role of MNCs in the sphere of biotechnology and agriculture.
The strategy and policies for establishing an IPR regime for Indian agriculture.
The relative roles of public and private sectors.
Wider concerns about ‘privatization’ of research.
Ans . B
Q. The fundamental breakthrough in deciphering the structure and functioning of DNA has become a public good. This means that
breakthroughs in fundamental research on DNA are accessible by all without any monetary considerations.
the fundamental research on DNA has the characteristic of having beneficial effects for the public at large.
due to the large scale of fundamental research on DNA, it falls in the domain of public sector research institutions.
the public and other companies must have free access to such fundamental breakthroughs in research.
Ans . A
Q. In debating the respective roles of the public and private sectors in the national research system, it is important to recognise
that private companies do not produce new varieties and inputs entirely on their own research
that almost all technology improvements are based on knowledge and experience accumulated from the past.
the complementary role of public and private-sector research
that knowledge repositories are primarily the scientific community and its academic publications
Ans . C
Q. Which one of the following may provide incentives to address the problem of potential adverse consequences of biotechnology?
Include IPR issues in the TRIPs agreement
Nationalize MNCs engaged in private research in biotechnology.
Encourage domestic firms to patent their innovations
Make provisions in the law for user compensation against failure of newly-developed varieties.
Ans . D
Q. Which of the following statements is not a likely consequence of emerging technologies in agriculture?
Development of newer and newer varieties will lead to increase in biodiversity.
MNCs may underplay the negative consequences of the newer technology on environment.
Newer varieties of seeds may increase vulnerability of crops to pests and diseases.
Reforms in patent laws and user compensation against crop failures would be needed to address new technology problems
Ans . A
Q. The TRIPs agreement emerged from the Uruguay Round to
address the problem of adverse consequences of genetically engineered new varieties of grain.
fulfil the WTO requirement to have an agreement on trade related property rights.
provide incentives to innovators by way of protecting their intellectual property.
give credibility to the innovations made by MNCs in the field of pharmaceuticals and agriculture.
Ans . C
Q. Public or quasi-public research institutions are more likely than private companies to address the negative consequences of new technologies, because of which of the following reasons?
Public research is not driven by profit motive.
Private companies may not be able to absorb losses arising out of the negative effects of the new technologies.
Unlike new technology products, knowledge and techniques for resource management are not amenable to simple market transactions
All of the above
Ans . D
Q. While developing a strategy and policies for building a more dynamic national agricultural research system, which one of the following statements needs to be considered?
Public and quasi-public institutions are not interested in making profits.
Public and quasi-public institutions have a broader and long-term outlook than private companies
Private companies are incapable of building products based on traditional and folk knowledge.
Traditional and folk knowledge cannot be protected by patents.
Ans . B
One of the criteria by which we judge the vitality of a style of painting is its ability to renew itself — its responsiveness to the changing nature and quality of experience, the degree of conceptual and formal innovation that it exhibits. By this criterion, it would appear that the practice of abstractionism has failed to engage creatively with the radical change in human experience in recent decades.
It has, seemingly, been unwilling to re-invent itself in relation to the systems of artistic expression and viewers’ expectations that have developed under the impact of the mass media. The judgement that abstractionism has slipped into ‘inter gear’ is gaining endorsement, not only among discerning viewers and practitioners of other art forms, but also among abstract painters themselves. Like their companions elsewhere in the world, abstractionists in India are asking themselves an overwhelming question today:
Does abstractionism have a future? The major crisis that abstractionists face is that of revitalising their picture surface; few have improvised any solutions beyond the ones that were exhausted by the 1970s. Like all revolutions, whether in policies or in art, abstractionism must now confront its moment of truth: having begun life as a new and radical pictorial approach to experience, it has become an entrenched orthodoxy itself. Indeed, when viewed against a historical situation in which a variety of subversive, interactive and richly hybrid forms are available to the art practitioner, abstractionism assumes the remote and defiant air of an aristocracy that has outlived its age; trammelled by formulaic conventions yet buttressed by a rhetoric of sacred mystery, it seems condemned to being the last citadel of the self-regarding ‘fine art’ tradition, the last hurrah of painting for painting’s sake.
The situation is further complicated in India by the circumstances in which an indigenous abstractionism came into prominence here during the 1960s. From the beginning it was propelled by the dialectic between two motives, one revolutionary and the other conservative — it was inaugurated as an act of emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent Indian nation state, when art was officially viewed as an indulgence at worst, and at best, as an instrument for the celebration of the republic’s hopes and aspirations.
Having rejected these dogmas, the pioneering abstractionists also went on to reject the various figurative styles associated with the Santiniketan circle and others. In such a situation, abstractionism was a revolutionary move. It led art towards the exploration of the subconscious mind, the spiritual quest and the possible expansion of consciousness. Indian painting entered into a phase of self-inquiry, a meditative inner space where cosmic symbols and non-representational images ruled. Often, the transition from figurative idioms to abstractionist ones took place within the same artist. At the same time, Indian abstractionists have rarely committed themselves wholeheartedly to a nonrepresentational idiom.
They have been preoccupied with the fundamentally metaphysical project of aspiring to the mystical-holy without altogether renouncing the symbolic. This has been sustained by a hereditary reluctance to give up the murti, the inviolable iconic form, which explains why abstractionism is marked by the conservative tendency to operate with images from the sacred repertoire of the past. Abstractionism thus entered India as a double-edged device in a complex cultural transaction. Ideologically, it served as an internationalist legitimisation of the emerging revolutionary local trends.
However, on entry, it was conscripted to serve local artistic preoccupations — a survey of indigenous abstractionism will show that its most obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art were with the more mystically oriented of the major sources of abstractionist philosophy and practice, for instance, the Kandinsky-Klee School. There have been no takers for Malevich’s Suprematism, which militantly rejected both the artistic forms of the past and the world of appearances, privileging the new-minted geometric symbol as an autonomous sign of the desire for infinity. Against this backdrop, we can identify three major abstractionist idioms in Indian art.
The first develops from a love of the earth, and assumes the form of a celebration of the self’s dissolution in the cosmic panorama; the landscape is no longer a realistic transcription of the scene, but is transformed into a visionary occasion for contemplating the cycles of decay and regeneration. The second idiom phrases its departures from symbolic and archetypal devices as invitations to heightened planes of awareness. Abstractionism begins with the establishment or dissolution of the motif, which can be drawn from diverse sources, including the hieroglyphic tablet, the Sufi meditation dance or the Tantric diagram.
The third idiom is based on the lyric play of forms guided by gesture or allied with formal improvisations like the assemblage. Here, sometimes, the line dividing abstract image from patterned design or quasi-random expressive marking may blur. The flux of forms can also be regimented through the policies of pure colour arrangements, vector-diagrammatic spaces and gestural design. In this genealogy, some pure lines of descent follow their logic to the inevitable point of extinction, others engage in cross-fertilization, and yet others undergo mutation to maintain their energy.
