English: 2013

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was born on 31 October 1795. His poems were not generally well received during his life, his reputation grew after his death. Later he became one of the most beloved of all English poets. Today his poems are some of the most popular in English literature.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of Odes.

After completing hi basic schooling, Keats registered as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital (now part of King’s College, London) and began studying there in October 1815. In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which mrade him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician, and surgeon, but before the end of the year he announced to his guardian that he was resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.

"Ode to Psyche", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were some of his famous Odes.

John Keats died in Rome on 23 February 1821 because of tuberculosis and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.

John Keats' tombstone in Rome

Class IX Unit - IV Glimpses of a Green Planet - Memories of a Dying River (Article)

M. T. Vasudevan Nair

Popularly known as MT, Madathil Thekkepaattu Vasudevan Nair, was born on 15 July 1933, in Kudallur, a small village in the present day Palakkad district. He is well-known as author, screenplay writer and film director. He is one of the most prolific and versatile writers in modern Malayalam literature. His three seminal novels on life in the matriarchal family in Kerala are ‘Naalukettu’, ‘Asuravithu’ and ‘Kaalam’.

He spent his early days in a village called Punnayurkulam in the present day Thrissur district. Nair completed his schooling from Kumaranelloor High School and obtained a degree in chemistry from Victoria College, Palakkad.

In 2005, India's third highest civilian honour Padma Bhushan was awarded to him. He was also awarded the highest literary award in India, 1995 Jnanpith, for his overall contribution to Malayalam literature. His novel Randamoozham (The Second Turn) is widely credited as his masterpiece.

His first short stories were published in several magazines while he was a youth. The first "Valarthumrugangal", in 1953. It was a short story on the pathetic condition of the artists in circus. The noted collections of his stories are ‘Iruttinte Athmavu’, ‘Olavum Theeravum’, ‘Bandhanam’, ‘Varikkuzhi’, ‘Dare-e-Salam’, ‘Swargam Thurakkunna Samayam’, ‘Vaanaprastham’ and ‘Sherlock’. "Iruttinte Athmavu" ("Creature of Darkness"), one of the most celebrated among his short stories, is the heart wrenching story of a 21-year old man, regarded as a lunatic by everyone and treated abominably. The story reveals the insanity behind the civilised and supposedly sane world.

His most famous novels include ‘Naalukettu’, ‘Manju’, ‘Kaalam’, ‘Asuravithu’ and ‘Randamoozham’. His debut novel ‘Naalukettu’ is a veritable depiction of the situation which prevailed in a typical joint family when its fortunes is on a steady decline.

‘Randamoozham’, widely regarded as the author's masterpiece, retells the story of the Mahabharatha from the point of view of Bhimasena. MT's only novel with a female protagonist (Vimala) is ‘Manj’. In the novel ‘Kaalam’, MT returns to his favourite milieu, the dilapidated joint-family Nair tharawad set against the wider backdrop of the Valluvanadan village in the backdrop of the crumbling matrilineal order of Kerala in a newly independent India. MT wrote ‘Arabipponnu’ along with N. P. Mohammed. MT's latest novel is Varanasi (2002) which is an emotional journey to Varanasi.

MT has authored two books on the craft of writing, ’Kaathikante Panippura’ and ‘Kaathikante Kala’. His articles on various topics and speeches on different occasions have been compiled under the titles ‘Kilivaathililude’, ‘Kannanthalippookkalude Kaalam’, ‘Vakkukalude Vismayam’ and ‘Eekakikalude Sabdam’. ‘Manushyar Nizhalukal’ and ‘Aalkkoottathil Thaniye’ are his travelogues.

He served as an Executive Member of the Kendra Sahitya Akademi. He was the editor of Mathrubhumi periodicals and Chief Editor of Mathrubhumi weekly. On 2 June 1996, he was bestowed with honorary D.Lit degree by the Calicut University.

MT joined the Mathrubhumi Group of Publications in 1956. When he retired from there in 1998, he was their editor of periodicals and Chief Editor of Mathrubhumi weekly. On 2 June 1996, he was bestowed with honorary D.Lit degree by the Calicut University. It was M.T who elevated the screenplay writing as a literary form.

He has directed seven films and written the screenplay for around 54 films. He won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay four times for: Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989), Kadavu (1991), Sadayam (1992), and Parinayam (1994), which is the most by anyone in the screenplay category. MT's screenplays have won social attention for the portrayal of the social and cultural crisis in the contemporary life of Kerala. Some of them are Kanyakumari, Varikkuzhi, Vilkkanundu Swapnangal, Edavazhiyile Poocha Mindappoocha, Akshrangal, Aalkkoottathil Thaniye, Aaroodam etc.

In 1973, M. T. Vasudevan Nair made his directorial debut with ‘Nirmalyam’ which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film.

Class IX Unit - IV Glimpses of a Green Planet - To Nature (Poem)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.
He wrote the poems ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria, a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential.
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the country town of Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England. Samuel's father, the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), was a well-respected vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School at Ottery. After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb. From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.
In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Besides the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan and the first part of the narrative poem Christabel. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age.
He died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by a lung disorder.

