Virtue by George Herbert

 Virtue by George Herbert 

About George Herbert:

George Herbert was born into a wealthy family in Wales. His father died when he was young, so his mother raised him and his siblings. She was a devout woman and was determined to raise them in the Church of England. Herbert's mother was so respected by the famous poet John Donne that he dedicated poems to her. Herbert received the best possible education, attending Trinity College, Cambridge in 1609. He was then hired as a high-profile representative of Cambridge. During this time he caught the attention of King James I and worked in the Parliament of England for a short period. After King James died, Herbert gave up on this public career. He took holy orders and was ordained as an Anglican priest, becoming the rector of a small church near Salisbury, Bemerton. He spent the last years of his life writing poetry and serving this small church community before dying of consumption at the age of 39.

Herbert is known as a poet of devotional verse. His poems focus on religious experience. Some of his most well-known poems are "The Altar" and "Easter Wings"—both pattern poems that are laid out on the page to resemble what they describe. He is best known for the short lyric poems from his single book of poetry The Temple. Because of the strange and unexpected images he used, he is sometimes known as a "metaphysical poet" alongside Donne and Andrew Marvell. In addition to writing in English, Herbert also wrote poems in Latin.

While Herbert's poems received praise during his lifetime and in subsequent centuries, he reached new critical acclaim in the 20th century, in part because of T. S. Eliot's praise of him and others in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" and his book George Herbert. Herbert's strange imagery and poems shaped like objects were seen as uniquely inventive. He is still admired today for both the complexity of his perspective on Christianity, as well as the complexity of his poetry.

About Poem : 

‘Virtue’ by Geroge Herbert describes how the day, rose, and spring, all the beautiful things of nature, are inconstant in comparison to “a sweet and virtuous soul”.

This poem begins with a reference to the “sweet day”. Though it is so cool, calm, and bright, in the eve its beauty fades away. A rose which bids a rash gazer wipe his eye, its root is embedded in one’s grave. It means that the flower will also die in the future. Likewise, spring is also transient. The season comes for a short period of time each year. Then it bids goodbye to all. At the end of the poem, Herbert says the virtue of one’s soul is everlasting. It chiefly lives even though the whole world turns to coal.

Structure :

The poem ‘Virtue’ is highly structured. It has a set rhyme scheme and meter. To begin with, Herbert uses the ABAB rhyme scheme in this poem. For example, in the first stanza, “bright” rhymes with “to-night” (lines 1 and 3), and “sky” and “die” rhyme together (lines 2 and 4). This scheme is maintained throughout the piece for creating an internal  contrast between the lines.

Herbert wrote this poem iambic tetrameter. The last line of each stanza is in iambic dimeter. It means most of the lines consist of four iambs and the last line of each stanza contains two iambs. There is only one variation and it appears in the third stanza. Here, the poet uses elision.

Literary Devices

The following list includes the major literary devices used in Herbert’s poem ‘Virtue’.

Alliteration: It occurs in the very first line of the poem: “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright.” This line also contains asyndeton.

Metaphor: “The bridal of the earth and sky,” “full of sweet days and roses,” etc.

Personification: “The dew shall weep thy fall to-night”

Refrain: Each stanza ends with the phrase “must die”. It is kind of a refrain. The last stanza differs from this scheme.

Imagery: In these lines, the rose’s bright red color is portrayed symbolically: “Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave”.

Epigram: “But though the whole world turn to coal,/ Then chiefly lives.”

The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

THE SOLDIER BY RUPERT BROOKE 

About Rupert Brooke :

When news broke of Rupert Brooke’s death in April 1915 “The Times” published an unrestrained eulogy. It referred to Brooke as “Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed…all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be…” Even though the subsequent depiction of Brooke as an almost God like figure threatened to confuse the man and the myth he was clearly an exceptionally accomplished, talented and popular figure both in school at Rugby where his father was a housemaster and at King’s College, Cambridge where he became a Fellow.

In the years before the war he travelled extensively in France, Germany and America. It was in Berlin that he composed one of his most famous poems “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” about his home in Cambridge. His impressions of the United States and Canada were published in a series of articles in the “Westminster Gazette” and Brooke continued to travel and write throughout 1913 and in to 1914 spending many happy months in Tahiti which he saw as a kind of Pacific paradise.