However, this genealogical survey demonstrates the wave at its crests, those points where the metaphysical and the painterly have been fused in images of abiding potency, ideas sensuously ordained rather than fabricated programmatically to a concept. It is equally possible to enumerate the troughs where the two principles do not come together, thus arriving at a very different account. Uncharitable as it may sound, the history of Indian abstractionism records a series of attempts to avoid the risks of abstraction by resorting to an overt and near-generic symbolism, which many Indian abstractionists embrace when they find themselves bereft of the imaginative energy to negotiate the union of metaphysics and painterliness.
Such symbolism falls into a dual trap: it succumbs to the pompous vacuity of pure metaphysics when the burden of intention is passed off as justification; or then it is desiccated by the arid formalism of pure painterliness, with delight in the measure of chance or pattern guiding the execution of a painting. The ensuing conflict of purpose stalls the progress of abstractionism in an impasse.
The remarkable Indian abstractionists are precisely those who have overcome this and addressed themselves to the basic elements of their art with a decisive sense of independence from prior models. In their recent work, we see the logic of Indian abstractionism pushed almost to the furthest it can be taken. Beyond such artists stands a lost generation of abstractionists whose work invokes a wistful, delicate beauty but stops there. Abstractionism is not a universal language; it is an art that points up the loss of a shared language of signs in society. And yet, it affirms the possibility of its recovery through the effort of awareness.
While its rheotoric has always emphasised a call for new forms of attention, abstractionist practice has tended to fall into a complacent pride in its own incomprehensibility; a complacency fatal in an ethos where vibrant new idioms compete for the viewers’ attention. Indian abstractionists ought to really return to basics, to reformulate and replenish their understanding of the nature of the relationship between the painted image and the world around it. But will they abandon their favourite conceptual habits and formal conventions, if this becomes necessary?
Q. Which one of the following is not stated by the author as a reason for abstractionism losing its vitality?
Abstractionism has failed to reorient itself in the context of changing human experience
Abstractionism has not considered the developments in artistic expression that have taken place in recent times.
Abstractionism has not followed the path taken by all revolutions, whether in politics or art.
The impact of mass media on viewers’ expectations has not been assessed, and responded to, by abstractionism.
Ans . D
Q. Which of the following, according to the author, is the role that abstractionism plays in a society?
it provides an idiom that can be understood by most members in a society
It highlights the absence of a shared language of meaningful symbols which can be recreated through greater awareness.
It highlights the contradictory artistic trends of revolution and conservatism that any society needs to move forward
It helps abstractionists invoke the wistful, delicate beauty that may exist in society.
Ans . B
Q. According to the author, which one of the following characterises the crisis faced by abstractionism?
Abstractionists appear to be unable to transcend the solutions tried out earlier
Abstractionism has allowed itself to be confined by set forms and practices
Abstractionists have been unable to use the multiplicity of forms now becoming available to an artist.
All of the above
Ans . D
Q. According to the author, the introduction of abstractionism was revolutionary because it
celebrated the hopes and aspirants of a newly independent nation.
provided a new direction to Indian art, towards self-inquiry and non-representational images.
managed to obtain internationalist support for the abstractionist agenda.
was an emancipation from the dogmas of the nascent nation state.
Ans . B
Q. Which one of the following is not part of the author’s characterization of the conservative trend in Indian abstractionism?
An exploration of the subconscious mind.
A lack of full commitment to non-representational symbols.
An adherence to the symbolic while aspiring to the mystical.
Usage of the images of gods or similar symbols.
Ans . A
Q. Given the author’s delineation of the three abstractionist idioms in Indian art, the third idiom can be best distinguished from the other two idioms through its
depiction of nature’s cyclical renewal.
use of non-representational images.
emphasis on arrangement of forms.
limited reliance on original models.
Ans . C
Q. According to the author, the attraction of the Kandinsky-Klee School for Indian abstractionists can be explained by which one of the following?
The conservative tendency to aspire to the mystical without a complete renunciation of the symbolic.
The discomfort of Indian abstractionists with Malevich’s Suprematism.
The easy identification of obvious points of affinity with European and American abstract art, of which the Kandinsky-Klee School is an example
The double-edged nature of abstractionism which enabled identification with mystically-oriented schools.
Ans . A
Q. Which one of the following, according to the author, is the most important reason for the stalling of abstractionism’s progress in an impasse?
Some artists have followed their abstractionist logic to the point of extinction.
Some artists have allowed chance or pattern to dominate the execution of their paintings.
Many artists have avoided the trap of a near-generic and an open symbolism
Many artists have found it difficult to fuse the twin principles of the metaphysical and the painterly
Ans . D
In a modern computer, electronic and magnetic storage technologies play complementary roles. Electronic memory chips are fast but volatile (their contents are lost when the computer is unplugged). Magnetic tapes and hard disks are slower, but have the advantage that they are non-volatile, so that they can be used to store software and documents even when the power is off. In laboratories around the world, however, researchers are hoping to achieve the best of both worlds.
They are trying to build magnetic memory chips that could be used in place of today’s electronic ones. These magnetic memories would be non-volatile; but they would also be faster, would consume less power, and would be able to stand up to hazardous environments more easily. Such chips would have obvious applications in storage cards for digital cameras and music players; they would enable handheld and laptop computers to boot up more quickly and to operate for longer; they would allow desktop computers to run faster; they would doubtless have military and space-faring advantages too. But although the theory behind them looks solid, there are tricky practical problems that need to be overcome. Two different approaches, based on different magnetic phenomena, are being pursued.
The first, being investigated by Gary Prinz and his colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC, exploits the fact that the electrical resistance of some materials changes in the presence of a magnetic field — a phenomenon known as magneto-resistance. For some multi-layered materials, this effect is particularly powerful and is, accordingly, called ‘giant’ magneto-resistance (GMR). Since 1997, the exploitation of GMR has made cheap multi-gigabyte hard disks commonplace. The magnetic orientations of the magnetised spots on the surface of a spinning disk are detected by measuring the changes they induce in the resistance of a tiny sensor.
This technique is so sensitive that it means the spots can be made smaller and packed closer together than was previously possible, thus increasing the capacity and reducing the size and cost of a disk drive. Dr. Prinz and his colleagues are now exploiting the same phenomenon on the surface of memory chips, rather than spinning disks. In a conventional memory chip, each binary digit (bit) of data is represented using a capacitor reservoir of electrical charge that is either empty of full — to represent a zero or a one. In the NRL’s magnetic design, by contrast, each bit is stored in a magnetic element in the form of a vertical pillar of magnetisable material.
A matrix of wires passing above and below the elements allows each to be magnetised, either clockwise or anticlockwise, to represent zero or one. Another set of wires allows current to pass through any particular element. By measuring an element’s resistance you can determine its magnetic orientation, and hence whether it is storing a zero or a one. Since the elements retain their magnetic orientation even when the power is off, the result is non-volatile memory. Unlike the elements of an electronic memory, a magnetic memory’s elements are not easily disrupted by radiation.
And compared with electronic memories, whose capacitors need constant topping up, magnetic memories are simpler and consume less power. The NRL researchers plan to commercialize their device through a company called Non-volatile Electronics, which recently began work on the necessary processing and fabrication techniques. But it will be some years before the first chips roll off the production line. Most attention in the field is focused on an alternative approach based on magnetic tunnel-junctions (MTJs), which are being investigated by researchers at chip makers, such as IBM, Motorola, Siemens and Hewlett-Packard.