Class X Unit III Reality to Reel-Sunshine through the Rain (Screenplay)

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is the most well-known of all Japanese film directors. The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th-century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and ju-jitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part II). Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa's career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas -- among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favour with Western audiences, and simultaneously introduced leading man Toshiro Mifune to Western viewers. It was Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. At the same time, American and European filmmakers began taking a serious look at Kurosawa's movies as a source of plot material for their own work -- Rashomon was remade as The Outrage, in a western setting, while Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Seven Samurai (1954) fared best of all, serving as the basis for John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (which had been the original title of Kurosawa's movie), in 1960; the remake actually did better business in Japan than the original film did. In the early 1980s, an unfilmed screenplay of Kurosawa's also served as the basis for Runaway Train (1985), a popular action thriller. Kurosawa's movies subsequent to his period thriller Sanjuro (1962) abandoned the action format in favor of more esoteric and serious drama, including his epic length medical melodrama Red Beard (1965). In recent years, despite ill-health and the problems getting financing for his more ambitious films, Kurosawa has remained the most prominent of Japanese filmmakers. With his Westernized style, Kurosawa has always found a wider audience and more financing opportunities in Europe and America than he has in his own country. His films are frequently copied and remade by American and European filmmakers.
In December 1971, after a period of suffering from mental fatigue and frustrated with a run of unsatisfying and sub par directing work, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrist thirty times with a razor. Fortunately, the wounds were not fatal and he made a full recovery. Because he could not get film financing for a period of time in his career, he directed and even appeared in Japanese television commercials. At over 6' feet tall, he was extremely large by Japanese standards, having stood a head taller than any of his colleagues.
Although the Japanese press tried to paint him as a tyrant, almost all of his casts and crews agreed he was a much more cool and detached presence on sets. Many also described him as "intense".
He was voted the 6th greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly, making him one among only two Asians along with Satyajit Ray (who is ranked in 25th position) on a list of 50 directors and the highest ranking non-American. He was a fan of the films of Satyajit Ray. Kurosawa worshipped legendary American director John Ford, his primary influence as a filmmaker. When the two met, Ford was uncommonly pleasant to the younger Japanese filmmaker and afterwards Kurosawa dressed in a similar fashion to Ford when on film sets.
Although he received an Honorary Award in 1990 "For cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world," he was only nominated once for a Best Director Oscar for Ran (1985). Also, his only film to have ever received the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was for Dersu Uzala (1975), which was also his only film not done in Japanese (it was in Russian).

His Dodes'ka-den (1970), Dersu Uzala (1975) and Kagemusha (1980) were Oscar-nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film". "Dersu Uzala" won. Rashomon (1950) won an Honorary Award as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951.
He was infamous for his perfectionism. Among the related tales are his insisting a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof’s presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train. He also required that all the actors in his period films had to wear their costumes for several weeks, daily, before filming so that they would look lived in.
His family, when traced back a few generations, were samurais from the Akira Prefecture. Kurosawa said later that his father, who was tall, with a commanding presence and worked as a fitness instructor, had a bearing he thought was samurai-like. Unlike his father, Kurosawa himself was never athletically inclined.

Sunday, 11 August 2013

50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous 'I Have a Dream' speech.

See the speech in its full form

Saturday, 10 August 2013

Class VIII Unit III - Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born on November 1667 in Dublin, Ireland. Swift's father died in Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England. He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin.
His uncle Godwin Swift took primary responsibility for the young Jonathan, sending him to Kilkenny College. In 1682 he attended Dublin University from where he received his B.A. in 1686. Swift was studying for his Master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham. Temple was an English diplomat. Gaining the confidence of his employer, Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance. Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.
When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park, he met Esther Johnson, then eight years old, daughter of an impoverished widow who acted as companion to Temple's sister Lady Giffard. Swift acted as her tutor and mentor, giving her the nickname "Stella", and the two maintained a close but ambiguous relationship for the rest of Esther's life.
Swift left Temple in 1690 for Ireland because of his health, but returned to Moor Park the following year. The illness, fits of vertigo or giddiness—now known to be Ménière's disease—would continue to plague Swift throughout his life. During this second stay with Temple, Swift received his M.A. from Hart Hall, Oxford in 1692. Then, apparently despairing of gaining a better position through Temple's patronage, Swift left Moor Park to become an ordained priest in the Established Church of Ireland and in 1694 he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor, with his parish located at Kilroot, near Carrickfergus in County Antrim.
Swift appears to have been miserable in his new position, being isolated in a small, remote community far from the centres of power and influence. Swift left his post and returned to England and Temple's service at Moor Park in 1696, and he remained there until Temple's death. There he was employed in helping to prepare Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time Swift wrote The Battle of the Books, a satire responding to critics of Temple's Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1690).
On 27 January 1699 Temple died. Swift, normally a harsh judge of human nature, said that all that was good and amiable in humankind died with him. He stayed on briefly in England to complete the editing of Temple's memoirs. However, Swift's work made enemies of some of Temple's family and friends, in particular Temple's formidable sister Lady Giffard, who objected to indiscretions included in the memoirs. His next move was to approach King William directly, based on his imagined connection through Temple and a belief that he had been promised a position. This failed so miserably that he accepted the lesser post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland. However, when he reached Ireland he found that the secretaryship had already been given to another. But he soon obtained the living of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan, and the prebend of Dunlavin in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
In February 1702, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Dublin. That spring he traveled to England and returned to Ireland in October, accompanied by Esther Johnson—now twenty years old. There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson nicknamed "Stella". Many, notably his close friend Thomas Sheridan believed that they were secretly married in 1716; others, dismissed the story as absurd.
During his visits to England in these years Swift published A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the In 1711, Swift published the political pamphlet "The Conduct of the Allies," attacking the Whig government for its inability to end the prolonged war with France.
Swift recorded his experiences and thoughts during this difficult time in a long series of letters to Esther Johnson, collected and published after his death as A Journal to Stella.
Once again in Ireland, however, Swift began to turn his pamphleteering skills in support of Irish causes, producing some of his most memorable works: Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier's Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), earning him the status of an Irish patriot. This new role was unwelcome to the Government, which made clumsy attempts to silence him.
During these years, he began writing his masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, better known as Gulliver's Travels. Much of the material reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade. First published in November 1726, it was an immediate hit, with a total of three printings that year and another in early 1727. French, German, and Dutch translations appeared in 1727, and pirated copies were printed in Ireland.

