Time Allowed: 3 hours Maximum marks: 300
Candidates should attempt ALL questions:
1.
Write an essay. In about 800 to 1000 words, on
any one of the following topics:
(a)
God Helps Those Who Help Themselves
(b)
Some Major Inventions Which Have transformed the
World
(c)
The game of Cricket and the Media Hype
(d)
One is not Born a Women, One Becomes a Woman
Solving the Problem of Water Scarcity.
(e)
Solving the problem of Water Scarcity
2.
Draft a report for a newspaper on the lack of
civic amenities in your locality.
OR
Write a letter to your friend who lives abroad, describing an election
scene in India. (Sign yourself as X and do not reveal your identity in any
manner.)
3.
Attempt a précis on your own words, reducing the
passage of 595 words to no fewer than 200 words and no more that 230 words.
Mention the exact number of words used. If the précis is not written in the
special précis sheet provided, marks will be reduced.
If you want to do something well, whatever it may be, any kind of work,
the least thing, play a game, write a book, do painting or music or run a race,
anything at ll, if you want to do it well, you must become what you are doing
and not remain a small person looking at himself doing it; for if one looks at
oneself acting, one is still n complicity with the ego. If, in oneself, one
succeeds in becoming what one does, it is a great progress. In the least little
details, one must learn this. Take a very amusing instance: your want to fill a
bottle from another bottle; you concentrate (you must try it as a describe
filled, the bottle from which hone pours, and the movements of pouring as long
as you are only this, all goes well. But if unfortunately you think at a given
moment: “Ah! It is getting on well, I am managing well,” the next minute it
spills over! It is the same for everything, for everything. That is why work is
a good means of discipline, for if you
want to do the work properly, you must become the work instead of being someone
who works, otherwise you will never do it well. If you remain “Someone who
works” and, besides, if your thoughts go vagabonding then you may be sure that
if you are handling fragile thinks, they will break, if you are cooking, you
will burn something or if you are playing a game, you will miss all the balls!
It is here; in this that works is a great discipline. For if truly you want to
do it well, this is the only way of doing it.
Take someone who is writing a book, for
instance. If he looks at himself writing the book, you can’t imagine how dull
the book will become; it smells immediately of the small human personality
which is there and it loses all its value. When a painter paints a picture, if
he observes himself painting the picture, the picture will never be good, it
will always be a kind of projection of the painter’s personality; it will be
without life, without force, without beauty. But, it all of a sudden, he
becomes the thing he wets to express, if he
becomes the brushes, the painting , the canvas, the subject, the image ,
the colours, the value, the whole thing, and is entirely inside it & lives
it, he will make something magnificent.
For everything, everything, it is the same.
There is nothing which cannot be a yogic discipline if one does it property.
And if it is not done properly even taoasya will be of no use and it will lead
you nowhere. For it is the same thing, if you do your tapasya, all the time
observing yourself doing it and telling yourself” “Am I making any progress, is
this going to be better, am I going to succeed?” then it is your ego, you know,
which becomes more and more enormous and occupies the whole place, and there is
no room for anything else.
What
gives one most the feeling of inferiority, of limitation smallness,
impotence, is always this turning back upon oneself, this shutting oneself up
in the bounds of a microscopic ego. One must widen oneself, open the doors. And
the best way is to be able to concentrate upon what one is doing instead of
concentration upon oneself.