Like many of his generation Brooke saw the outbreak of war as an opportunity to revitalise a world “grown old and cold and weary.” (Sonnet: Peace 1914). He died of blood poisoning on a troopship destined for Gallipoli and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

About Poem :

If I should die, think only this of me:

      That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

 Brooke’s famous sonnet was written in 1914 and is one of the most celebrated examples of poems written at the outbreak of war that approached the conflict with a sense of noble self-sacrifice and patriotism.

The romantic idealism of “The Soldier” is clearly a world away from the brutality and suffering depicted in poems written after 1916 but note how the poem immediately accepts that the outcome of this cause to which the poet has freely committed himself may well be death. If he does not survive the war Brooke desires to be remembered not for his work as a writer or his qualities as a man but for his Englishness. The words “England” or “English” are used six times in the fourteen lines as Brooke celebrates life “…under an English heaven.” Rather than disappearing forever through death in a “foreign field” Brooke imagines that the richness of what England has given him will never be lost. Ultimately he will become, “A pulse in the eternal mind…”

He compares England to a mother giving birth to, nurturing and educating a son. Consider the depiction of England Brooke offers the reader. What does he appear to value and cherish? Is there a sense here of Brooke being not so much a war poet but a poet of peace?

La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

About  poet :

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad by the Romantic poet John Keats, first published in 1819. The title translates to "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" in French, and the poem tells the story of a knight who falls in love with a mysterious and enchanting woman, only to be betrayed and left to suffer.

The poem opens with the knight wandering alone in a desolate landscape, with no one around him except for the lady who appears suddenly. He is captivated by her beauty and falls deeply in love with her, but there is something otherworldly about her that he cannot quite understand.

The lady takes the knight to her fairy-like dwelling, where she sings and dances for him. The knight is completely entranced by her, and he promises to do anything for her. However, the lady's love is fickle, and she quickly grows bored with the knight. She leaves him alone in the cold, cruel world, and he is left to suffer in despair.

The poem ends with the knight's dream-like recollection of the lady's betrayal, and he is left to ponder the true nature of his experience. The reader is left with the sense that the knight has been ensnared by the lady's beauty, only to be cast aside once she has had her fill of him.

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a powerful exploration of love and loss, and it captures the essence of Romanticism in its use of vivid, evocative imagery and its focus on the emotional experiences of the individual. Keats was a master of language and emotion, and this poem is one of his most enduring and beloved works. It is a haunting and unforgettable tale of love and heartbreak that continues to captivate readers to this day.

About Poem:

To structure the poem’s narrative, Keats borrows a question-and-response form from earlier folk ballads and pastoral eclogues. In the first three stanzas the poet does indeed appear as a third-person narrator, but only as a kind of rhetorical presence, addressing the knight in a series of questions that allow the poet to “transfer,” in Coleridge’s words, “from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth” onto the character of the knight. Likewise, the knight’s predicament is laid out in this mini-interrogation—he is given a vocabulary—and the rest of the poem will be taken up by his response, his story, as it were.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

            Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

            And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

            So haggard, and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

            And the harvest’s done.

With the belle dame playing a figure of love and fantasy and the agent of death and decay to the knight, it is as though Keats has stumbled upon his mirror image as he gazes upon the knight:

I see a lily on thy brow,

            With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

            Fast withereth too.

For a fantasy poem whose setting seems so distant from real time, the poem might very well express figuratively what Keats was experiencing in his love life and his health. The mix of literary and emotional forces influencing Keats at the time he wrote “La Belle Dame sans Merci” was nothing less than extreme. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was 14; his brother, whom Keats nursed through his final months, died of the same disease in 1818. Even before his brother’s death, Keats too would begin to show signs of the disease, returning from his rigorous tour of Scotland and Ireland with a harsh cough and an ulcerated throat. That year he would also fall in love with Fanny Brawne and by the spring of 1819 would embark on what was to become one of the most important sequences of odes in our literature, all written in a single year. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” was written in the heat of his passion for Fanny, the fever of death hanging over him. He was on fire poetically, in love, growing ill, and suffering from depression. By the end of May 1819 Keats finished the poem:

I met a lady in the meads,

       Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

       And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

       And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

       And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

       A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

       And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

       “I love thee true.”

She took me to her elfin grot,

       And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

       With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

       On the cold hill side.