On 28 January 1728, Esther Johnson died; Swift had prayed at her bedside, even composing prayers for her comfort. Swift could not bear to be present at the end, but on the night of her death he began to write his The Death of Mrs. Johnson. He was too ill to attend the funeral at St Patrick's.

Death became a frequent feature in Swift's life from this point. In 1731 he wrote Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, his own obituary published in 1739. In 1738 Swift began to show signs of illness, and in 1742 he may have suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak and realizing his worst fears of becoming mentally disabled. He became increasingly quarrelsome, and long-standing friendships, like that with Thomas Sheridan, ended without sufficient cause. It was long believed by many that Swift was really insane at this point.
In 1742 he suffered great pain from the inflammation of his left eye, which swelled to the size of an egg; five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye. He went a whole year without uttering a word."
On October 19, 1745, Swift died. After being laid out in public view for the people of
Dublin to pay their last respects, he was buried in his own cathedral by Esther Johnson's side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune (twelve thousand pounds)
was left to found a hospital for the mentally ill, originally known as St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in 1757, and which still exists as a psychiatric hospital.

Class VIII Unit III - In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. Landlords expected the children of black sharecroppers to work in the fields at a young age. But mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four.

Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind."

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.

On March 17, 1967, she married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal.

Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. Her 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", published in Ms. magazine, helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston.

In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.

In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple.

The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical.

She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work. She expresses the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history.

Selected awards and honors

Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1967)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
National Book Award for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985.
Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995)
American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997)
The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts
The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters
The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York
Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006)
Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007)
The LennonOno Grant for Peace (2010)

Novels and short story collections

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
Meridian (1976)
The Color Purple (1982)
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
To Hell With Dying (1988)
The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
Finding the Green Stone (1991)
Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
The Complete Stories (1994)
By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998)
The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000)
Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005)
Everyday Use (1973). Short stories, essays, interviews

Poetry collections

Once (1968)
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985)
Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991)
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003)
A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003)
Collected Poems (2005)
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
Non-fiction books[edit source | editbeta]
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Living by the Word (1988)
Warrior Marks (1993)
The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure (1997)
Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)
Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001)
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006)
Overcoming Speechlessness (2010)
Chicken Chronicles, A Memoir (2011)

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Class IX Unit - III Tales of Toil - Follower

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge on 13 April, 1939, he now resides in Dublin.
He was the first of nine children. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away, which is now the family home.
Heaney initially attended Anahorish Primary School, and when he was twelve years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a Roman Catholic boarding school situated in Derry. Heaney’s brother, Christopher, was killed in a road accident at the age of four, while Heaney was studying at St. Columb’s. The poems “Mid-Term Break” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore” focus on his brother’s death.
Other awards that Heaney has received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Heaney's literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. On 6 June 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

Poems for Collection

Collection of Poems Highlighting the Labour Power of the People

The People
I recall that man and not two centuries
have passed since I saw him,
he went neither by horse nor by carriage:
purely on foot
he outstripped
distances,
and carried no sword or armour,
only nets on his shoulder,
axe or hammer or spade,
never fighting the rest of his species:
his exploits were with water and earth,
with wheat so that it turned into bread,
with giant trees to render them wood,
with walls to open up doors,
with sand to construct the walls,
and with ocean for it to bear.
I knew him and he is still not cancelled in me.
The carriages fell to pieces,
war destroyed doors and walls,
the city was a handful of ashes,
all the clothes turned to dust,
and he remains to me,
he survives in the sand,
when everything before
seemed imperishable but him.
......................................................................
.....................................................................
‘All will be gone, you will live on,
You ignite life.
You made what is yours.’
So let no one trouble themselves when
I seem to be alone and am not alone,
I am with no one and speak for them all:
Some listen to me, without knowing,
but those I sing, those who do know
go on being born, and will fill up the Earth.

Coromandel Fishers - Sarojini Naidu
Rise, brothers, rise; the wakening skies pray to the morning light,
The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night.
Come, let us gather our nets from the shore and set our catamarans free,
To capture the leaping wealth of the tide, for we are the kings of the sea!
No longer delay, let us hasten away in the track of the seagull’s call,
The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother, the waves are our comrades all.
What though we toss at the fall of the sun where the hand of the sea-god drives?
He who holds the storm by the hair, will hide in his breast our lives.
Sweet is the shade of the coconut glade, and the scent of the mango grove,
And sweet are the sands at the full o’ the moon with the sound of the voices we love;
But sweeter, O brothers, the kiss of the spray and the dance of the wild foam’s glee;
Row, brothers, row to the edge of the verge, where the low sky mates with the sea.

The Workman’s Square Deal

What does the workman want?

He wants his own,

The honest share of what his hands produce,

He craves no charity and begs no bone,

But only asks for freedom from abuse.

He wants fair play and equal rights

And equal chance for all,

And privilege for none to steal or slay

Or force his weaker brother to the wall.