IBM’s research team, led by Stuart Parkin, has already created a 500 element working prototype that operates at 20 times the speed of conventional memory chips and consumes one per cent of the power. Each element consists of a sandwich of two layers of magnetisable material separated by a barrier of aluminium oxide just four or five atoms thick. The polarisation of lower magnetisable layer is fixed in one direction, but that of the upper layer can be set (again, by passing a current through a matrix of control wires) either to the left or to the right, to store a zero or a one. The polarisations of the two layers are then in either the same or opposite directions.
Although the aluminium-oxide barrier is an electrical insulator, it is so thin that electrons are able to jump across it via a quantum-mechanical effect called tunnelling. It turns out that such tunnelling is easier when the two magnetic layers are polarised in the same direction than when they are polarised in opposite directions. So by measuring the current that flows through the sandwich, it is possible to determine the alignment of the topmost layer, and hence whether it is storing a zero or a one.
To build a full-scale memory chip based on MTJs is, however, no easy matter. According to Paulo Freitas, an expert on chip manufacturing at the Technical University of Lisbon, magnetic memory elements will have to become far smaller and more reliable than current prototypes if they are to compete with electronic memory. At the same time, they will have to be sensitive enough to respond when the appropriate wires in the control matrix are switched on, but not so sensitive that they respond when a neighbouring element is changed. Despite these difficulties, the general consensus is that MTJs are the more promising ideas. Dr Parkin says his group evaluated the GMR approach and decided not to pursue it, despite the fact that IBM pioneered GMR in hard disks. Dr. Prinz, however, contends that his plan will eventually offer higher storage densities and lower production costs. Not content with shaking up the multi-billion-dollar market for computer memory, some researchers have even more ambitious plans for magnetic computing.
In a paper published last month in Science, Russell Cowburn and Mark Welland of Cambridge University outlined research that could form the basis of a magnetic microprocessor a chip capable of manipulating (rather than merely storing) information magnetically. In place of conducting wires, a magnetic processor would have rows of magnetic dots, each of which could be polarised in one of two directions. Individual bits of information would travel down the rows as magnetic pulses, changing the orientation of the dots as they went.
Dr. Cowburn and Dr. Welland have demonstrated how a logic gate (the basic element of a microprocessor) could work in such a scheme. In their experiment, they fed a signal in at one end of the chain of dots and used a second signal to control whether it propagated along the chain. It is admittedly, a long way from a single logic gate to a full microprocessor, but this was true also when the transistor was first invented. Dr. Cowburn, who is now searching for backers to help commercialize the technology, says he believes it will be at least 10 years before the first magnetic microprocessor is constructed.
But other researchers in the field agree that such a chip is the next logical step. Dr. Prinz says that once magnetic memory is sorted out ‘the target is to go after the logic circuits’. Whether allmagnetic computers will ever be able to compete with other contenders that are jostling to knock electronics off its perch — such as optical, biological and quantum computing — remains to be seen. Dr Cowburn suggests that the future lies with hybrid machines that use different technologies. But computing with magnetism evidently has an attraction all its own.
Q. In developing magnetic memory chips to replace the electronic ones, two alternative research paths are being pursued. These are approaches based on
volatile and non-volatile memories.
magneto-resistance and magnetic tunnel-junctions.
radiation disruption and radiation neutral effects.
orientation of magnetized spots on the surface of a spinning disk and alignment of magnetic dots on the surface of a conventional memory chip
Ans . B
Q. A binary digit or bit is represented in the magneto-resistance based magnetic chip using
a layer of aluminium oxide.
a capacitor.
a vertical pillar of magnetized material.
a matrix of wires.
Ans . C
Q. In the magnetic tunnel-junctions (MTJs) tunnelling is easier when
two magnetic layers are polarised in the same direction.
two magnetic layers are polarised in the opposite directions.
two aluminium-oxide barriers are polarised in the same direction.
two aluminium-oxide barriers are polarised in the opposite directions.
Ans . A
Q. A major barrier on the way to build a full-scale memory chip based on MTJs is
the low sensitivity of the magnetic memory elements.
the thickness of aluminium oxide barriers.
the need to develop more reliable and far smaller magnetic memory chips.
All of the above
Ans . C
Q. In the MTJs approach, it is possible to identify whether the top most layer of the magnetized memory element is storing a zero or one by
measuring an element’s resistance and thus determining its magnetic orientation.
measuring the degree of disruption caused by radiation in the elements of the magnetic memory.
magnetizing the elements either clockwise or anticlockwise.
measuring the current that flows through the sandwich.
Ans . D
Q. A line of research which is trying to build a magnetic chip that can both store and manipulate information, is being pursued by
Paul Freitas.
Stuart Parkin.
Gray Prinz.
None of them
Ans . D
Q. Experimental research currently underway, using rows of magnetic dots, each of which could be polarised in one of the two directions, has led to the demonstration of
working of a microprocessor.
working of a logic gate
working of a magneto-resistance based chip.
working of a magneto tunnelling-junction (MTJ) based chip.
Ans . B
Q. From the passage, which of the following cannot be inferred?
Electronic memory chips are faster and non-volatile.
Electronic and magnetic storage technologies play a complementary role.
MTJs are the more promising idea, compared to the magneto-resistance approach
Non-volatile Electronics is the company set up to commercialize the GMR chips.
Ans . A
The story begins as the European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle in the Midwest. The land they found was covered with forests. With incredible effort they felled the trees, pulled the stumps and planted their crops in the rich, loamy soil. When they finally reached the western edge of the place, we now call Indiana, the forest stopped and ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment.
Some even called it the ‘Great Desert’. It seemed untillable. The earth was often very wet and it was covered with centuries of tangled and matted grasses. With their cast iron plows, the settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut and the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few years of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades. Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest. In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere and the tool was a plow made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud.
It was a simple tool, the ’sod buster’ that opened the great prairies to agricultural development. Sauk County, Wisconsin is the part of the prairie where I have a home. It is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673, Father Marquette was the first European to lay his eyes upon their land. He found a village laid out in regular patterns on a plain beside the Wisconsin river. He called the place Prairie du Sac. The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into the unrecorded time. When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sauk people, west of the Mississippi river. The settlers came with John Deere’s new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new kind of agriculture. They ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sod-busting tool for planting wheat.
Initially, the soil was generous and the farmers thrived. However, each year the soil lost more of its nurturing power. It was only 30 years after the Europeans arrived with their new technology that the land was depleted. Wheat farming became uneconomic and tens of thousands of farmers left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust. It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sauk Indians who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk prairie land were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation.
And they even forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations unrecorded. And that is how it was that three deserts were created — Wisconsin, the reservation and the memories of people. A century later, the land of the Sauks is now populated by the children of a second wave of European farmers who learned to replenish the soil through the regenerative powers of dairying, ground cover crops and animal manures. These third and fourth generation farmers and townspeople do not realise, however, that a new settler is coming soon with an invention as powerful as John Deere’s plow. The new technology is called ‘bereavement counselling’.
