Page 165 - DENG401_Advance Communication Skills

Advanced Communication Skills

Notes This was the single lesson my father gave to his family. I hope I have done as well with my
own.
When J was growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, our family was so close it sometimes
felt as if we were one person with four parts.

My parents always made my sister, Delma, and me feel important and special. Nothing
was too much work or too much trouble. My father might have been busy with a dozen
other things but he always had time for us. My mother went out of her way to cook the
foods we loved-just to make us happy. To this day, whenever I come to visit, she still
makes my two favorites-chicken soup with little veal meatballs, and ravioli stuffed with
ricotta cheese. Of all the world’s great Neopolitan cooks, she has to be one of the best.
(From the book ‘IACOCCA’ an autobiography by Lee Iacocca with William Novak)

Questions
1. What was the single lesson that the writer’s father gave to his family?
2. What does the writer say about his childhood memories?

You and I half belong to the servile races. I am sure you know that. I am sure you half
accept that. That is why you have lived as you have lived. The Tamils selling roses in
Berlin belong wholly to the servile races. That idea would have been impressed on them
in all kinds of ways. And that British idea about the servile and the martial races of India
is utterly wrong. The British East India Company army in the north of India was a Hindu
army of the upper castes. This was the army that pushed the boundaries of the British
Empire almost to Afghanistan. But after the great Mutiny of 1857 that Hindu army was
degraded. Further military opportunities’ were denied them. So the warriors who had
won the empire became servile in British propaganda, and the frontier people they had
conquered just before the Mutiny became the martial ones. It is how imperialisms work.
It is what happens to captive people. And since in India we have no idea of history we
quickly forget our past and always believe what we are told. As for the Tamils in the
south, they became dirt in the new British dispensation. They were dark and unwarlike,
good only for labour. They were shipped off as serfs to the plantations in Malaya and
Ceylon and elsewhere.
(From the book ‘Magic Seeds’ by V.S. Naipaul)
Questions

1. Describe how imperialism works?
2. According to the writer to which race does the Tamils belong to?

It was, however, a disturbed sleep, and sometime in the middle of it, I fell to thinking why
the human race, the best of all of God’s creations, has been so deeply divided by violence.
I imagined a conversation between five people who together symbolize the finest attributes
of the human mind and whom I admire deeply. Through their conversation, I sought an
answer. In this experience, much more intense and vivid than a dream, though for want of
a better word I shall term it that, I saw myself in a desert with miles of sand all around.
There was a full moon and the desert was bathed in its light. Five men – Mahatma Gandhi,
Albert Einstein, Emperor Asoka, Abraham Lincoln and Caliph Omar – stood in a circle,
their clothes ruffled by the wind.

Contd...

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