What does the workman want?

He wants his right,

Against the vain traditions of the law,

Against the sophistries of age and might,

Against religion's oft mistaken awe.

The workman wants the reign of commonsense,

He wants the true democracy of man,

Not any patronage nor all pretence,

Will hold him long to any other plan.

The common welfare is the workman's goal,

The common use of all the commonwealth,

The common rights of every common soul.

And common access to the springs of health.

And everyone a worker by and by,

His own employer, his own king and priest,

Nor any rich nor poor, nor low nor high,

When all the world monopolies have ceased.

Work

We work harder and harder for less and less pay

We sweat in their factories from dawn to the end of the day

The threads they have broken are the threads that we weave

The lies they have told us will not be believed

We make more than they can use we get less than we need

The wheels run faster and faster driven by their endless greed

Who owns the hours stolen from us?

The time they have taken will be reclaimed by us

They build their machines shining and new

Machines must be built no matter whose work they will do

The wheel on their leash the computer on their rein

So much human potential burned up in pain

They steal our leisure they steal our youth

They steal our future they tarnish the truth

They are thieves in the night - they’ve even stolen the sun

But we’ll be there waiting the next time they come

പടയാളികള്‍ - വൈലോപ്പിള്ളി

പാതിരാക്കോഴി വിളിപ്പതും കേള്‍ക്കാതെ

പാടത്തു പുഞ്ചയ്ക്കു തേവുന്നു രണ്ടുപേര്‍;
ഒന്നൊരു വേട്ടുവന്‍, മറ്റേതവന്‍ വേട്ട
പെണ്ണിവര്‍ പാരിന്റെ പാദം പണിയുവോര്‍;
ഭൂതംകണക്കിനേ മൂടല്‍മഞ്ഞഭ്രവും
ഭൂമിയും മുട്ടിപ്പരന്നുനിന്നീടവേ,
തങ്ങളില്‍ തന്നേയടങ്ങി, നിലാവത്തു
തെങ്ങുകള്‍ നിന്ന നിലയ്ക്കുറങ്ങീടവേ,
ഈയര്‍ദ്ധനഗ്നരാം ദമ്പതിമാര്‍കളോ
പാടത്തു പുഞ്ചയ്ക്കു പാരണ നല്‍കയാം.
തേക്കൊട്ട മുങ്ങിയും പൊങ്ങിയും തേങ്ങുമ്പൊ-
ഴീക്കൂട്ടര്‍ പാടുമത്യുച്ചമാം പാട്ടുകള്‍,
ഗദ്ഗദരുദ്ധമാം രോദനംപോലവേ,
ദുഃഖിതരായി ശ്രവിക്കുന്നു ദിക്കുകള്‍!
നല്‍ത്തുലാവര്‍ഷവും കാത്തിരുന്നങ്ങനെ
പാര്‍ത്തലം വൃശ്ചികം പാടേ കടന്നുപോയ്.
നാലഞ്ചു തുള്ളിയേ നാകമുതിര്‍ത്തുള്ളൂ
നാനാചരാചരദാഹം കെടുത്തുവാന്‍.
വര്‍ദ്ധിച്ച താപേന വന്‍മരുഭൂവിലെ-
യധ്വഗര്‍പോലെത്തുമോരോ ദിനങ്ങളും
പാടത്തെ വെള്ളം കുടിച്ചു വറ്റിക്കയാല്‍
വാടിത്തുടങ്ങീതു വാരിളം നെല്ലുകള്‍.
തൈത്തലയെല്ലാം വിളര്‍ത്തു, മുളകിന്റെ
കൈത്തിരി തീരെക്കൊളുത്താതെ വീണുപോയ്!
കാര്‍മണ്ഡലത്തെ പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കുമൂഴിയെ-
പ്പാഴ്മഞ്ഞുതിര്‍ത്തു ഹസിക്കയാം വിണ്ടലം!
ഹാ കഷ്ട,മെങ്ങനെ മര്‍ത്ത്യന്‍ സഹിക്കുമീ
മൂകപ്രകൃതിതന്നന്ധമാം ക്രൂരത?
ഇപ്പെരും ക്രൂരതയോടു പോരാടുവോ-
രിപ്പൊഴും പുഞ്ചയ്ക്കു തേവുമീ വേട്ടുവര്‍;
പഞ്ചഭൂതങ്ങളോടങ്കമാടീടുമീ-
പ്പഞ്ചമരത്രേ പെരും പടയാളികള്‍.
മാലോകര്‍ തുഷ്ടിയാം തൊട്ടിലില്‍, നിദ്രതന്‍-
താലോലമേറ്റു മയങ്ങിക്കിടക്കവേ,
തന്‍ജീവരക്തമൊഴുക്കുന്നു പാടത്തു
തണ്ണീരിലൂടെയിദ്ധീരനാം പുരുഷന്‍.
കാന്തന്റെ തേരിന്‍ കടിഞ്ഞാണ്‍ പിടിക്കുന്നു
താന്‍തന്നെ തേവിക്കൊടുക്കുമിപ്പെണ്‍കൊടി
പാട്ടുകള്‍ പാടിക്കെടുത്തുന്നു തന്വംഗി
കൂട്ടുകാരന്റെ തണുപ്പും തളര്‍ച്ചയും.
പാടുകയാണിവള്‍ പാലാട്ടുകോമന്റെ
നീടുറ്റ വാളിന്‍നിണപ്പുഴക്കേളികള്‍.
ആരാണു വീറോടു പോരാടുമീ രണ്ടു
പോരാളിമാര്‍കളെപ്പാടിപ്പുകഴ്ത്തുവാന്‍?