It is a tool forged at the great state university, an innovative technique to meet the needs of those experiencing the death of a loved one, a tool that can ‘process’ the grief of the people who now live on the Prairie of the Sauk. As one can imagine the final days of the village of the Sauk Indians before the arrival of the settlers with John Deere’s plow, one can also imagine these final days before the arrival of the first bereavement counsellor at Prairie du Sac. In these final days, the farmers and the towns people mourn at the death of a mother, brother, son, or friend. The bereaved is joined by neighbours and kin. They meet grief together in lamentation, prayer and song. They call upon the words of the clergy and surround themselves in community. It is in these ways that they grieve and then go on with life. Through their mourning they are assured of the bonds between them and renewed in the knowledge that this death is a part of the Prairie of the Sauk.
Their grief is common property, an anguish from which the community draws strength and gives the bereaved the courage to move ahead. It is into this prairie community that the bereavement counsellor arrives with the new grief technology. The counsellor calls the invention a service and assures the prairie folk of its effectiveness and superiority by invoking the name of the great university while displaying a diploma and certificate. At first, we can imagine that the local people will be puzzled by the bereavement counsellor’s claim. However, the counsellor will tell a few of them that the new technique is merely to assist the bereaved’s community at the time of death. To some other prairie folk who are isolated or forgotten, the counsellor will approach the Country Board and advocate the right to treatment for these unfortunate souls.
This right will be guaranteed by the Board’s decision to reimburse those too poor to pay for counselling services. There will be others, schooled to believe in the innovative new tools certified by universities and medical centres, who will seek out the bereavement counsellor by force of habit. And one of these people will tell a bereaved neighbour who is unschooled that unless his grief is processed by a counsellor, he will probably have major psychological problems in later life. Several people will begin to use the bereavement counsellor because, since the Country Board now taxes them to insure access to the technology, they will feel that to fail to be counselled is to waste their money, and to be denied a benefit, or even a right. Finally, one day, the aged father of a Sauk woman will die.
And the next door neighbour will not drop by because he doesn’t want to interrupt the bereavement counseller. The woman’s kin will stay home because they will have learned that only the bereavement counsellor knows how to process grief the proper way. The local clergy will seek technical assistance from the bereavement counsellor to learn the correct form of service to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counsellor who really cares for her because only the bereavement counsellor comes when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk. It will be only one generation between the bereavement counsellor arrival and the community of mourners disappearance.
The counsellor’s new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighbourly obligations and community ways of coming together and going on. Like John Deere’s plow, the tools of bereavement counselling will create a desert where a community once flourished. And finally, even the bereavement counsellor will see the impossibility of restoring hope in clients once they are genuinely alone with nothing but a service for consolation. In the inevitable failure of the service, the bereavement counsellor will find the deserts even in herself.
Q. Which one of the following best describes the approach of the author?
Comparing experiences with two innovations tried, in order to illustrate the failure of both
Presenting community perspectives on two technologies which have had negative effects on people.
Using the negative outcomes of one innovation to illustrate the likely outcomes of another innovation
Contrasting two contexts separated in time, to illustrate how ‘deserts’ have arisen.
Ans . D
Q. According to the passage, bereavement handling traditionally involves
the community bereavement counsellors working with the bereaved to help him/her overcome grief.
the neighbours and kin joining the bereaved and meeting grief together in mourning and prayer.
using techniques developed systematically in formal institutions of learning, a trained counsellor helping the bereaved cope with grief.
the Sauk Indian Chief leading the community with rituals and rites to help lessen the grief of the bereaved.
Ans . B
Q. According to the author, due to which of the following reasons, will the bereavement counsellor find the deserts even in herself?
Over a period of time, working with Sauk Indians who have lost their kinship and relationships, she becomes one of them
She is working in an environment where the disappearance of community mourners makes her work place a social desert.
Her efforts at grief processing with the bereaved will fail as no amount of professional service can make up for the loss due to the disappearance of community mourners.
She has been working with people who have settled for a long time in the Great Desert.
Ans . C
Q. According to the author, the bereavement counsellor is
a friend of the bereaved helping him or her handle grief.
an advocate of the right to treatment for the community.
a kin of the bereaved helping him/her handle grief.
a formally trained person helping the bereaved handle grief.
Ans . D
Q. The prairie was a great puzzlement for the European pioneers because
it was covered with thick, untillable layers of grass over a vast stretch
it was a large desert immediately next to lush forests
it was rich cultivable land left fallow for centuries
it could be easily tilled with iron plows
Ans . A
Q. Which of the following does the ‘desert’ in the passage refer to?
Prairie soil depleted by cultivation of wheat.
Reservations in which native Indians were resettled
Absence of, and emptiness in, community kinship and relationships.
All of the above
Ans . D
Q. According to the author, people will begin to utilize the service of the bereavement counsellor because
new Country regulations will make them feel it is a right, and if they don’t use it, it would be a loss.
the bereaved in the community would find her a helpful friend.
she will fight for subsistence allowance from the Country Board for the poor among the bereaved
grief processing needs tools certified by universities and medical centres.
Ans . A
Q. Which of the following parallels between the plow and bereavement counselling is not claimed by the author?
Both are innovative technologies
Both result in migration of the communities into which the innovations are introduced.
Both lead to ‘deserts’ in the space of only one generation
Both are tools introduced by outsiders entering existing communities.
Ans . B
The teaching and transmission of North Indian classical music is, and long has been, achieved by largely oral means. The raga and its structure, the often breathtaking intricacies of tala or rhythm, and the incarnation of raga and tala as bandish or composition, are passed thus, between guru and shishya by word of mouth and direct demonstration, with no printed sheet of notated music, as it were, acting as a go-between.
Saussure’s conception of language as a communication between addresser and addressee is given, in this model, a further instance, and a new, exotic complexity and glamour. These days, especially with the middle-class having entered the domain of classical music and playing not a small part in ensuring the continuation of this ancient tradition, the tape recorder serves as a handy technological slave and preserves, from oblivion, the vanishing, elusive moment of oral transmission.
Hoary gurus, too, have seen the advantage of this device, and increasingly use it as an aid to instruct their pupils; in place of the shawls and other traditional objects that used to pass from shishya to guru in the past, as a token of the regard of the former for the latter, it is not unusual, today, to see cassettes changing hands. Part of my education in North Indian classical music was conducted via this rather ugly but beneficial rectangle of plastic,
which I carried with me to England when I was an undergraduate. One cassette had stored in it various talas played upon the tabla, at various tempos, by my music teacher’s brother-in-law, Hazarilalji, who was a teacher of Kathak dance, as well as a singer and a tabla player. This was a work of great patience and prescience, a one and half hours performance without any immediate point or purpose, but intended for some delayed future moment when I’d practise the talas solitarily. This repeated playing out of the rhythmic cycles on the tabla was inflected by the noises — an irate auto driver blowing a horn; the sound of overbearing pigeons that were such a nuisance on the banister;
even the cry of a kulfi seller in summer — entering from the balcony of the third floor flat we occupied in those days, in a lane in a Mumbai suburb, before we left the city for good. These sounds, in turn, would invade, hesitantly, the ebb and flow of silence inside the artificially heated room, in a borough of West London, in which I used to live as an undergraduate. There, in the trapped dust, silence and heat, the theka of the tabla, qualified by the imminent but intermittent presence of the Mumbai suburb, would come to life again. A few years later, the tabla and, in the background, the pigeons and the itinerant kulfi seller, would inhabit a small graduate room in Oxford.