The knight’s story is of coming upon “a lady in the meads,” “a faery’s child” with wild eyes. The story is full of double entendres: “fragrant zone” (a girdle of flowers or his lover’s nether regions?), “I set her on my pacing steed” (his horse, or his erection?). She weeps and sighs “full sore” (until she is sore?). There are often two ways of seeing this scene, as the knight quickly learns. The landscape is lush with meadows and spring, wild honey and manna dew, but the story quickly moves from idyllic to horrific, as the fairytale romp turns to imprisonment on a cold hillside.

After his rough-and-tumble, the knight finds himself in a kind of hell through the common gothic transport of a dream. He is surrounded by all of the lady’s previous victims, who include kings and princes and warriors; her taste in men is evidently consistent.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Thee hath in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

       With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

       On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

       Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

The repetition of “pale” reinforces the subtext of tubercular illness. In the next stanza we see the victims’ “starved lips” (starved for air?) and hear their only words, “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!” The thrall of love is clearly equated with the thrall of illness.

The partnering themes in gothic literature—love and death; temptation and duty; dream and waking, and the murky suffering of the consequences of ungoverned emotion; ecstasy and its aftermath of despair; the otherworldly seductress, Homer’s Circe or Sirens, or the poetic muse herself—these are all figures without pity (sans merci) whose function is to entrap. All of this informs the consumptive grayness of the knight’s predicament, a cache of themes that are echoed in the poet’s own feverish condition. Even nature cooperates, with its withering sedge and finished harvest.

Keats’s notions that the poet is “without identity” and “the most unpoetical of anything in existence” extend Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” but mostly in practical ways: Keats’s knight seems a purer creation of dramatic character than Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Christabel, and more like a Hamlet or a King Lear, albeit in miniature. Of course, a total subjugation of “poetic character,” as Keats calls it in his letter, would be impossible, though many modern and postmodern poets have attempted just that. In this way, Keats was certainly anticipating post-Romantic strategies of expression. Through allegorical displacement Keats is able to diffuse overobvious “self-expression” and transform what in a lesser poet would remain self-pity into a self-erasing empathy for his created characters. By using the figure of the knight as a dramatically convincing surrogate for the pathos he himself feels, Keats makes powerful use of some of the most important Romantic themes: the stress of self-examination, the fraught duality of Eros and death, and individual mortality and its mirroring in the cycles of nature.

A Dance of the Forests

 Hello friends 

I am Bhavna Sosa from Department of English MKBU.  This task was given by Yesha ma’am. This blog about 'A Dance of the Forests'.

About author:

Nigerian playwright and political activist Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was born in 1934 in Abeokuta, near Ibadan, into a Yoruba family and studied at University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of Leeds, England. Soyinka, who writes in English, is the author of five memoirs, including Aké: the Years of Childhood (1981) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir (2006), the novels The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), and 19 plays shaped by a diverse range of influences, including avant-garde traditions, politics, and African myth.

Soyinka’s poetry similarly draws on Yoruba myths, his life as an exile and in prison, and politics. His collections of poetry include Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969, republished as A Shuttle in the Crypt in 1972), Ogun Abibiman (1976), Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988), and Selected Poems (2001).

An outspoken opponent of oppression and tyranny worldwide and a critic of the political situation in Nigeria, Soyinka has lived in exile on several occasions. During the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, he was held as a prisoner in solitary confinement after being charged with conspiring with the Biafrans. In 1997, while in exile, he was tried for, convicted of, and sentenced to death for antimilitary activities, a sentence that was later lifted.

Soyinka has taught at a number of universities worldwide, among them Ife University, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Emory University.

About play :

The play begins with a Dead Man and a Dead Woman breaking free from their burial in the soil in the middle of a forest. They ask those that pass by to "take their case." The Man and Woman were a captain and his wife in a past life and were tortured and killed by an Emperor by the name of Mata Kharibu and his Queen, nicknamed Madame Tortoise. The Dead Man and his wife have come to the Gathering of the Tribes, and were sent here by Aroni, a god, with permission from the Forest Head, in place of the forefathers that the living have requested to join them.

Four characters come through the forest initially: Rola, a prostitute, once known as Madame Tortoise and a queen from the previous life; Adenebi, a court historian in the time of the Emperor Mata Kharibu, now a council orator; Agboreko, who was a soothsayer to Mata Kharibu in a past life and plays the same role in this life; and finally, Demoke, who is now a carver but was once a poet in the court. Aroni has selected these four in order for them to gain knowledge about their past lives and to atone for their sins.