സന്താള്‍നര്‍ത്തകര്‍ - ഒ.എന്‍.വി.
ആടുന്നു സന്താള്‍നര്‍ത്തക-
രാടുന്നു, തീ കടയുന്നൊരു
കാടുകളുടെ കരളു മിടിപ്പതു
കാണുന്നു ഞാനെന്‍ മുന്നില്‍.
ധിംധിം ധിമി ധിം ധിമിധിം..... ദ്രുത-
താളത്തില്‍ തളകള്‍ കുലുങ്ങി-
പ്പാടുമ്പോള്‍, കാളിമയാര്‍ന്നൊരു
പാദങ്ങള്‍, കലപില ചൊല്ലി-
പ്പാറും ചെറുപക്ഷികള്‍പോ,ലിരു-
പാടുമുലഞ്ഞാടിവരുന്നൂ!
കാരകിലുടലാര്‍ന്നോരവരെ-
ക്കാണുമ്പോള്‍, സ്മൃതികളില്‍ വീണ്ടും
കാളിയഫണമുന്മദനര്‍ത്തന-
മാടുന്നൂ, കാളിന്ദിത്തിര-
യാടുന്നൂ, മിന്നല്‍ക്കൊടി വന-
മാലയിടും നീലഘനാഘന-
മാടുന്നൂ, തീകടയുന്നൊരു
കാടുകളുടെ കരളു മിടിക്കും
താളം ധിംധിംധിമി ധിംധിമി
താളം ഞാന്‍ മുന്നില്‍ കാണ്‍മൂ!
മലകളില്‍നിന്നരുവികള്‍പോലെ
അവര്‍ താഴേയ്‌ക്കൊഴുകിവരുന്നൂ.
മുകിലിന്‍ മുലഞെട്ടില്‍നിന്നും
മഴനീരുകണക്കെവരുന്നൂ.
കുഴലുകള്‍, പുല്‍ത്തണ്ടുകള്‍, ചെണ്ടകള്‍,
കുടമണികള്‍, തപ്പുകള്‍, തളകള്‍,
ഇടയിടെ വായ്ത്താരികള്‍, ഇവ ചേര്‍-
ന്നൊരു പ്രാകൃതമദ്യത്തിന്‍ ചൂടു-
ലഹരി പകര്‍ന്നൊഴുകി വരുന്നൂ;
സിരകളിലേക്കൊഴുകിവരുന്നൂ!
കാട്ടുകടന്നലുകള്‍ പൊന്‍മെഴു-
പാത്രങ്ങളില്‍ വാറ്റിയൊരുക്കിയ
പൂവുകള്‍തന്‍ രക്തംപോലെ,
കാവുകള്‍ തന്‍ കണ്ണീര്‍പോലെ
കാടുകളുടെ കരളിലിരിക്കും
കാളിക്കകമുരുകിയപോലെ,
അവരൊഴുകിവരുന്നൂ നഗര-
പ്പെരുവഴികള്‍ നടുങ്ങിയുണര്‍ന്നു
ആടുന്നൂ സന്താള്‍നര്‍ത്തക-
രാടുന്നൂ, തീകടയുന്നൊരു
കാടുകളുടെ കരളു മിടിപ്പതു
കാണുന്നു ഞാനെന്‍ മുന്നില്‍!

Class IX Unit - III Tales of Toil - The Resignation (Short Story)

Munshi Premchand

Premchand was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani literature.
Born Dhanpat Rai Srivastav, "Munshi Premchand",was a novel writer, story writer and dramatist, and he has been referred to as the "Upanyas Samrat" ("Emperor among Novelists") by some Hindi writers. His works include more than a dozen novels, around 250 short stories, several essays and translations of a number of foreign literary works into Hindi.
Premchand was born on 31 July 1880 in Lamhi, a village located near Varanasi (Benares).
When he was 7 years old, Premchand began his education at a madarsa in Lalpur, located around 2½ km from Lamahi. Premchand learnt Urdu and Persian from a maulvi in the madarsa. When he was 8, his mother died after a long illness. His grandmother, who took the responsibility of raising him, died soon after. Premchand felt isolated, as his elder sister had already been married, and his father was always busy with work. His father, who was now posted at Gorakhpur, re-married, but Premchand received little affection from his step-mother. The step-mother later became a recurring theme in Premchand's works.
He took the job of selling books for a book wholesaler, thus getting the opportunity to read a lot of books. He learnt English at a missionary school, and studied several works of fiction. In 1895, he was married at the age of 15, while still studying in the 9th grade. The match was arranged by his maternal step-grandfather. The girl was from a rich landlord family and was older than Premchand, who found her quarrelsome and not good-looking. In 1900, Premchand secured a job as an assistant teacher at the Government District School, Bahraich, at a monthly salary of 20.
Dhanpat Rai first wrote under the pseudonym "Nawab Rai". His first short novel was Asrar e Ma'abid (Devasthan Rahasya in Hindi, "The Mystery of God's Abode"), which explores corruption among the temple priests and their sexual exploitation of poor women. The novel was published in a series in the Benares-based Urdu weekly Awaz-e-Khalk from 8 October 1903 to February 1905.

