Class 11 NCERT Chapters

The following poem is taken from Mappings which was published in 1981 and is included in the Collected Poems by Vikram Seth.

Though it was nearly midnight when Andrew reached Bryngower, he found Joe Morgan waiting for him, walking up and down with short steps between the closed surgery and the entrance to the house. At the sight of him the burly driller’s face expressed relief.

The first time that Agha Shahid Ali spoke to me about his approaching death was on 25 April 2001. The conversation began routinely. I had telephoned to remind him that we had been invited to a friend’s house for lunch and that I was going to come by his apartment to pick him up.

Scene: The living-room of the Pearson family. Afternoon. It is a comfortably furnished, much lived-in room in a small suburban semi-detached villa. If necessary only one door need be used, but it is better with two - one up left leading to the front door and the stairs and the other in the right wall leading to the kitchen and the back door.

This short story is a poignant account of a daughter who goes in search of her mother's belongings after the War, in Holland. When she finds them, the objects evoke memories of her earlier life.

One day back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every imaginable kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up tapping on the window of my room.

The teacher was explaining the lines in the beginning of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. It was a description of the battle.

Letter Writing is an important channel of communication between people who are geographically distant from one another. In earlier times when the telephone and e-mail were not available, the only means of communication between people was through letters.

Most of us find it difficult to begin writing. We can make this easier by thinking about the topic either through brainstorming, that is with several people in a group giving their ideas as they strike them, or by putting them down on a sheet of paper as they occur to us.

The purpose of sub-titling is to convey the main idea or theme of each section of a long piece of writing. It helps the reader know at a glance the sub-topics that are being addressed.

Summarising follows note-making. The purpose of note-making is usually for one's own personal reference. If the main points are to be reported we present a summary. It is not as severely shortened as note-making.

Note-Making is an important study skill. It also helps us at work. We need to draw the main points of the material we read as it is difficult to remember large chunks of information.

A flawless half-moon floated in a perfect blue sky on the morning we said our goodbyes. Extended banks of cloud like long French loaves glowed pink as the sun emerged to splash the distant mountain tops with a rose-tinted blush.

THE Jijamata Express sped along the Pune-Bombay* route considerably faster than the Deccan Queen. There were no industrial townships outside Pune. The first stop, Lonavala, came in 40 minutes. The ghat section that followed was no different from what he knew. The train stopped at Karjat only briefly and went on at even greater speed. It roared through Kalyan.

One cannot recall any movement in world history which has gripped the imagination of the entire human race so completely and so rapidly as the Green Movement which started nearly twenty-five years ago.

He was just a teenager when he died. The last heir of a powerful family that had ruled Egypt and its empire for centuries, he was laid to rest laden with gold and eventually
forgotten.

In July 1976, my wife Mary, son Jonathan, 6, daughter Suzanne, 7, and I set sail from Plymouth, England, to duplicate the round-the-world voyage made 200 years earlier by Captain James Cook.

My grandmother, like everybody's grandmother, was an old woman. She had been old and wrinkled for the twenty years that I had known her. People said that she had once been young and pretty and had even had a husband, but that was hard to believe.

Kumudini Lakhia (born 1930) is a renowned Kathak dancer and choreographer who was taught and influenced by the famous Ram Gopal. She has performed in over 40 countries, but chose to give up her career as a solo performer to start the Kadamb Dance Centre in Ahmedabad, where she trains students in the art of classical Kathak dance.

E.M. Forster (1879–1970), a noted English author and critic, wrote a number of short stories, novels and essays. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was published in 1905. This was followed by Howard’s End and A Passage to India and other well-known works.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a powerful and influential critic of the nineteenth century. He wrote on a variety of subjects: nature, art, architecture, politics, history. All his work is characterised by a clarity of vision.

The roots of India’s literary traditions can be traced to the rich oral literatures of the tribes/adivasis. Usually in the form of songs or chanting, these verses are expressions of the close contact between the world of nature and the world of tribal existence. They have been orally transmitted from generation to generation and have survived for several ages.

S. Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was a distinguished astrophysicist and Nobel Laureate. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He received many awards and wrote several books.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1969), the British philosopher and mathematician, has written numerous popular works on philosophy, politics and education. He took a major part in the twentieth century revival of logic and made continued effort to identify the methods of philosophy with those of the sciences.

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable.

Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) is a contemporary Indian poet. He was educated in Pune and earned a diploma in painting from the J.J. School of arts, Mumbai. He writes both in English and Marathi and has authored two books. The present poem is an excerpt from Jejuri - a long poem in thirty-one sections.

John Keats (1795-1821) was one of the greatest of the younger generation of ‘English Romantic’ poets. He started his career as an apprentice to a surgeon but soon gave it up for poetry. His poetic career lasted for only four years but, during this short span, he evolved from an ordinary poet to an exceptionally mature poetic force. His poetry celebrates beauty, which he considered the ultimate truth.