Another character, Obaneji, is actually the Forest Head disguised in human form. He invites the characters to join in a welcome dance for the Dead Man and Woman. Eshuoro, a wayward spirit seeking vengeance for the death of Oremole, Demoke's apprentice, comes and interrupts the proceedings. He claims that Demoke killed him by pulling him off the top of an araba tree they were carving, which caused him to fall to his death. Ogun, the god of carvers, stands up for Demoke against Eshuoro's claim. We learn that Demoke encouraged the cutting of the araba tree, and also that there was a great fire in which 65 of 70 people were killed.

Documentation: Preparing the List of Work Cited

Hello friends 

I am Bhavna Sosa from Department of English MKBU. This blog about 'Documentation: Preparing the List of Work Cited'. This task was given by Megha ma'am. 

What is Citation?

A citation is a reference to the source of information used in your research. Any time you directly quote, paraphrase or summarize the essential elements of someone else's idea in your work, an in-text citation should follow. An in-text citation is a brief notation within the text of your paper or presentation which refers the reader to a fuller notation, or end-of-paper citation, that provides all necessary details about that source of information.

Direct quotations should be surrounded by quotations marks and are generally used when the idea you want to capture is best expressed by the source. 

Paraphrasing and summarizing involve rewording an essential idea from someone else's work, usually to either condense the point or to make it better fit your writing style.

You do not have to cite your own ideas, unless they have been published. And you do not have to cite common knowledge, or information that most people in your audience would know without having to look it up.

In-Text Citations

In-text citations alert the reader to an idea from an outside source.

What is book review?

A review is a critical evaluation of a text, event, object, or phenomenon. Reviews can consider books, articles, entire genres or fields of literature, architecture, art, fashion, restaurants, policies, exhibitions, performances, and many other forms. This handout will focus on book reviews. For a similar assignment, see our handout on literature reviews.

Above all, a review makes an argument. The most important element of a review is that it is a commentary, not merely a summary. It allows you to enter into dialogue and discussion with the work’s creator and with other audiences. You can offer agreement or disagreement and identify where you find the work exemplary or deficient in its knowledge, judgments, or organization. You should clearly state your opinion of the work in question, and that statement will probably resemble other types of academic writing, with a thesis statement, supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

The Only Story by Juliana Barnes 

"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."

The Only Story stakes bold claims and provokes surprising questions that demonstrate Barnes is anything but resting on his laurels.

He states the novel’s thesis, via narrator Paul, on the opening page this way:

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

As Paul’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that it’s about love in general and first love in particular, which, the book argues, is the only story we really have to tell about ourselves.

Consider teeth, for example. Paul says of Susan’s,

I must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her “rabbit teeth” because they were perhaps a millimeter longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.

It’s difficult not to smile at this slightly ridiculous but entirely believable romantic gesture. Her teeth show up throughout the first part of the novel, until they are, in heartbreaking fashion, lost. If Barnes has something to say here, it’s that little things like affection for teeth are the signum et res - the sign and the reality - of true love.

There’s an illuminating contrast, however, between Paul and Susan’s story and that of Shostakovich in The Noise of Time. Is the latter’s love for his spouse not all the more poignant, interesting, and sustainable precisely because she is not his only love? Isn’t it his passion for music that made Shostakovich an appealing lover in the first place? In her brilliant 2017 Paris Review piece “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Claire Dederer asks if all artists are not monsters in some sense given that selfishness is always involved in the finishing of a work. Provocative as such a question is, couldn’t the opposite case also be made? Namely, that the lover with no project of her or his own is the real monster, because lack of interest in the cultivation of self results in a subjectivity so dull that any captivating romantic love with such a person is out of the question. Given the choice between Shostakovich and Paul, who would not choose the former?

Paul’s love story may not be all that interesting, but Barnes’s analysis of it certainly is. As in his other works, the author applies a scalpel to human consciousness to expose his protagonist’s intentions, beliefs, and neuroses with astute observation. Part one of the novel is in first person, part two in second, part three in third, and these different voices correspond to different stages in Paul and Susan’s relationship: the birth of love, the death of love, and the aftermath of love. Each part has its moments of enchanting, psychologically descriptive prose, such as this musing of Paul’s from the first section:

She laughs at life, this is part of her essence. She laughs at what I laugh at. She also laughs at hitting me on the head with a tennis ball; at the idea of having sherry with my parents; she laughs at her husband, just as she does when crashing the gears of the Austin shooting break.