Class IX Unit - III Tales of Toil - I am the People, the Mob (Poem)

I am the People, the Mob (Poem)

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Class VI Unit-2 The Friends-The Months

Sara Coleridge

She was an English author and translator. She was the fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah Fricker.
Coleridge was born at Greta Hall, Keswick on 23 December, 1802. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Robert Southey and his wife (Mrs. Coleridge's sister), and Mrs. Lovell (another sister), widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet, all lived together.
Guided by Southey, and with his ample library at her command, she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was twenty five had learnt in addition French, German, Italian and Spanish.
In 1822, Sara Coleridge published Account of the Abipones, a translation in three large volumes of Martin Dobrizhoffer. In 1825 her second work appeared, a translation from the medieval French of the Loyal Serviteur, The Right Joyous and Pleasant History of the Feats, Jests, and Prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and without Reproach: By the Loyal Servant.
In September 1829, at Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, after an engagement of seven years duration, Sara Coleridge was married to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798–1843), younger son of Captain James Coleridge. In 1834 Mrs. Coleridge published her Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme. These were originally written for the instruction of her own children, and became very popular.
In 1837 the Coleridges moved to Chester Place, Regents Park; and in the same year appeared Phantasmion, a Fairy Tale, Sara Coleridge's longest original work, described by critic Mike Ashley as "the first fairytale novel written in English".

Thursday, 11 July 2013

Class VII Unit-2 Children of Paradise-Vanka

Vanka

Class VII Unit-2 Children of Paradise-My Mother

Ann Taylor

She was an English poet and literary critic. In her youth she was a writer of verse for children, for which she achieved long-lasting popularity. In the years immediately preceding her marriage, she became an astringent literary critic of growing reputation. She is, however, best remembered as the elder sister and collaborator of Jane Taylor.
. Ann was born in Islington and lived with her family at first in London and later in Lavenham in Suffolk, in Colchester and, briefly, in Ongar.
The sisters and their authorship of various works have often been confused, usually to Jane's advantage. This is in part because their early works for children were published together and without attribution, but also because Jane, by dying young at the height of her powers, unwittingly attracted early posthumous eulogies, including what is almost a hagiography by her brother Isaac, and much of Ann's work came to be ascribed to Jane.
Ann's poem "The Maniac's Song", published in the Associate Minstrels (1810), was probably the finest short poem by either sister, and it has even been postulated that it was an inspiration for Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci.
Ann also deserves to be remembered as a writer of prose, as evidenced particularly by her autobiography and by the many letters of hers that survive; her style is strong and vivid and, when she is not too preoccupied with moral and religious themes - like her sister Jane, she tended to undue pessimism about her own spiritual worth - it is often shot through with a pleasing, and sometimes acerbic, wit. The Autobiography also provides much detailed and fascinating information about the life of a moderately prosperous dissenting family in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Original poems for Infant Minds by several young persons (by Ann and Jane and others) was first issued in two volumes in 1804 and 1805. Rhymes for the Nursery followed in 1806, and Hymns for Infant Minds in 1808. In Original Poems for Infant Minds the authors were identified for each poem. In Rhymes for the Nursery (1806) poems were not identified by author. Attributions for the sisters' poems can be found in an exceptional Taylor resource: The Taylors of Ongar: An Analytical Bio-Bibliography by Christina Duff Stewart.[3] Stewart cites a copy of Rhymes for the Nursery belonging to a nephew, Canon Isaac Taylor, annotated to indicate the respective authorship of Ann and Jane.
On December 24, 1813, Ann married Joseph Gilbert, an Independent (later Congregational) minister and theologian, and left Ongar to make a new home far from her family, at Masborough near Rotherham.
Kept busy with the duties of wife and later mother, Ann Gilbert still managed to write poems, hymns, essays, and letters. Her interest in public matters, such as atheism, prison reform, and the anti-slavery movement, often spurred her to take up her pen, and the results of those scattered moments found a way into print. Oddly for one of such independence of mind and strongly held and usually liberal opinions, she was firmly opposed to female suffrage.
After Gilbert died on December 12, 1852, Ann found time to write a short memoir of her husband.[4] Nor did she spend the rest of her long life in gentle retirement. As well as actively supporting the members of her large family, through visits and a constant stream of letters - family was always of central concern to the Taylors - she travelled widely in many parts of Britain, taking in her stride as an old lady traveling conditions that might have daunted one much younger. She died on December 20, 1866 and was buried next to her husband in Nottingham General Cemetery.

Sunday, 30 June 2013

Class VIII Unit-2 On Telling a Tale-Matilda (Ballad)

Hilaire Belloc

Belloc was born on 27 July, 1870 in La Celle-Saint-Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was an Anglo-French writer and historian. He was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. He was known as a writer, orator, poet, satirist, man of letters, and political activist. He was President of the Oxford Union and later MP for Salford from 1906 to 1910.
Cloud, France to a French father and an English mother. He grew up in England where much of his boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex, for which he often felt homesick in later life.
His mother Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (1829–1925) was also a writer and a great-granddaughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley.
After being educated at John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Belloc served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891.
After his military service, Belloc proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford, as a History scholar. He went on to obtain first-class honours in History.
He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively in Britain and Europe. While courting his future wife Elodie, whom he first met in 1890, the impecunious Belloc walked a good part of the way from the midwest of the United States to her home in northern California, paying for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry.
In 1896, he married Elodie Hogan, an American. In 1906, he purchased land and a house called King's Land at Shipley, West Sussex, where he brought up his family and lived until shortly before his death. Elodie and Belloc had five children before her 1914 death from influenza. After her death, Belloc wore mourning for the remainder of his life, keeping her room exactly as she had left it.
Belloc suffered a stroke in 1941 and never recovered from its effects. He died on 16 July 1953 in Guildford, Surrey, following a fall he had at King's Land. He is buried at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation of West Grinstead.

