I. English encodes class in India. It does so by sliding into the DNA of social division: income, caste, gender, religion or
place of belonging. The threat it poses to social cohesion has worried public commentators across the political
spectrum. In an address delivered as independent India’s Parliament dilly-dallied over the suggestion to replace
English with regional languages as the medium of instruction for higher education, Gandhi said, ‘This blighting imposition
of a foreign medium upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest tragedies. Our boys
think, and rightly in the present circumstances, that without English they cannot get government service. Girls are
taught English as a passport to marriage.’
A hundred years later, the language continues to be seen as a tool of exclusion. The problem now is about inequality
of access. ‘To be denied English is harmful to the individual as well as our society,’ writes Chetan Bhagat, selfappointed
leader of a class war set off by unequal access to English.
Bhagat, an engineer-turned-investment banker, wrote his first college romance in English in 2004. Then only a certain
kind of person—someone who grew up reading, writing and speaking the language—wrote books in English—big
words, long sentences, literary pretension, heavy with orientalism. In the ten years since Bhagat put the popular in
‘popular’ English fiction, he has written six other novels and sold millions of copies all told. With every new book, all
written in deliberately simple English, Bhagat has recruited thousands of new soldiers in his crusade against what he
calls the ‘caste system around the language’. Bhagat even has a term for Indians who ‘have’ English: E1. ‘These
people had parents who spoke English, had access to good English-medium schools—typically in big cities, and
gained early proficiency, which enabled them to consume English products such as newspapers, books and films.
English is so instinctive to them that even some of their thought patterns are in English. These people are much in
demand.’ The people E1 presumably control, through a nexus of privilege built on ownership of English, are E2:
‘probably ten times the E1s. They are technically familiar with the language. [But] if they sit in an interview conducted
by E1s, they will come across as incompetent, even though they may be equally intelligent, creative or hardworking.’
The situation may not be so comically stark. The haves and have-nots may not exactly fit into Bhagat’s stereotypes
of urban, sophisticated rich people and provincial, uncultured poor. His argument does not factor in many other walls
around English in India. You are more likely to learn English if you are born a man rather than a woman, high caste
rather than low caste, south Indian rather than north Indian. There is more than one kind of E1 and more than one kind
of E2. And there is more than one way E2s can overthrow E1s. One is to speak it like they know it.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, by Snigdha Poonam,
Penguin Viking, 2018.]
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
The answer to this question can be found in the last paragraph of
the passage. The author alludes to the impact of identity (gender)
and place (south vs north India). This makes the first option the
right answer. The origins of the language have not been discussed
anywhere.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
According to Bhagat, the E2 are technically familiar with the
language but they lack the confidence to express themselves
articulately in it. Option (B) presents a scenario that contradicts
this idea. In the first option, fear of public speaking is not within
the scope of the discussion.
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
The author has analysed Chetan Bhagat’s views and finds them
too overarching and lacking in an understanding of certain finer
aspects. Consider the last paragraph.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
The concluding lines of the first paragraph provide us with the
answer. This is a simple fact-based question. The other options
are not supported by the information given.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
Sophisticated means having, revealing, or proceeding from a great
deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture.
Spoilt means harm the character of (someone, especially a child)
by being too lenient or indulgent. Thus, they are not related.
II. I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material
things but also ideas. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after
the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into
legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we
accepted this as the norm. The dearth of reading material in towns and villages in socialist India is hard to imagine,
and it produced two categories of people: those who stopped reading after school or college, and those — including
children — who read anything they could find. I read road signs with the enthusiasm that attaches to reading thrillers.