Work Cited : 

 https://www.marian.edu/docs/default-source/marian's-adult-programs-documents/what-is-citation.pdf?sfvrsn=76a375fd_2. 

“Book Reviews.” The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 23 Sept. 2021, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/book-reviews/. 

Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Jonathan Cape, 2018.

Millay, Thomas J. Annotations of Pain: First Love in “The Only Story,” 17 Apr. 2018. 

Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 Hello friends 

I am Bhavna Sosa from the Department of English MKBU. This task is about The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. This blog is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir.

       The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

                       by Arundhati Roy

About Arundhati Roy : 

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Man Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide. She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and Public Power in the Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile. Her newest book, published by Haymarket, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

About Novel :

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is the second novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, published in 2017, twenty years after her debut, The God of Small Things.

The novel weaves together the stories of people navigating some of the darkest and most violent episodes of modern Indian history, from land reform that dispossessed poor farmers to the Bhopal disaster, 2002 Godhra train burning and Kashmir insurgency. Roy's characters run the gamut of Indian society and include an intersex woman (hijra), a rebellious architect, and her landlord who is a supervisor in the intelligence service. The narrative spans across decades and locations, but primarily takes place in Delhi and Kashmir.

Characters :-

Jahanara Begam

Mulakaat Ali

Aftab/Anjum

Man who know English

Ahlam Baji(middle Wife) 

Bombay Silk

Mary(only Christian) 

Gudiya

Saeeda

Bulbul

Bismilla (Bimla) 

Nimo Gorakhpur

Kulsoom Bi (Nayak of Hijra House) 

Ziauddin Imam

Zainab

Zakir Mia

Mansoor(zakir mia son) 

Abhay Chand

Sakeem (anjum Brother) 

Aurangjeb

Hazrat Sarman

Changez Khan

Borte Khatun

Dr. Azad Bharati

Sadam Hussein

Dayachand

Sangita madam

Inspector Sherawat

Tubby old Gandhian (anna Hazare

Mr. Agarwal (kejariwal) 

Gujrat ka lalla (Narendra Modi) 

Manmohan singh (trapped Rabbit) 

S. Tilottama(Tilo) 

Mariyam Ipe(mother of Tilottama) 

Musa Yeswi

Arifa (wife of Musa) 

Jebeen 

Biplav Das Gupta

Chitra(Wife of Biplav Das) 

Rabiya, Aania (Daughter of Biplav Das) 

Nagraj Hariharan

Captain Amrik Singh

Lovleet singh (Amrik singh's wife) 

Acp Pinky Sodhi

Balveer Sodhi (brother of pinky) 

Aijaz (one of the Terrorist interviewed by Nagraj) 

Khadija (lady give accompany to Tilo) 

Jainab

Jalil Qadri 

Revathy 

Plot Summary:

The story begins with A strange older woman living in Graveyard named Jannat. There is one another man named Imam Ziauddin who is old blind man became frequent companion of Anjum. Who came to know that the woman’s name is Anjum. She is a Hijra, a transwoman, who left Khwabgah many years ago. Then there is a story of Anjum's birth. Who born as a intersex, but her mother, Jahanara, gendered the child a boy and named him Aftab.

In his childhood Aftab was a very good singer that caused the neighbourhood kids to tease him about being too feminine. His father Mulaqat gave him a suggestion to undergo a gender-change surgery, and also told him stories about his great warrior ancestors to inspire him towards masculinity. One day he noticed one Hijra girl walking beautifully and he followed her which led him to Khwabgah, after that he kept visiting the place until he got 15 years old and then permanently moved there to live. In Khwabgah Aftab becomes Anjum permanently. She also went through gender transition surgery and became Female finally. She also became very famous among NGOs, human rights groups and journalists because of her beauty and aggressive femininity. All the way she becomes a successful Hijra.

One day Anjum finds one abandoned baby girl outside the mosque and takes her with her. She treated the baby like her child and became her mother. She named the baby Zainab. She mostly tells realistic stories of her life. When Zainab reaches the age when she is ready to go to school suddenly she goes through a bout of ill health. So Anjum decided to take her for pilgrimage with Zakir Mian to a holy Muslim site in Gujarat. In pilgrimage, Anjum and Zakir Mian face the worst massacre, in which Zakir Mian was killed, but Anjum is spared because they believe that killing Hijra is bad luck. Anjum after returning from Gujarat started behaving strangely. She started wearing boys' clothes and trying to dress Zainab as a little boy to protect her from suffering violence. When Ustad Kulsoom Bi Opposed this division, Anjum left Khwabgah, moved to Graveyard behind the government hospital and started living there. She leaves Zainab in Saeeda’s care.