Class VIII Unit-2 On Telling a Tale-The Enchanted Shirt (Ballad)

John Hay

John Milton Hay was an American statesman, diplomat, author, journalist, and served as the private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln. Hay's highest office was serving as United States Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
Hay was born in Salem, Indiana,[1] of Scottish ancestry, the third son of Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard from Middleborough, Massachusetts, He was educated first at the private school of the Reverend Stephen Childs, an Episcopal clergyman. In 1851 John went to an academy at Pittsfield in Pike County, where he met an older student, John G. Nicolay, with whom he would later work as private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. In 1852 John Hay went to the college at Springfield, (later known as Carthage College) and in 1855 was sent to Brown University, where he joined Theta Delta Chi. At Brown, he developed an interest in poetry. He left Brown in 1858 before receiving his diploma and went home to Warsaw to study law with his uncle, Milton Hay.
Abraham Lincoln's law office was next door to the law office of Milton Hay, John's uncle, and Lincoln thus became acquainted with John Hay. When Lincoln won election as president, his secretary, John G. Nicolay, recommended John Hay to Lincoln as assistant private secretary. Thus, at age 22 he began a lifelong career in government, except for a stint in journalism from 1870–78. Though technically a clerk in the Interior Department, he served as Lincoln's secretary until 1864.
Hay was present when Lincoln died after being shot at Ford's Theatre. Hay and Nicolay wrote a formal 10-volume biography of Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: A History, 1890) and prepared an edition of his collected works.
Portions of Hay's diaries and letters from 1861–1870, published in the book Lincoln and the Civil War, show Lincoln in a far more intimate light.
In 1870 he left government and worked for 6 years as an editor for the New York Tribune under Whitelaw Reid.

In August 1898, Hay was named by President McKinley as Secretary of State and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris of 1898, which ended the Spanish–American War. Hay continued serving as Secretary of State after Theodore Roosevelt succeeded McKinley, serving until his own death in 1905.

Class VIII Unit-2 On Telling a Tale-I can't Climb Trees any more (short story)

Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent. In 1992, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his short story collection, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, given by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children's literature.
Ruskin Bond was born on 19 July, 1934 in Kasauli to Edith Clerke and Aubrey Bond. His siblings were Ellen and William. Ruskin’s father was with the Royal Air Force. When Bond was four years old, his mother was separated from his father. At the age of ten Ruskin went to live at his grandmother's house in Dehradun after his father's sudden death in 1944 from malaria. Ruskin was raised by his mother, who remarried an Indian businessman. He completed his schooling at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, from where he graduated in 1952 after winning several writing competitions in the school like the Irwin Divinity Prize and the Hailey Literature Prize.
Following his high school education he spent four years in England. In London he started writing his first novel, The Room on the Roof, the semi-autobiographical story of the orphaned Anglo-Indian boy Rusty. It won the 1957 John Llewellyn Rhys prize, awarded to a British Commonwealth writer under 30.
Since 1963 he has lived as a freelance writer in Mussoorie, a town in the Himalayan foothills.He wrote Vagrants in the Valley, as a sequel to The Room on the Roof. These two novels were published in one volume by Penguin India in 1993. The following year a collection of his non-fiction writings, The Best Of Ruskin Bond was published by Penguin India. His interest in the paranormal led him to write popular titles such as Ghost Stories from the Raj, A Season of Ghosts, A Face in the Dark and other Hauntings.
The Indian Council for Child Education recognised his pioneering role in the growth of children's literature in India, and awarded him the Sahitya Academi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He received the Padma Shri in 1999. He has written over three hundred short stories, essays and novels, including Vagrants in The Valley, The Blue Umbrella, Funny Side Up, A Flight of Pigeons and more than 30 books for children. He has also published two volumes of autobiography. Scenes from a Writer's Life describes his formative years growing up in Anglo-India; The Lamp is Lit is a collection of essays and episodes from his journal.
His novel, The Flight of Pigeons, has been adapted into the film Junoon. The Room on the Roof has been adapted into a BBC-produced TV series. Several stories have been incorporated in the school curriculum in India, including "The Night Train at Deoli", "Time Stops at Shamli", and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. In 2007, the Bollywood director Vishal Bharadwaj made a film based on his popular novel for children, The Blue Umbrella. The movie won the National Award for Best Children's film.

Class VIII Unit-2 On Telling a Tale-The Story Teller

Hector Hugh Munro
Hector Hugh Munro better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story.
Born in Akyab, Burma (now Myanmar) on December 18, 1870, Hector Hugh Munro was the son of Charles Augustus Munro and Mary Frances Mercer. Charles Munro was an Inspector-General for the Burmese Police. Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth, Devon and at Bedford School. After the death of his wife Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, to England, where they were brought up by their grandmother and aunts in a strict puritanical household.
In 1893, Hector followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police, where he was posted to Burma. Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.
At the start of World War I, Munro joined 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper, later transferring to 22nd Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, where he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. On November 13, 1916, when sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre he was killed by a German sniper.
He started his career as a journalist, writing for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, Daily Express, Bystander, Morning Post, and Outlook. In 1900, Munro's first book appeared: The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From 1902 to 1908, Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday), and Paris; he then gave that up and settled in London.
Beside his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion of Britain.