Dilip Chitre (1938-2009) was born in Baroda. He writes poetry both in Marathi and English. Travelling in a Cage, from which the poem selected here has been taken, was published in 1980. Apart from poetry, Chitre has also written short stories and critical essays.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was a student and later a Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. One of the most important poets of the century, he has published several collections of poems noted for their irony, compassion and wit.

Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) was born in Mumbai. He is today perhaps the best known Indian poet to have written in English. He had his education at Wilson College, Bombay and later at Birbeck College, London. A professor of American Literature at Bombay University, Ezekiel has written several poems and some plays.

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) completed his education at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1956, he married the poet Sylvia Plath. He tried to make a living in America by teaching and writing. Finally, he returned to England.

Padma Sachdev (born 1940) writes in her mother tongue Dogri and in Hindi. She has received many awards for her poetry, including the Sahitya Academi Award she received at the age of thirty for her first collection of Dogri poems. The above poem, translated from the original Dogri, bemoans the deprivation of Dogri of its native script Sharade, that evolved from the original Brahmi around the time Dogri developed.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) spent most of his life in the Lake district of northern England, and the many hours that he spent wandering about the hills and woods led to the production of some of the finest poetry on nature.

Wole Soyinka (born 1934), is a famous Nigerian poet and playwright. He was educated at the Government College in Ibadan, Nigeria and, later, at Leeds University, England, where he took a degree in English. He taught in the London schools and also worked in the Royal Court Theatre. He returned to Nigeria when he was about twenty-five.

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) was born in Coventry, England. He is well-known as a leader of ‘Movement’ in English Poetry in the fifties. The principal works of Philip Larkin are The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was one of the greatest poets and dramatists of the English language. Born at Stratford-on-Avon, England, he went to London where his reputation as a dramatist and poet was established. His Sonnets, 154 in number, probably written between 1593 and 1598, were published in 1602.

The word ‘poetry’ originates from a Greek word meaning ‘to make’. A poet is thus a maker and the poem something that is made or created. No single definition of poetry is possible but some characteristic features of poetry may be mentioned.

It was twenty years ago and I was living in Paris. I had a tiny apartment in the Latin quarter overlooking a cemetery and I was earning barely enough money to keep the body and soul together. She had read a book of mine and had written to me about it.

The slow, narrow-gauge Indian train with its awkward freak of an engine had a way of making unauthorised stops for no good reason, between fields of corn or at the foot of a village - it was said that the guard signalled a halt to pluck a pumpkin or ripe melons from its stem or to buy fistfuls of green gram from a peasant.

I left India in 1964 with a certificate in commerce and the equivalent, in those days, of ten dollars to my name. For three weeks I sailed on the SS Roma, an Italian cargo vessel, in a third-class cabin next to the ship’s engine, across the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and, finally, to England.

Mammachi had started making pickles commercially soon after Pappachi retired from government service in Delhi and came to live in Ayemenem. The Kottayam Bible Society was having a fair and asked Mammachi to make some of her famous banana jam and tender mango pickle. It sold quickly, and Mammachi found that she had more orders than she could cope with.

It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves. I remember the date very well, for, it was in the same month that Holmes refused a knighthood for services which may perhaps some day be described.

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love and love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet, she felt they had been thrust upon her and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew.

There are various kinds of mustachios worn in my country to mark the boundaries between the various classes of people. Outsiders may think it stupid to lay down, or rather to raise, lines of demarcation of this kind, but we are notorious in the whole world for sticking to our queer old conventions, prides and prejudices, even as the Chinese or the Americans or, for that matter, the English...

It is twilight. A thick wet snow is slowly twirling around the newly lighted street lamps and lying in soft thin layers on roofs, on horses’ backs, on people’s shoulders and hats. The cabdriver, Iona Potapov, is quite white and looks like a phantom: he is bent double as far as a human body can bend double; he is seated on his box; he never makes a move.

As you saw in the opening chapter of your first book, Introducing Sociology, the discipline is a relatively young one even in the European context, having been established only about a century ago. In India, interest in sociological ways of thinking is a little more than a century old, but formal university teaching of sociology only began in 1919 at the University of Bombay.

Sociology is sometimes called the child of the 'age of revolution'. This is because it was born in 19th century Western Europe, after revolutionary changes in the preceding three centuries that decisively changed the way people lived.

Look around you. What do you see? If you are in a classroom, you may see students in uniform, sitting on chairs with books open on their desk. There are school bags with lunch and pencil boxes. Ceiling fans might be whirring overhead.

It is often said that change is the only unchanging aspect of society. Anyone living in modern society does not need to be reminded that constant change is among the most permanent features of our society. In fact, the discipline of sociology itself emerged as an effort to make sense of the rapid changes that Western European society had experienced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

You will recall that the earlier book Introducing Sociology, had begun with a discussion on the relationship between personal problems and social issues. We also saw how individuals are located within collectivities such as groups, classes, gender, castes and tribes. Indeed each of you, is a member of not just one kind of collectivity, but many overlapping ones.