When the iterant kabadiwala, collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our neighbourhood, I rushed
to the house where he was doing business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those who’d stopped
having any use for them, and I rummaged through his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business
was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s
scolding, plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the Benson and Hedges Cup.... Two takeaways
from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of
everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language. Speaking of belatedness, the awareness of having
been born at the wrong time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered elsewhere, far away,
without our knowledge or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness. I remember a professor’s choked
voice, narrating to me how all the arguments he’d made in his doctoral dissertation, written over many, many years of
hard work (for there indeed was a time when PhDs were written over decades), had suddenly come to naught after he’d
discovered the work of C.W.E. Bigsby. This, I realised as I grew older, was one of the characteristics of provincial life:
that they (usually males) were saying trite things with the confidence of someone declaring them for the first time. I,
therefore, grew up surrounded by would-be Newtons who claimed to have discovered gravity (again). There’s a deep
sense of tragedy attending this sort of thing — the sad embarrassment of always arriving after the party is over. And
there’s a harsh word for that sense of belatedness: “dated.” What rescues it is the unpredictability of these anachronistic
“discoveries” — the randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections among thoughts and ideas, in
a way that hasn’t yet been professionalised.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “The Provincial Reader”, by Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books]
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘When the iterant kabadiwala,
collector of papers, magazines, and rejected things, visited our
neighbourhood, I rushed to the house where he was doing
business. He bought things at unimaginably low prices from those
who’d stopped having any use for them, and I rummaged through
his sacks of old magazines. Sometimes, on days when business
was good, he allowed me a couple of copies of Sportsworld
magazine for free. I’d run home and, ignoring my mother’s scolding,
plunge right in — consuming news about India’s victory in the
Benson and Hedges Cup’ Thus, it can be concluded that kabadiwala
was a source of magazines and newspapers for the author.
Therefore, option (B) is the correct option.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘Two takeaways from these
experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial
reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming
late, and the desire for pleasure in language. Speaking of
belatedness, the awareness of having been born at the wrong
time in history, of inventing things that had already been discovered
elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge or cooperation, is a
moment of epiphany and deep sadness.’ Option (A) is incorrect
as ‘coming late for everything’ changes the message implied by
the author. Option (C) is the correct answer.
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘Speaking of belatedness,
the awareness of having been born at the wrong time in
history, of inventing things that had already been
discovered elsewhere, far away, without our knowledge
or cooperation, is a moment of epiphany and deep sadness.’
Option A correctly states the implication of these lines.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
‘Anachronistic’ means connected with another time.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘What rescues it is the
unpredictability of these anachronistic “discoveries” — the
randomness and haphazardness involved in mapping connections
among thoughts and ideas, in a way that hasn’t yet been
professionalised’ ‘Mapping connections among thoughts and ideas’
refers to sophistication letting her engage with the ideas
with some originality. Therefore, option (B) is the correct option.
III. ‘So pick a bird,’ Iff commanded. ‘Any bird.’ This was puzzling. ‘The only bird around here is a wooden peacock,’
Haroun pointed out, reasonably enough. Iff gave a snort of disgust. ‘A person may choose what he cannot see,’ he
said, as if explaining something very obvious to a very foolish individual. ‘A person may mention a bird’s name even if
the creature is not present and correct: crow, quail, hummingbird, bulbul, mynah, parrot, kite. A person may even
select a flying creature of his own invention, for example winged horse, flying turtle, airborne whale, space serpent or
aeromouse. To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of
Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being. Or, in this case, the said
bird or Imaginary Flying Organism.’
‘That may be true where you come from,’ Haroun argued. ‘But in these parts, stricter rules apply.’
‘In these parts,’ rejoined blue-bearded Iff, ‘I am having time wasted by someone who will not trust in what he can’t see.
How much have you seen, eh? Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And submarines? Huh? Also,
hailstones, baseballs, pagodas? Goldmines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it
happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eves and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.’
With that, he plunged his hand into a pocket of his auberginey pajamas, and when he brought it forth again it was
bunched into a fist. ‘So take a look, or I should say a gander, at the enclosed.’ He opened his hand, and Haroun’s eyes
almost fell out of his head. Tiny birds were walking about on Iff’s palm; and pecking at it, and flapping their miniature
wings to hover just above it. And as well as birds there were fabulous winged creatures out of legends: an Assyrian lion
with the head of a bearded man and a pair of large hairy wings growing out of its flanks; and winged monkeys, flying
saucers, tiny angels, levitating (and apparently air-breathing) fish. ‘What’s your pleasure, select, choose,’ Iff urged.
And although it seemed obvious to Haroun that these magical creatures were so small that they couldn’t possibly have
carried so much as a bitten-off fingernail, he decided not to argue and pointed at a tiny crested bird that was giving him
a sidelong look through one highly intelligent eye.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie, Granta & Penguin,
1990.]
