Updated
on 29/03/2021
1.The
Last Lesson (Alphonse Daudet)
Main points of the chapter
Ø In this
story M. Hamel is a dedicated and patriotic French teacher, who has been
teaching French language for 40 years.
Ø Today he was
going to deliver his last lesson.
Ø A student
named Franz was late for school that day.
Ø Franz was
afraid because he had not learnt his lesson on participles.
Ø He saw big
crowd in front of bulletin board when he was coming to school.
Ø All bad news
come by this bulletin board for the past two years.
Ø When Franz
came M. Hamel was in class room with rod in his hand.
Ø He did not
rebuke Franz. He said him to take his seat.
Ø People of
villages were also sitting at back benches on that day to attend his last
lesson.
Ø Mr. M. Hamel
spoke in gentle tone & announced this is their last lesson in French
language.
Ø He said that
an order had come from Berlin, only German would be taught in schools of Alsace
and Lorraine.
Ø Because
France had defeated against Prussia.
Ø The new
teacher would come the next day.
Ø He urged
students & countrymen to protect their language.
Ø In Last he
tried to speak, but something choked him.
Ø He took a
piece of chalk and wrote on blackboard “Vive La France” (Long Live France).
2. Lost Spring- Stories of Stolen Childhood (Anees Jung)
Main Points of the Chapter
Ø This story
has been divided into two parts. First about a ragpicker named Saheb and second
part is about a bangle maker ‘Mukesh’.
Ø Saheb is a
ragpicker. His full name is Saheb-e-Alam which means ‘Lord of the Universe’.
Ø Anees Jung
sees him daily scrounging the garbage dumps.
Ø He came from
Dhaka (Bangladesh) because storms destroyed their homes and fields.
Ø Like many
other families of ragpickers, Saheb’s family also lives in Seemapuri ( Delhi)
Ø About 10,000
ragpickers live there in miserable conditions.
Ø They have
been living there for more than thirty years.
Ø There houses
are made of mud.
Ø One morning,
the writer sees Saheb who was watching two young men playing tennis.
Ø He tells her
that he likes the game. He is also wearing tennis shoes which were given by a
rich boy because there is a hole in the shoes.
Ø Now Saheb
works in a tea stall. He gets 800 rupees but no longer his own master.
Ø The writer
describes the life of another poor boy named Mukesh.
Ø He lives in
a dusty street of Firozabad which is famous for its bangles.
Ø His family
works in a bangle factory. But Mukesh has dreams to be a motor Mechanic.
Ø More than
20,000 children work in the bangle factories. They work in dark cells without
air and light.
Ø Mukesh’s grandfather
had gone blind with the dust from polishing the glass of bangles.
Ø The author’s
asks him if he dreams of flying an aero plane. He says ‘no’ and he is content to dreams of cars.
3. Deep Water
Main Points of the chapter:
Ø When the
writer was three or four years old, his father took him to the beach in
California.
Ø When he saw
the strong waves of water, his heart filled with horror.
Ø When he was
ten or eleven years old, he decided to learn to swim.
Ø There was a
pool at the YMCA in Yakima; it was good place to learn swimming.
Ø The pool was
only two or three feet at the shallow end, while it was nine feet deep at the
other end.
Ø One day he
went to a swimming pool. A boy of eighteen came here, he threw him into the
deep side of the pool.
Ø He was
nearly drowned in the swimming pool and he thought that he was going to die.
Ø Luckily, he
was saved from drowning and brought out of the pool.
Ø He never
back to the pool. The fear of water remained with him.
Ø It spoiled
all his joy of fishing, boating and swimming.
Ø Finally, he
decided to get an instructor and learn to swim.
Ø The
instructor made him a good swimmer. Now he could swim miles across big rivers
and lakes.
Ø The writer
says, there is terror only in the fear of death, in death, there is peace.
4. The Rattrap (Selma Lagerlof)
Main
Points of the chapter:
Ø This
is a story of a poor man who sells small rattraps (cage to catch rats) of wire.
Ø He
wandered from place to place to sell these rattraps.
Ø But he
could not earn enough so he had to beg and petty thefts.
Ø One
night he saw a little grey cottage by the roadside.
Ø He
stayed with a crofter who served him well.
Ø The
crofter told him that he had earned thirty kronor in payment of his cow’s milk.
Ø The
next morning, when both had gone for their work, the peddler came back & stole
the old man’s thirty kronor.
Ø Now he
took a way through a forest instead of main road, in order to escape being
caught.
Ø But it
was confusing forest so he found himself near the place from where he had
started.
Ø He
thought that the whole world is also like a rattrap (Chuhedani).
Ø Like
rat we people are tempted by the baits as riches, joys, shelters, food and
clothes.
Ø It was
dark & cold night of December; he heard the sound of hammer and reached the
Ramsjo Ironworks.
Ø The Ramsjo
mistook the peddler as his old acquaintance, Nils Olof.
Ø The
ironmaster invited him to his house for the Christmas Eve.
Ø But
next day when he looked at the stranger in the broad daylight, he at once
realised his mistake, that man was not his old friend.
Ø So he
asked him at once to leave his house.
Ø But
the ironmaster’s daughter named Edla pleaded on the stranger.
Ø She served
him for the Christmas Eve as best as she could.