The tape recorder, though, remains an extension of the oral transmission of music, rather than a replacement of it. And the oral transmission of North Indian classical music remains, almost uniquely, a testament to the fact that the human brain can absorb, remember and reproduce structures of great complexity and sophistication without the help of the hieroglyph or written mark or a system of notation. I remember my surprise on discovering that Hazarilalji — who had mastered Kathak dance, tala and North Indian classical music, and who used to narrate to me,
occasionally, compositions meant for dance that were grand and intricate in their verbal prosody, architecture and rhythmic complexity — was near illiterate and had barely learnt to write his name in large and clumsy letters. Of course, attempts have been made, throughout the 20th century, to formally codify and even notate this music, and institutions set up and degrees created, specifically to educate students in this ‘scientific’ and codified manner. Paradoxically, however, this style of teaching has produced no noteworthy student or performer;
the most creative musicians still emerge from the guru-shishya relationship, their understanding of music developed by oral communication. The fact that North Indian classical music emanates from, and has evolved through, oral culture, means that this music has a significantly different aesthetic, and that this aesthetic has a different politics, from that of Western classical music.
A piece of music in the Western tradition, at least in its most characteristic and popular conception, originates in its composer, and the connection between the two, between composer and the piece of music, is relatively unambiguous precisely because the composer writes down, in notation, his composition, as a poet might write down and publish his poem. However far the printed sheet of notated music might travel thus from the composer, it still remains his property; and the notion of property remains at the heart of the Western conception of ‘genius’, which derives from the Latin gignere or ‘to beget’.
The genius in Western classical music is, then, the originator, begetter and owner of his work — the printed, notated sheet testifying to his authority over his product and his power, not only for expression or imagination, but of origination. The conductor is a custodian and guardian of this property. Is it an accident that Mandelstam, in his notebooks, compares — the conductor’s baton to a policeman’s, saying all the music of the orchestra lies mute within it, waiting for its first movement to release it into the auditorium?
The raga — transmitted through oral means — is, in a sense, no one’s property; it is not easy to pin down its source, or to know exactly where its provenance or origin lies. Unlike the Western classical tradition, where the composer begets his piece, notates it and stamps it with his ownership and remains, in effect, larger than, or the father of, his work, in the North Indian classical tradition, the raga — unconfined to a single incarnation, composer or performer — remains necessarily greater than the artiste who invokes it.
This leads to a very different politics of interpretation and valuation, to an aesthetic that privileges the evanescent moment of performance and invocation over the controlling authority of genius and the permanent record. It is a tradition, thus, that would appear to value the performer, as medium, more highly than the composer who presumes to originate what, effectively, cannot be originated in a single person — because the raga is the inheritance of a culture.
Q. The author’s contention that the notion of property lies at the heart of the Western conception of genius is best indicated by which one of the following?
The creative output of a genius is invariably written down and recorded
The link between the creator and his output is unambiguous.
The word ‘genius’ is derived from a Latin word which means ‘to beget
The music composer notates his music and thus becomes the ‘father’ of a particular piece of music.
Ans . C
Q. Saussure’s conception of language as a communication between addresser and addressee, according to the author, is exemplified by the
teaching of North Indian classical music by word of mouth and direct demonstration.
use of the recorded cassette as a transmission medium between the music teacher and the trainee.
written down notation sheets of musical compositions.
conductor’s baton and the orchestra
Ans . A
Q. The author holds that the ‘rather ugly but beneficial rectangle of plastic’ has proved to be a ‘handy technological slave’ in
storing the talas played upon the tabla, at various tempos.
ensuring the continuance of an ancient tradition
transporting North Indian classical music across geographical borders
capturing the transient moment of oral transmission.
Ans . D
Q. The oral transmission of North Indian classified music is an almost unique testament of the
efficacy of the guru-shishya tradition.
learning impact of direct demonstration.
brain’s ability to reproduce complex structures without the help of written marks.
the ability of an illiterate person to narrate grand and intricate musical compositions.
Ans . C
Q. According to the passage, in the North Indian classical tradition, the raga remains greater than the artiste who invokes it. This implies an aesthetic which
emphasises performance and invocation over the authority of genius and permanent record
makes the music no one’s property.
values the composer more highly than the performer.
supports oral transmission of traditional music
Ans . A
Q. From the author’s explanation of the notion that in the Western tradition, music originates in its composer, which one of the following cannot be inferred?
It is easy to transfer a piece of Western classical music to a distant place.
The conductor in the Western tradition, as a custodian, can modify the music, since it ‘lies mute’ in his baton
The authority of the Western classical music composer over his music product is unambiguous.
The power of the Western classical music composer extends to the expression of his music.
Ans . B
Q. According to the author, the inadequacy of teaching North Indian classical music through a codified, notation-based system is best illustrated by
a loss of the structural beauty of the ragas.
a fusion of two opposing approaches creating mundane music.
the conversion of free-flowing ragas into stilted set pieces.
its failure to produce any noteworthy student or performer.
Ans . D
Q. Which of the following statements best conveys the overall idea of the passage?
North Indian and Western classical music are structurally different.
Western music is the intellectual property of the genius while the North Indian raga is the inheritance of the culture.
Creation as well as performance are important in the North Indian classical tradition.
North Indian classical music is orally transmitted while Western classical music depends on written down notations
Ans . B
The painter is now free to paint anything he chooses. They are scarcely any forbidden subjects, and today everybody is prepared to admit that a painting of some fruit can be as important as a painting of a hero dying. The Impressionists did as much as anybody to win this previously unheard-of freedom for the artist.
Yet, by the next generation, painters began to abandon the subject altogether, and began to paint abstract pictures. Today the majority of pictures painted are abstract. Is there a connection between these two developments? Has art gone abstract because the artist is embarrassed by his freedom? Is it that, because he is free to paint anything, he doesn’t know what to paint? Apologists for abstract art often talk of it as the art of maximum freedom. But could this be the freedom of the desert island? It would take to long to answer these questions properly. I believe there is a connection.
Many things have encouraged the development of abstract art. Among them has been the artists’ wish to avoid the difficulties of finding subjects when all subjects are equally possible. I raise the matter now because I want to draw attention to the fact that the painter’s choice of a subject is a far more complicated question than it would at first seem. A subject does not start with what is put in front of the easel or with something which the painter happens to remember. A subject starts with the painter deciding he would like to paint such-and-such because for some reason or other he finds it meaningful.
A subject begins when the artist selects something for special mention. (What makes it special or meaningful may seem to the artist to be purely visual – its colours or its form.) When the subject has been selected, the function of the painting itself is to communicate and justify the significance of that selection. It is often said today that subject matter is unimportant. But this is only a reaction against the excessively literary and moralistic interpretation of subject matter in the nineteenth century. In truth the subject is literary the beginning and end of a painting. The painting begins with a selection (I will paint this and not everything else in the world);
it is finished when that selection is justified (now you can see all that I saw and felt in this and how it is more than merely itself). Thus, for a painting to succeed it is essential that the painter and his public agree about what is significant. The subject may have a personal meaning for the painter or individual spectator; but there must also be the possibility of their agreement on its general meaning. It is at this point that the culture of the society and period in question precedes the artist and his art. Renaissance art would have meant nothing to the Aztecs –and vice versa.