Class IX Unit - III Tales of Toil - The Man who Knew Too Much (Short Story)

Alexander Baron

He was a British author and screenwriter. He is best known for his highly acclaimed novel about D-Day entitled From the City from the Plough (1948) and his London novel The Lowlife (1963).
Baron was born in Maidenhead on December 4, 1917, and raised in the Hackney district of London to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. He attended Hackney Downs School.
During the 1930s, with his schoolfriend Ted Willis, Baron was a leading activist and organiser of the Labour League of Youth (at that time aligned with the Communist Party), campaigning against the fascists in the streets of the East End. Baron became increasingly disillusioned with far left politics and finally broke with the communists after the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939.
Baron served in the Pioneer Corps of the British Army during World War II, experiencing fierce fighting in the Italian campaign, Normandy and in Northern France and Belgium. As a pioneer, he was among the first Allied troops to be landed in Sicily, Italy and on D-Day.
He used his wartime experiences as the basis for his three best-selling war novels.[ After the war he became assistant editor of Tribune before publishing his first novel From the City from the Plough (1948). At this time, at the behest of his publisher Jonathan Cape, he also changed his name from Bernstein to Baron.
In the 1950s Baron wrote screenplays for Hollywood, and by the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC's Play for Today. He wrote several episodes of the A Family at War series: 'The Breach in the Dyke' (1970), 'Brothers in War' (1970), 'A Lesson in War' (1970), 'Believed Killed' (1971), 'The Lost Ones' (1971), and 'Two Fathers' (1972). Later he became well known for drama serials like Poldark and A Horseman Riding By, and in the 1980s for BBC classic literary adaptions including Ivanhoe, Sense And Sensibility (1981), Jane Eyre (1983), Oliver Twist (1985) and Vanity Fair (1987). He contributed several episodes to Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984–1985).
Baron's personal papers are held in the archives of the University of Reading. His wartime letters and unpublished memoirs were used by the historian Sean Longden for his book To the Victor the Spoils, a social history of the British Army between D Day and VE Day. Baron has also been the subject of essays by Iain Sinclair and Ken Worpole.
Since Baron's death on December 6, 1999 his novels have been republished several times, testifying to a strong resurgence of interest among in his work among the reading public as well as among critics and academics.

Class IX Unit II Breaking Barriers - Only Daughter (Memoir)

Sandra Cisneros

She is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicana literature.
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 20, 1954, the third born of seven children.
She grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the USA instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries ... but not belonging to either culture. Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty.
Cisneros's childhood loneliness was instrumental in shaping her later passion for writing.Cisneros’s one
strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious reader and more enlightened and socially conscious than her father.
Cisneros was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.
Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counsellor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998 she established the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.

Monday, 24 June 2013

Class X Unit II The World of Mystery-Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat (Poem)

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets. Born in the United States on September 26, 1888, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine. He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.
Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four. Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London.
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Awards
Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)
Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)
Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)
Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)
Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1960)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
Thirteen honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard)
Tony Award in 1950 for Best Play: The Broadway production of The Cocktail Party
Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical Cats
Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him
Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps
A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Class X Unit II The World of Mystery-The Method of Sherlock Holmes (Novel)

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Supported by wealthy uncles, Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine (1868 -1870). He then went on to Stonyhurst College until 1875. From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria.
From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh.While studying, Conan Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine. His first published piece "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879. On 20 September 1879, he published his first non-fiction article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal.
While living in Southsea, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur side, under the pseudonym A. C. Smith. (This club, disbanded in 1896, had no connection with the present-day Portsmouth F.C., which was founded in 1898.) Conan Doyle was also a keen cricketer, and between 1899 and 1907 he played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). His highest score, in 1902 against London County, was 43. He was an occasional bowler who took just one first-class wicket (although one of high pedigree — it was W. G. Grace). Also a keen golfer, Conan Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club, East Sussex for 1910. He moved to Little Windlesham house in Crowborough with his second wife Jean Leckie and their family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.

Class X Unit II The World of Mystery- The Himalayas (Poem)

Sujata Bhatt

She was born in Ahmedabad on 6 May 1956, and brought up in Pune until 1968, when she emigrated to the United States with her family. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa, and for a time was writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin (Dedalus Press, 2007). Bhatt was a visiting fellow at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania and currently works as a freelance writer. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets. Combining both Gujarati and English, Bhatt writes "Indian-English rather than Anglo-Indian poetry." Her poems have appeared in various journals in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and Canada, and have been widely anthologised, as well as being broadcast on British, German, and Dutch radio.
Bhatt now lives in Bremen, Germany with her husband, German writer Michael Augustin, and daughter.
Poetry collections
1988 Bruzinem Carcanet Press
1991 Monkey Shadows Carcanet Press
1995 The Stinking Rose Carcanet Press
1997 Point No Point. Carcanet Press
2000: Augatora. Carcanet Press
2002: The Colour of Solitude (Second edition). Carcanet Press
2008: Pure Lizard. Carcanet Press
Awards
1988 Commonwealth poetry prize (Asia) Brunizem
1988 Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize Brunizem
1991 Poetry Book Society Recommendation Monkey Shadows
1991 Cholmondeley Award
2000 Poetry Book Society Recommendation Aguatora

2000 Tratti Poetry Prize

Pages

Christmas Exam

Labour India Info World

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Sunday, 1 December 2013

Friday, 22 November 2013

Thursday, 31 October 2013

Friday, 25 October 2013

Monday, 21 October 2013

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Friday, 20 September 2013

Tuesday, 10 September 2013