Slowly Anjum built a house in graveyard, where after some time Saddam Hussain, an unemployed Dalit young man on a mission to murder the police officer who caused the death of his father came and started living there. Who once witnessed his father's murder. Saddam Hussain also suggested Anjum that she should start charge to guests and for funeral services, And Anjum started calling her home Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services.

After that we find there is a character of Biplab, a bureaucrat in the Indian government discovers that a tenant of his, Tilottama, has gone missing. He secretly loves Tilottama throughout his life. He met Tilottama in a play performance as a student of university. But unfortunately Tilottama was dating Musa, a Kashmiri architect. There is one another character Naga who is a journalist, who also is in love with Tilottama.Biplab is involved in the Kashmir conflict as a bureaucrat whose work serves primarily to cover up the atrocities committed by the Indian Army in the region. But soon he finds himself a puppet of the government, who reveals only as much as the government wants him to reveal. Naga is a journalist, and although he doesn’t see himself as corrupt in any way. One day Biplab received a message from Tilottama that the army had captured her so Biplab sent Naga to save her, and Naga saved her from jail and soon Naga and Tilottama married. But soon they divorced and Tilottama asked Biplab if she could rent one of his apartments. Here Biplav thought that it's his chance for Tilottama. Before Biplab comes to Tilottama's apartment, there is a wide public protest at Jantar Mantar. It was started as an anti corruption protest by Gandhian. And later turned into a hunger strike against corruption in India. There are many other causes and groups also joined the protest to get media coverage. Anjum and Hussain move to Jantar Mantar to see what is happening there. There is a group called the Mothers of the Disappeared that finds a baby abandoned on the pavement in front of the protest. Anjum decided to take the baby with her but another protester Mr.Aggarwal. Anjum got into a fight with him as Mr. Aggarwal wanted to handover the baby to a police officer but Anjum was against it and wanted to take the baby with her. In between the conflict the baby disappeared and no one knows who took the baby so Anjum and Hussain leave Jantar Mantar to find the baby.

Later on readers come to know that the baby was taken by Tilottama. The baby was named as Miss Jebeen the Second by Tilottama. The name is given after Musa's daughter who was murdered in a massacre by the Indian government in Kashmir. Also her mother Arifa died in the same massacre. Tilottama was also involved in the Kashmir massacre after meeting Musa. After Musa and Tilottama returned from the houseboat, the boat was raided by military police.Gulrez, a friend of musa killed by the military police.the military was led by Major Amrik Singh. Tilottama and Musa vows to take revenge for their deaths. But Amrik Singh fled to California with his wife and childrens.

After taking the baby from Jantar Mantar, The police are after her, so Tilottama wants a safe place to live, her friend Dr. Azad Bhartiya suggested her to Jannat Guest house and gave the number of Sadam Hussain. Tilottama moved to Jannat Guest House and started living there. She begins to work as a teacher for the poor, local children, and greatly enjoys her work. On the other hand, Sadam Hussain and Zainab fell in love and married. Many outcast people came and started living in Jannat guest house. All the people at Jannat guest house are very happy. Jabeen the second raised surrounds peace, love and safety. The story ends here.

Fact-Fiction

-2002 Godhra kand Gujarat - Trauma to Anjum

-Mr.Aggarwal- Arvind Kejriwal

-Gujarat ka Lalla -Narendra Modi

-Leaching of Dalit (Una-Gujrat) - Saddam Father's death

-Trapped Rabbit - Manmohan Singh

Write about any one theme or character of the novel with the help of Chat OpenAI GPT. Ask to Chat GPT and put a screenshot as well as copy-paste the answer generated by this response generator.

The theme of religion and power in "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness"

The theme of religion and power is central to Arundhati Roy's novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness." The novel explores the ways in which religious institutions and leaders wield power over individuals and communities, often to the detriment of marginalised groups such as the poor, women, and sexual minorities. The novel features several characters who struggle against the oppressive forces of religion and tradition, including Anjum, a hijra who creates a safe haven for other hijras and outcasts, and Tilo, a woman who defies societal norms by living outside of traditional gender roles.