If, to some extent, a few intellectuals can appreciate them both today it is because their culture is an historical one; its inspiration is history and therefore it can include within itself, in principle if not in every particular, all known developments to date. When a culture is secure and certain of its values, it presents it presents its artists with subjects. The general agreement about what is significant is so well established that the significance of a particular subject accrues and becomes traditional. This is true, for instance, of reeds and water in China, of the nude body in Renaissance, of the animal in Africa. Furthermore, in such cultures the artist is unlikely to be a free agent: he will be employed for the sake of particulars subjects, and the problem, as we have just described it, will not occur to him.
When a culture is in a state of disintegration or transition the freedom of the artist increases – but the question of subject matter becomes problematic for him: he, himself, has to choose for society. This was at the basis of all the increasing, crises in European art during the nineteenth century. It is too often forgotten how many of the art scandals of that time were provoked by the choice of subject (Gericault, Courbet, Daumier, Degas, Lautrec, Van Gogh, etc.).
By the end of the nineteenth century there were, roughly speaking, two ways in which the painter could meet this challenge of deciding what to paint and so choosing for society. Either he identified himself with the people and so allowed their lives to dictate his subjects to him; or he had to find his subjects within himself as painter. By people I mean everybody except the bourgeoisie. Many painters did of course work of the bourgeoisie according to their copy-book of approved subjects, but all of them, filling the Salon and the Royal Academy year after year, are now forgotten, buried under the hypocrisy of those they served so sincerely.
Q. When a culture is insecure, the painter chooses his subject on the basis of:
The prevalent style in the society of his time.
Its meaningfulness to the painter.
What is put in front of the easel.
Past experience and memory of the painter
Ans . B
Q. In the sentence, “I believe there is a connection” (second paragraph), what two developments is the author referring to?
Painters using a dying hero and using a fruit as a subject of painting
Growing success of painters and an increase in abstract forms
Artists gaining freedom to choose subjects and abandoning subjects altogether
Rise of Impressionists and an increase in abstract forms.
Ans . C
Q. Which of the following is NOT necessarily among the attributes needed for a painter to succeed:
The painter and his public agree on what is significant
The painting is able to communicate and justify the significance of its subject selection
The subject has a personal meaning for the painter.
The painting of subjects is inspired by historical developments.
Ans . C
Q. In the context of the passage, which of the following statements would NOT be true?
Painters decided subjects based on what they remembered from their own lives
Painters of reeds and water in China faced no serious problem of choosing a subject.
The choice of subject was a source of scandals in nineteenth century European art.
Agreement on the general meaning of a painting is influenced by culture and historical context.
Ans . A
Q. Which of the following views is taken by the author
The more insecure a culture, the greater the freedom of the artist.
The more secure a culture, the greater the freedom of the artist
The more secure a culture, more difficult the choice of subject.
The more insecure a culture, the less significant the choice of the subject.
Ans . A
Recently I spent several hours sitting under a tree in my garden with the social anthropologist William Ury, a Harvard University professor who specializes in the art of negotiation and wrote the bestselling book, Getting to Yes. He captivated me with his theory that tribalism protects people from their fear of rapid change. He explained that the pillars of tribalism that humans rely on for security would always counter any significant cultural or social change.
In this way, he said, change is never allowed to happen too fast. Technology, for example, is a pillar of society. Ury believes that every time technology moves in a new or radical direction, another pillar such as religion or nationalism will grow stronger - in effect, the traditional and familiar will assume greater importance to compensate for the new and untested. In this manner, human tribes avoid rapid change that leaves people insecure and frightened. But we have all heard that nothing is as permanent as change. Nothing is guaranteed. Pithy expressions, to be sure, but no more than cliches. As Ury says, people don’t live that way from day-to-day.
On the contrary, they actively seek certainty and stability. They want to know they will be safe. Even so, we scare ourselves constantly with the idea of change. An IBM CEO once said: ‘We only restructure for a good reason, and if we haven’t re-structured in a while, that’s a good reason.’ We are scared that competitors, technology and the consumer will put us out of business so we have to change all the time just to stay alive.
But if we asked our fathers and grandfathers, would they have said that they lived in a period of little change? Structure may not have changed much. It may just be the speed with which we do things. Change is over-rated, anyway. Consider the automobile. It’s an especially valuable example, because the auto industry has spent tens of billions or dollars on research and product development in the last 100 years. Henry Ford’s first car had a metal chassis with an internal combustion, gasoline-powered engine, four wheels with rubber tyres, a foot operated clutch assembly and brake system, a steering wheel, and four seats, and it could safely do 18 miles per hour.
A hundred years and tens of thousands of research hours later, we drive cars with a metal chassis with an internal combustion, gasoline-powered engine, four wheels with rubber tyres, a foot operated clutch assembly and brake system, a steering wheel, four seats - and the average speed in London in 2001 was 17.5 miles per hour! That’s not a hell of a lot of return for the money. Ford evidently doesn’t have much to teach us about change. The fact that they’re still manufacturing cars is not proof that Ford Motor Co. is a sound organization, just proof that it takes very large companies to make cars in great quantities - making for an almost impregnable entry barrier. Fifty years after the development of the jet engine, planes are also little changed. They’ve grown bigger, wider and can carry more people. But those are incremental, largely cosmetic changes. Taken together, this lack of real change has come to mean that in travel - whether driving or flying — time and technology have not combined to make things much better.
The safety and design have of course accompanied the times and the new volume of cars and flights, but nothing of any significance has changed in the basic assumptions of the final product. At the same time, moving around in cars or aeroplanes becomes less and less efficient all the time. Not only has there been no great change, but also both forms or transport have deteriorated as more people clamour to use them. The same is true for telephones, which took over hundred years to become mobile, or photographic film, which also required an entire century to change. The only explanation for this is anthropological.
Once established in calcified organizations, humans do two things: sabotage changes that might render people dispensable, and ensure industry-wide emulation. In the 1960s, German auto companies developed plans to scrap the entire combustion engine for an electrical design. (The same existed in the 1970s in Japan, and in the I980s in France.). So for 40 years we might have been free of the wasteful and ludicrous dependence on fossil fuels. Why didn’t it go anywhere? Because auto executives understood pistons and carburettors, and would loath to cannibalize their expertise, along with most of their factories.
Q. According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?
Executives of automobile companies are inefficient and ludicrous
The speed at which an automobile is driven in a city has not changed much in a century
Anthropological factors have fostered innovation in automobiles by promoting use of new technologies.
Further innovation in jet engines has been more than incremental.
Ans . B
Q. Which of the following views does the author fully support in the passage?
Nothing is as permanent as change
Change is always rapid.
More money spent on innovation leads to more rapid change
Over decades, structural change has been incremental.
Ans . D
Q. Which of the following best describes one of the main ideas discussed in the passage?
Rapid change is usually welcomed in society.
Industry is not as innovative as it is made out to be.
We should have less change than what we have now
Competition spurs companies into radical innovation
Ans . B
Q. According to the passage, the reason why we continues to be dependent on fossil fuels is that:
Auto executives did not wish to change.