Ø Next
morning both ironmaster and his daughter went to the church when he was
sleeping.
Ø There
they heard that a man who sells rattrap, had robbed the old crofter.
Ø Her
father was afraid that the rattrap seller might have stolen all their silver
spoons.
Ø But he
had not taken anything, rather he had left a letter & the rattrap as
Christmas present for Edla.
Ø In the
package there were three ten-kronor notes. He requested her to return money to
the old crofter.
Ø Now he
is reformed by the compassionate behavior of a young girl Edla.
5. Indigo (Louis Fischer)
Main
Points of the chapter:
Ø This
chapter is a description of Gandhiji’s struggle for the poor peasants of
Champaran.
Ø In
1916, when Mahatma Gandhi went to Lucknow to attend the annual convention of
the Indian National Congress.
Ø There
a poor peasant named Rajkumar Shukla came to Gandhiji to take help from him for
the poor peasants of Champaran.
Ø They
went to Patna (Bihar) from Calcutta by a train. Where Gandhiji stayed at the
house of Rajendra Prasad (later became President of India).
Ø Gandhiji
got information about the peasants that they had to grow Indigo on 15 percent
of the land and surrender it as rent (lagan) to the landlords.
Ø By the
time 1917, Germany had developed synthetic indigo so The British planters now
no longer needed the indigo crop.
Ø So
they obtained agreements from the sharecroppers to pay them compensation for
not planting Indigo.
Ø Some
of the illiterate peasants agreed to it, but other refused.
Ø Gandhiji
fought for the poor peasants a long battle for one year.
Ø He met
many prominent lawyers of Bihar, as Rajendra Prasad, Brij Kishor Babu, Maulana
Mazharul Hug and many others.
Ø At
last, he got justice for the poor peasants.
Ø During
this period, he kept an eye on the working of his Ashram in Ahmedabad also.
Ø Gandhiji
also worked on social level as education, health and hygiene of the poor
peasant families.
Ø He
taught the people to be self-reliant and not to depend on any outside help.
6.
Poets and Pancakes (Ashokamitran)
Main Points
of the chapter:
Ø The Tamil
writer Ashokamitran was a part of the Gemini Studios (Chennai)which was setup
in 1940 and its founder was SS Vasan (The Boss).
Ø In his book
‘My years with Boss’, the writer describes the working culture of the Studios.
Ø He sat in a
small room and his duty was to take out newspaper cuttings and store them in
files.
Ø He describes
the make-up department of the Gemini Studios.
Ø This
department was in the upstairs of a building, which was once Robert Clive’s
stable.
Ø The
department had the look of a hair cutting salon.
Ø There were
incandescent lights at all angles around half a dozen large mirrors.
Ø Pancake was
the brand name of the make-up material that the Gemini Studios bought in truck
loads.
Ø Heavy
make-up was used for the actors.
Ø Those were
the days of mainly indoor shooting; only five percent of the film was shot
outdoors.
Ø The chief
make-up man made the chief actors and actresses ‘ugly’.
Ø His senior
assistant did the make-up of the second hero and heroine.
Ø The junior
assistant handled the main comedian.
Ø The players
who played the crowd were the responsibility of the office-boy.
Ø The
office-boy was not exactly a boy. He was in his early forties. He came here to
become a star actor, a top screen writer, director or lyrics writer.
Ø Kothamangalam
Subbu was the No. 2 at the Gemini Studios. The office boy did not like him.
Ø He also described
a lawyer, a performing company known as Buchman’s Moral Re-armament Army and in
last an unknown poet Stephen Spender.
7.
The Interview Part I & II (Christopher Silvester)
Main Points
of the chapter:
Ø This chapter
has been put in two parts. The first part is about the use of the interview in
journalism.
Ø Some call it
a punishable crime while others call it the highest source of truth.
Ø It has
become an extremely useful medium of communication.
Ø The second
part gives and extract of the interview Mukund Padmanabhan with Umberto Eco.
Ø In his
interview, Mukund tries to known from Eco how he became a successful novelist.
Ø Eco tells
Mukund that he became a novelist because he liked narrating things.
Ø He wrote
novels only in his empty spaces as on Sunday.
Ø He tells the
interviewer that he is an academic first and a novelist afterwards.
Ø His novel
‘The name of the Rose’ is world famous. About 10-15 million copies of it were
sold.
8.
Going Places (A R Barton)
Main Points
of the chapter:
Ø This story
about a young girl Sophie and her fantasies.
Ø On the other
hand, there is her friend Jansie who has not false dreams.
Ø Sophie
belongs to a poor family. But she has
very high dreams about her future.
Ø She dreams
of having a boutique of her own as well as becoming an actress.
Ø She dreams
of becoming a fashion designer also.
Ø In her
dreams, she meets Danny Casey, a young football player.
Ø She tells
her brother Geoff as well as to Jansie about her meeting with Danny Casey.
Ø But he and
her father both don’t believe her.
Ø She asked
him for an autograph but neither he nor she had a pen at that time.
Ø She tells
Geoff that Danny asked her to meet the next week.
Ø She goes and
waits for him, but he does not come.
Ø And at last,
she has to leave with a broken heart.
Ø She imagines
meeting with him and takes his autograph at the arcade.