The novel also explores the intersection of religion and politics, showing how religious leaders and political figures use religion to justify their actions and maintain their power. The novel portrays a scathing view on the use of religion to justify discrimination, oppression and violence, as well as the use of religious institutions as a tool of control and manipulation by the powerful.

Additionally, the novel also portrays the theme of how the marginalised communities use their own, more inclusive and compassionate interpretations of religion to create spaces of safety and resistance.

The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children By S. Tilottama - Give answers to the questions asked regarding any three stories. Questions are given at the end of each story.

NEWS

Kashmir Guideline News ServiceDozens of Cattle Cross Line of Control (LoC) in RajouriAt least 33 cattle including 29 buffaloes have crossed over to Pakistan side in Nowshera Sector of Rajouri district in Jammu and Kashmir.According to KGNS, the cattle crossed the LoC in Kalsian sub-sector. ‘The cattle which belong to Ram Saroop, Ashok Kumar, Charan Das, Ved Prakash and others were grazing near LoC when they crossed over to otherside,’ locals told KGNS.

Q 1: Why did the cattle cross the LoC?

(a) For training

(b) For sneak-in ops

(c) Neither of the above.

Ans:- (c) Neither of the above.

THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER

Manohar Mattoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who stayed on in the Valley even after all the otherHindus had gone. He was secretly tired of and deeply hurt by the barbs from his Muslimfriends who said that all Hindus in Kashmir were actually, in one way or another, agents of the Indian Occupation Forces. Manohar had participated in all the anti-India protests, and had shouted Azadi! louder than everybody else. But nothing seemed to help. At one point he had even contemplated taking up arms and joining the Hizb, but eventually he decided against it. One day an old school friend of his, Aziz Mohammed, an intelligence officer,visited him at home to tell him that he was worried for him. He said that he had seen his(Mattoo’s) surveillance file. It suggested that he be put under watch because he displayed anti-national tendencies’.

When he heard the news Mattoo beamed and felt his chest swell with pride. ‘You have given me the Nobel Prize!’ he told his friend.He took Aziz Mohammed out to Café Arabica and bought him coffee and pastries worthRs 500.A year later he (Mattoo) was shot by an unknown gunman for being a kafir.

Q 1: Why was Mattoo shot?

(a) Because he was a Hindu

(b) Because he wanted Azadi

(c) Because he won the Nobel Prize

(d) None of the above

(e) All of the above.

Ans:- (a) Because he was a Hindu

Q 2: Who could the unknown gunman have been?

(a) An Islamist militant who thought all kafirs should be killed

(b) An agent of the Occupation who wanted people to think that allIslamist militants thought that all kafirs should be killed

(c) Neither of the above

(d) Someone who wanted everyone to go crazy trying to figure it out.

Ans :- (a) An Islamist militant who thought all kafirs should be killed

THE CAREERIST

The boy had always wanted to make something of himself. He invited four militants for dinner and slipped sleeping pills into their food. Once they had fallen asleep he called the army. They killed the militants and burned down the house. The army had promised the boy two canals of land and one hundred and fifty thousand rupees. They gave him only fifty thousand and accommodated him in quarters just outside an army camp. They told him that if he wanted a permanent job with them instead of being just a daily wage worker he would have to get them two foreign militants. He managed to get them one ‘live’ Pakistani but was having trouble finding another. ‘Unfortunately these days business is bad,’ he told PI.‘Things have become such that you cannot any longer just kill someone and pretend he’s a foreign militant. So my job cannot be made permanent.’PI asked him, if there was a referendum whom he would vote for, India or Pakistan?‘Pakistan of course.’‘Why?’‘Because it is our Mulk (country). But Pakistan militants can’t help us in this way. If I can kill them and get a good job it helps me.’He told PI that when Kashmir became a part of Pakistan, he (PI) would not be able to survive in it. But he (the boy) would. But that, he said, was just a theoretical matter. Becausehe would be killed shortly.

Q 1: Who did the boy expect to be killed by?

(a) The army

(b) Militants

(c) Pakistanis

(d) Owners of the house that was burned.

Ans:- (a) The army

Thank you...

Presentation 5 History of English Literature from 1350 to 1900

 Presentation: 5 History of English Literature from 1350 to 1900

Here is my presentation about Paper 5 Jonathan and his works

Johnathan Swift and his Work from BhavnaSosa

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