No alternative fuels were discovered
Change in technology was not easily possible
German, Japanese and French companies could not come up with new technologies.
Ans . A
The viability of the multinational corporate system depends upon the degree to which people will tolerate the unevenness it creates. It is well to remember that the ‘New Imperialism’ which began after 1870 in a spirit of Capitalism Triumphant, soon became seriously troubled and after 1914 was characterized by war, depression, breakdown of the international economic system and war again, rather than free Trade, Pax Britannica and Material Improvement. A major reason was Britain’s inability to cope with the by-products of its own rapid accumulation of capital;
i.e., a class-conscious labour force at home; a middle class in the hinterland; and rival centres of capital on the Continent and in America. Britain’s policy tended to be atavistic and defensive rather than progressive-more concerned with warding off new threats than creating new areas of expansion. Ironically, Edwardian England revived the paraphernalia of the landed aristocracy it had just destroyed. Instead of embarking on a ‘big push’ to develop the vast hinterland of the Empire, colonial administrators often adopted policies to arrest the development of either a native capitalist class or a native proletariat which could overthrow them. As time went on, the centre had to devote an increasing share of government activity to military and other unproductive expenditures;
they had to rely on alliances with an inefficient class of landlords, officials and soldiers in the hinterland to maintain stability at the cost of development. A great part of the surplus extracted from the population was thus wasted locally. The New Mercantilism (as the Multinational Corporate System of special alliances and privileges, aid and tariff concessions is sometimes called) faces similar problems of internal and external division. The centre is troubled: excluded groups revolt and even some of the affluent are dissatisfied with the roles. Nationalistic rivalry between major capitalist countries remains an important divisive factor, Finally, there is the threat presented by the middle classes and the excluded groups of the underdeveloped countries.
The national middle classes in the underdeveloped countries came to power when the centre weakened but could not, through their policy of import substitution manufacturing, establish a viable basis for sustained growth. They now face a foreign exchange crisis and an unemployment (or population) crisis-the first indicating their inability to function in the international economy and the second indicating their alienation from the people they are supposed to lead.
In the immediate future, these national middle classes will gain a new lease of life as they take advantage of the spaces created by the rivalry between American and nonAmerican oligopolists striving to establish global market positions. The native capitalists will again become the champions of national independence as they bargain with multinational corporations. But the conflict at this level is more apparent than real, for in the end the fervent nationalism of the middle class asks only for promotion within the corporate structure and not for a break with that structure.
In the last analysis their power derives from the metropolis and they cannot easily afford to challenge the international system. They do not command the loyalty of their own population and cannot really compete with the large, powerful, aggregate capitals from the centre. They are prisoners of the taste patterns and consumption standards set at the centre. The main threat comes from the excluded groups. It is not unusual in underdeveloped countries for the top 5 per cent to obtain between 30 and 40 per cent of the total national income, and for the top one-third to obtain anywhere from 60 to 70 per cent. At most, one-third of the population can be said to benefit in some sense from the dualistic growth that characterizes development in the hinterland.
The remaining two-thirds, who together get only one-third of the income, are outsiders, not because they do not contribute to the economy, but because they do not share in the benefits. They provide a source of cheap labour which helps keep exports to the developed world at a low price and which has financed the urban-biased growth of recent years. In fact, it is difficult to see how the system in most underdeveloped countries could survive without cheap labour since removing it (e.g. diverting it to public works projects as is done in socialist countries) would raise consumption costs to capitalists and professional elites.
Q. According to the author, the British policy during the ‘New Imperialism’ period tended to be defensive because
it was unable to deal with the fallouts of a sharp increase in capital.
its cumulative capital had undesirable side-effects.
its policies favoured developing the vast hinterland.
it prevented the growth of a set-up which could have been capitalistic in nature.
Ans . A
Q. Under New Mercantilism, the fervent nationalism of the native middle classes does not create conflict with the multinational corporations because they (the middle classes)
negotiate with the multinational corporations.
are dependent on the international system for their continued prosperity.
are not in a position to challenge the status quo.
do not enjoy popular support.
Ans . C
Q. In the sentence, “They are prisoners of the taste patterns and consumption standards set at the center.” (fourth paragraph), what is the meaning of ‘center’?
National government
Native capitalists.
New capitalists.
None of the above.
Ans . D
Q. The author is in a position to draw parallels between New Imperialism and New Mercantilism because
both originated in the developed Western capitalist countries
New Mercantilism was a logical sequel to New Imperialism
they create the same set of outputs – a labour force, middle classes and rival centers of capital.
both have comparable uneven and divisive effects.
Ans . D
Fifty feet away three male lions lay by the road. They didn’t appear to have a hair on their heads. Noting the color of their noses (leonine noses darken as they age, from pink to black), Craig estimated that they were six years old-young adults. “This is wonderful!” he said, after staring at them for several moments. “This is what we came to see.
They really are maneless.” Craig, a professor at the University of Minnesota, is arguably the leading expert on the majestic Serengeti lion, whose head is mantled in long, thick hair. He and Peyton West, a doctoral student who has been working with him in Tanzania, had never seen the Tsavo lions that live some 200 miles east of the Serengeti. The scientists had partly suspected that the maneless males were adolescents mistaken for adults by amateur observers. Now they knew better. The Tsavo research expedition was mostly Peyton’s show. She had spent several years in Tanzania, compiling the data she needed to answer a question that ought to have been answered long ago: Why do lions have manes?
It’s the only cat, wild or domestic, that displays such ornamentation. In Tsavo she was attacking the riddle from the opposite angle. Why do its lions not have manes? (Some “maneless” lions in Tsavo East do have partial manes, but they rarely attain the regal glory of the Serengeti lions’.) Does environmental adaptation account for the trait? Are the lions of Tsavo, as some people believe, a distinct subspecies of their Serengeti cousins? The Serengeti lions have been under continuous observation for more than 35 years, beginning with George Schaller’s pioneering work in the I960s. But the lions in Tsavo, Kenya’s oldest and largest protected ecosystem, have hardly been studied.
Consequently, legends have grown up around them. Not only do they look different, according to the myths, they behave differently, displaying greater cunning and aggressiveness. “Remember too,” Kenya: The Rough Guide warns, “Tsavo’s lions have a reputation of ferocity.” Their fearsome image became well-known in 1898, when two males stalled construction of what is now Kenya Railways by allegedly killing and eating 135 Indian and African laborers. A British Army officer in charge of building a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River, Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, spent nine months pursuing the pair before he brought them to bay and killed them. Stuffed and mounted, they now glare at visitors to the Field Museum in Chicago.
Patterson’s account of the leonine reign of terror, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, was an international best-seller when published in 1907. Still in print, the book has made Tsavo’s lions notorious. That annoys some scientists. “People don’t want to give up on mythology,” Dennis King told me one day. The zoologist has been working in Tsavo off and on for four years. “I am so sick of this man-eater business. Patterson made a helluva lot of money off that story, but Tsavo’s lions are no more likely to turn man-eater than lions from elsewhere.” But tales of their savagery and wiliness don’t all come from sensationalist authors looking to make a buck.