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘To give a thing a name, a
label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the
Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way
of bringing the said thing into being’, Therefore, option (D) is the
correct answer.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
As per the given passage, Iff gives a number of examples of a
similar type in order to explain his argument. Therefore, option (B)
is the correct answer.
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
Refer to these lines of the passage: ‘How much have you seen,
eh? Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And
submarines? Huh? Also, hailstones, baseballs, pagodas?
Goldmines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And in
the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in
your own eves and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a
mess’ The underlined sentence implies that one should not rely
solely on what she/he can see with his own eyes. Therefore,
option (A) is the correct answer.
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
Levitate, fly and hover are synonyms. And ‘gander’ means to look
at something. Therefore, option (D) is the correct answer.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
In the context of the given passage, ‘fabulous’ means mythical.
IV. The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social
connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public
LiveJournal. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per
post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—
this feverish, electric, unliveable hell.
The curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012.
People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become
tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring
circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted
complaints at airlines and moaned about articles that had been commissioned to make people moan. The dream of a
better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now
chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing
mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in
the realm of misuse.
Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to
glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living
life and be visible to other people. But on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate
in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal
profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this
communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then
overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-travelled on Instagram; why everyone seems so
smug and triumphant on Facebook; and why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for
many people, like a political good in itself. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this
architecture, which positions personal identity as the centre of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout
that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, by Jia Tolentino, Random House,
2019.]
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
Refer to, “By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would
attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m
thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its
mazes of incessant forced connection— this feverish, electric,
unliveable hell.”
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
Refer to the 2nd paragraph. The cat videos are devoid of truism.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
We browse the internet according to our needs. Whatever we
want to see, whatever reflection we desire. And the internet
exactly does that. It customises our viewing experiences.
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
a, b and c are examples of metaphors
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
This is a non-fiction essay educating us about the ills of internet.
V. Until the Keeladi site was discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic plains in the north
urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu. Historians have often claimed that large scale town life in India first
developed in the Greater Magadha region of the Gangetic basin. This was during the ‘second urbanisation’ phase. The
‘first urbanisation phase’ refers to the rise of the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. Tamil Nadu was thought to have
urbanised at this scale only by the third century BCE. The findings at Keeladi push that date back significantly. ...
Based on linguistics and continuity in cultural legacies, connections between the Indus Valley Civilisation, or IVC, and
old Tamil traditions have long been suggested, but concrete archaeological evidence remained absent. Evidence
indicated similarities between graffiti found in Keeladi and symbols associated with the IVC. It bolstered the arguments
of dissidents from the dominant North Indian imagination, who have argued for years that their ancestors existed
contemporaneously with the IVC. ... All the archaeologists I spoke to said it was too soon to make definitive links
between the Keeladi site and the IVC. There is no doubt, however, that the discovery at Keeladi has changed the
paradigm. In recent years, the results of any new research on early India have invited keen political interest, because
proponents of Hindu nationalism support the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation.
... The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility
that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered ‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That
wasn’t all. In subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi
script used for writing inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be dated back to the sixth
century BCE, likely a hundred years before previously thought. So not only had urban life thrived in the Tamil lands, but
people who lived there had developed their own script. “The evolution of writing is attributed to Ashoka’s edicts, but
2600 years ago writing was prevalent in Keeladi,” Mathan Karuppiah, a proud Madurai local, told me. “A farmer could
write his own name on a pot he owned. The fight going on here is ‘You are not the one to teach me to write, I have learnt
it myself.’ “
[Excerpted from “The Dig”, by Sowmiya Ashok, Fifty-Two]
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
Bases on the first line of the passage, ‘Until the Keeladi site was
discovered, archaeologists by and large believed that the Gangetic
plains in the north urbanised significantly earlier than Tamil Nadu.