Tsavo lions are generally larger than lions elsewhere, enabling them to take down the predominant prey animal in Tsavo, the Cape buffalo, one of the strongest, most aggressive animals of Earth. The buffalo don’t give up easily: They often kill or severely injure an attacking lion, and a wounded lion might be more likely to turn to cattle and humans for food. And other prey is less abundant in Tsavo than in other traditional lion haunts. A hungry lion is more likely to attack humans. Safari guides and Kenya Wildlife Service rangers tell of lions attacking Land Rovers, raiding camps, stalking tourists. Tsavo is a tough neighborhood, they say, and it breeds tougher lions.
But are they really tougher? And if so, is there any connection between their manelessness and their ferocity? An intriguing hypothesis was advanced two years ago by Gnoske and Peterhans: Tsavo lions may be similar to the unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene. The Serengeti variety is among the most evolved of the species-the latest model, so to speak-while certain morphological differences in Tsavo lions (bigger bodies, smaller skulls, and maybe even lack of a mane) suggest that they are closer to the primitive ancestor of all lions. Craig and Peyton had serious doubts about this idea, but admitted that Tsavo lions pose a mystery to science.
Q. The book Man-Eaters of Tsavo annoys some scientists because
it revealed that Tsavo lions are ferocious
Patterson made a helluva lot of money from the book by sensationalism.
it perpetuated the bad name Tsavo lions had.
it narrated how two male Tsavo lions were killed.
Ans . C
Q. The sentence which concludes the first paragraph, “Now they knew better”, implies that:
The two scientists were struck by wonder on seeing maneless lions for the first time.
Though Craig was an expert on the Serengeti lion, now he also knew about the Tsavo lions.
Earlier, Craig and West thought that amateur observers had been mistaken.
Craig was now able to confirm that darkening of the noses as lions aged applied to Tsavo lions as well.
Ans . C
Q. According to the passage, which of the following has NOT contributed to the popular image of Tsavo lions as savage creatures?
Tsavo lions have been observed to bring down one of the strongest and most aggressive animals — the Cape buffalo.
in contrast to the situation in traditional lion haunts, scarcity of non-buffalo prey in the Tsavo makes the Tsavo lions more aggressive.
The Tsavo lion is considered to be less evolved than the Serengeti variety.
Tsavo lions have been observed to attack vehicles as well as humans.
Ans . C
Q. Which of the following, if true, would weaken the hypothesis advanced by Gnoske and Peterhans most?
Craig and Peyton develop even more serious doubts about the idea that Tsavo lions are primitive.
The maneless Tsavo East lions are shown to be closer to the cave lions.
Pleistocene cave lions are shown to be far less violent than believed.
The morphological variations in body and skull size between the cave and Tsavo lions are found to be insignificant.
Ans . C
Throughout human history the leading causes of death have been infection and trauma. Modem medicine has scored significant victories against both, and the major causes of ill health and death are now the chronic degenerative diseases, such as coronary artery disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, macular degeneration, cataract and cancer. These have a long latency period before symptoms appear and a diagnosis is made. It follows that the majority of apparently healthy people are pre-ill. But are these conditions inevitably degenerative? A truly preventive medicine that focused on the pre-ill, analysing the metabolic errors which lead to clinical illness, might be able to correct them before the first symptom. Genetic risk factors are known for all the chronic degenerative diseases, and are important to the individuals who possess them.
At the population level, however, migration studies confirm that these illnesses are linked for the most part to lifestyle factors—exercise, smoking and nutrition. Nutrition is the easiest of these to change, and the most versatile tool for affecting the metabolic changes needed to tilt the balance away from disease. Many national surveys reveal that malnutrition is common in developed countries. This is not the calorie and/or micronutrient deficiency associated with developing nations (Type A malnutrition); but multiple micronutrient depletion, usually combined with calorific balance or excess (Type B malnutrition).
The incidence and severity of Type B malnutrition will be shown to be worse if newer micronutrient groups such as the essential fatty acids, xanthophylls and flavonoids are included in the surveys. Commonly ingested levels of these micronutrients seem to be far too low in many developed countries. There is now considerable evidence that Type B malnutrition is a major cause of chronic degenerative diseases. If this is the case, then it is logical to treat such diseases not with drugs but with multiple micronutrient repletion, or ‘pharmaco-nutrition’. This can take the form of pills and capsules-’nutraceuticals’, or food formats known as ‘functional foods’.
This approach has been neglected hitherto because it is relatively unprofitable for drug companies-the products are hard to patent-and it is a strategy which does not sit easily with modem medical interventionism. Over the last 100 years, the drug industry has invested huge sums in developing a range of subtle and powerful drugs to treat the many diseases we are subject to. Medical training is couched in pharmaceutical terms and this approach has provided us with an exceptional range of therapeutic tools in the treatment of disease and in acute medical emergencies.
However, the pharmaceutical model has also created an unhealthy dependency culture, in which relatively few of us accept responsibility for maintaining our own health. Instead, we have handed over this responsibility to health professionals who know very little about health maintenance, or disease prevention. One problem for supporters of this argument is lack of the right kind of hard evidence. We have a wealth of epidemiological data linking dietary factors to health profiles / disease risks, and a great deal of information on mechanism:
how food factors interact with our biochemistry. But almost all intervention studies with micronutrients, with the notable exception of the omega 3 fatty acids, have so far produced conflicting or negative results. In other words, our science appears to have no predictive value. Does this invalidate the science? Or are we simply asking the wrong questions? Based on pharmaceutical thinking, most intervention studies have attempted to measure the impact of a single micronutrient on the incidence of disease. The classical approach says that if you give a compound formula to test subjects and obtain positive results, you cannot know which ingredient is exerting the benefit, so you must test each ingredient individually. But in the field of nutrition, this does not work.
Each intervention on its own will hardly make enough difference to be measured. The best therapeutic response must therefore combine micronutrients to normalise our internal physiology. So do we need to analyse each individual’s nutritional status and then tailor a formula specifically for him or her? While we do not have the resources to analyse millions of individual cases, there is no need to do so. The vast majority of people are consuming suboptimal amounts of most micronutrients, and most of the micronutrients concerned are very safe. Accordingly, a comprehensive and universal program of micronutrient support is probably the most cost-effective and safest way of improving
Q. The author recommends micronutrient-repletion for large-scale treatment of chronic degenerative diseases because
it is relatively easy to manage.
micronutrient deficiency is the cause of these diseases.
it can overcome genetic risk factors.
it can compensate for other lifestyle factors.
Ans . B
Q. Tailoring micronutrient-based treatment plans to suit individual deficiency profiles is not necessary because
it very likely to give inconsistent or negative results.
it is a classic pharmaceutical approach not suited to micronutrients
most people are consuming suboptimal amounts of safe-to-consume micronutrients
it is not cost effective to do so.
Ans . C
Q. Type-B malnutrition is a serious concern in developed countries because
developing countries mainly suffer from Type-A malnutrition.
it is a major contributor to illness and death.
pharmaceutical companies are not producing drugs to treat this condition.
national surveys on malnutrition do not include newer micronutrient groups.
Ans . B
Q. Why are a large number of apparently healthy people deemed pre-ill?
They may have chronic degenerative diseases.
They do not know their own genetic risk factors which predispose them to diseases.
They suffer from Type-B malnutrition
There is a lengthy latency period associated with chronically degenerative diseases
Ans . B