Historians’ Option (A) is the correct choice.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
The passage states that, ‘There is no doubt, however, that the
discovery at Keeladi has changed the paradigm. In recent years,
the results of any new research on early India have invited keen
political interest, because proponents of Hindu nationalism support
the notion of Vedic culture as fundamental to the origins of Indian
civilisation. ... The Keeladi excavations further challenge the idea
of a single fountainhead of Indian life. They indicate the possibility
that the earliest identity that can recognisably be considered
‘Indian’ might not have originated in North India. That wasn’t all. In
subsequent seasons of the Keeladi dig, archaeologists discovered
that Tamili, a variant of the Brahmi script used for writing
inscriptions in the early iterations of the Tamil language, could be
dated back to the sixth century BCE, likely a hundred years before
previously thought.” If we look at the quoted line in this context,
Option (C) is the correct choice.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
Option c is the correct choice since it also validates the theme of
the passage, that the findings question the jingoism of North
Indians claiming themselves to be first originators of urban life in
India.
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
Option a is the factually correct answer among the given options.
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
The previously held theory that Ashoka’s edicts had evolved
writing has an elitist background. But with the quote it is clear that
Keeladi provided access irrespective of social position. Thus
option (B) is the correct choice.
VI. Down by the sandy banks of the Yamuna River, the men must work quickly. At a little past 12 a.m. one humid night in
May, they pull back the black plastic tarp covering three boreholes sunk deep in the ground. They then drag thick
hoses toward a queue of 20-odd tanker trucks idling quietly with their headlights turned off. The men work in a team:
While one man fits a hose’s mouth over a borehole, another clambers atop a truck at the front of the line and shoves
the tube’s opposite end into the empty steel cistern attached to the vehicle’s creaky frame. ‘On kar!’ someone shouts
in Hinglish; almost instantly, his orders to ‘switch it on’ are obeyed. Diesel generators, housed in nearby sheds, begin
to thrum. Submersible pumps, installed in the borehole’s shafts, drone as they disgorge thousands of gallons of
groundwater from deep in the earth. The liquid gushes through the hoses and into the trucks’ tanks. The full trucks
don’t wait around. As the hose team continues its work, drivers nose down a rutted dirt path until they reach a nearby
highway. There, they turn on their lights and pick up speed, rushing to sell their bounty to factories and hospitals,
malls and hotels, apartments and hutments across this city of 25 million. Everything about this business is illegal: the
boreholes dug without permission, the trucks operating without permits, the water sold without testing or treatment.
‘Water work is night work,’ says a middle-aged neighbour who lives near the covert pumping station and requested
anonymity. ‘Bosses arrange buyers, labour fills tankers, the police look the other way, and the muscle makes sure
that no one says nothing to nobody.’ Teams like this one are ubiquitous in Delhi, where the official water supply falls
short of the city’s needs. A quarter of Delhi’s households live without a piped-water connection: most of the rest receive
water for only a few hours each day. So residents have come to rely on private truck owners—the most visible strands
of a dispersed web of city councillors, farmers, real estate agents, and fixers who source millions of gallons of water
each day from illicit boreholes, and sell the liquid for profit. The entrenched system has a local moniker: the watertanker
mafia. A 2013 audit found that the city loses 60 percent of its water supply to leakages, theft, and a failure to
collect revenue. The mafia defends its work as a community service, but there is a much darker picture of Delhi’s
subversive water industry: one of a thriving black market populated by small-time freelance agents who are exploiting
a fast-depleting common resource and in turn threatening India’s long-term water security.
[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from: “At the Mercy of the Water Mafia”, by Aman Sethi, Foreign Policy]
Correct Answer
b
Explanation
The author mentions in the passage that the water is being sold
‘without testing or treatment’. Therefore, option (B) is true. The
other options cannot be corroborated in the light of the passage.
Correct Answer
a
Explanation
‘Entrenched’ refers to something that is well established. So,
option (A) is the most appropriate answer.
Correct Answer
c
Explanation
The author mentions that water is fast depleting resource.
Therefore, it is not at all acceptable that this precious resource is
sold illegally. So, option (C) is the main concern of the author.
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
The author refers to the vehicle’s creaky frame when the water
is filled. The diesel generators thrum and the submersible pumps
drone. Therefore, the words refer to the sounds that are created
while the water is smuggled/filled. The word ‘gushing’ refers to a
liquid that flows out of something in a rapid and plentiful stream. It
is not a sound as such. Therefore, option (D) is the answer.
Correct Answer
d
Explanation
‘Covert’ refers to something that is not openly acknowledged.
Therefore, ‘hidden’ and ‘covert’ are synonyms.