THE QUALITIES THAT I LIKE MOST IN MEN (OR) MY IDEA OF A GENTLEMAN

THE QUALITIES THAT I LIKE MOST IN MEN (OR)

MY IDEA OF A GENTLEMAN 

Outline:Introduction kindness - courtesy - humour-unselfishness and helpfulness - chivalry -tolerance - sincerity and loyalty-conclusion

There are several qualities that make a man lovable. One of the most important of these is kindliness. Everyone appreciates a person who is gentle and kind. Kindliness springs from selflessness, a sort of consideration for others feelings.

Courtesy is another quality for which a man is liked wherever he goes. Rude and tactless people will be shunned and disliked. They will find themselves unable to make friends.

Humour is a quality which is not very common. A sense of humour helps to make life pleasant. No one can be humorous unless he is cheerful. Smiling and cheerful people are much sought after. They are like a ray of sunshine in people's lives. In their presence troubles vanish and the world becomes a better place to live in.

Selflessness and helpfulness are other qualities which I like and admire a great deal. The unselfish man has no thought to spare for himself. He works for the welfare of others. He goes out of his way to help people get out of their difficulties or to lessen their distress.

Chivalry is another quality which is admirable but rather rare nowadays. Chivalry makes a man defend the case of the weak and oppressed. In a world where might is right, chivalry is sorely missed.

Tolerance, or the quality which makes us put up with the defects of others. is also an uncommon quality. Fault - finding and criticism are very common So the tolerant man is as rare as a precious gem.

Sincerity and loyalty to one's friends are qualities to be much admired. Never allowing our friends to be attacked, either in their presence or in their absence, shows how loyal we are to them. Sincerity makes us straightforward in speech and action. We will not stoop to meanness of any kind. Lastly a strict sense of justice is an admirable quality. It makes us ensure that no harm is done, that no one is treated unfairly or unjustly, it will make us bum at the knowledge of injustice and we shall never be able to rest until justice is done to those who are wronged. 

To my mind, to be a real man, a thorough gentleman, one must necessarily possess each of the above mentioned qualities in good measure. 

Difficult Words: Kindliness - kindness, appreciation - feels that a thing is good. courtesy - politeness, vanish - go out of sight: disappear, admire - look upon with wonder and pleasure. chivalry - courage, politeness, generosity - character knight of the middle ages, tolerance - act of allowing others to think or act as they please, even when they seem to be wrong, admirable - wonderful. uncommon - Unusual. stoop - bend the body forward and down.

Essay: Life in an Indian Village.

Essay: Life in an Indian Village.

Outline: How I happened to visit a village - it was a typical Indian village - the drawbacks of village life - its attractions - compensations.

Two of my classmates hail from a village in Maharashtra. Last year they invited me to spend some of my summer holidays with them, I accepted the invitation and stayed with them for a week. It was my first experience of village life, and it was most delightful and educational.

I believe that my friends' village is representative of rural India, where 75 percent of the Indian population lives. It is backward in several respects: yet it has benefited from the not so recent Five - Year Plans and Community Projects. It has a Primary School, a dispensary, and it is connected with a railway station by a motorable road. Hence, in describing my impressions of this village, I am recording my response to rural India which represents the real India.

Life in this village seemed to be drab, monotonous and tagnant. I felt intellectually starved, as there were no books and the daily newspaper came in the evening, Nor were there places of entertainment like clubs, cinema. houses, and decent restaurants. Several localities and roads were dusty and unclean. I was appalled at the poverty of many of the villagers who constantly borrowed money from the local money - lenders at an exorbitant rate of interest. They lived in mud - houses which were dimly lit by oil lamps after evening, as the village had no electricity yet. I realised that our much - haunted rural uplift programmes had little actual impact on village life. Too weak and ignorant to raise a voice of protest, the villagers had resigned themselves to their fate. I remembered the lines from Grey Chill Penury repressed their noble rage And froze the genial current of their soul.

But there were redeeming features - compensations. Here we were free from what Mathew Arnold calls this strange disease of modern life-the sick hurry, the hustle and bustle, and the tension and anxiety of city life. You did not have to make frantic efforts to catch the train or stand in a long queue to board a bus. You were not jammed in over - crowded suburban trains and jostled by milling crowds on railway platforms. There was no noise made by cars, lorries, and factories. Outside the village the air was pure and the landscape beautiful. Fields of wheat and paddy stretched endlessly enclosed on the horizon by green wavy hills. A river flows through the village and we spend our evenings on its wide sandy bank, chatting or playing games. I felt refreshed by an intimate contact with Nature

The villagers - most of whom were farmers - were industrious, and fundamentally honest and religious. For all their lack of education and sophistication, they had a native shrewdness and wisdom and the traditional culture of India. Anyway, I left the village with the conviction that rural development should be given the highest priority in India. 

Difficult Words: Drab - dull.  appalled - greatly dismayed or horrified. exorbitant - too high, haunted - proudly displayed or praised, fate - the development of events beyond a person's control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power.  penury - poverty. jostled - push, elbow, or bump against (someone) roughly, typically in a crowd. milling - moving confusedly in a mass. frantic - wild or distraught with fear, anxiety, or other emotion. sophistication - refinement. priority - claim to consideration. industrious - diligent and hard-working. shrewdness - the quality of having or showing good powers of judgement.

Essay: Gifts

Essay: Gifts

Outline: A donation, a dole etc. are not gifts - nor are wedding and birthday presents true gifts - a gift must reflect the tastes of the recipient - giving gifts is a complicated business - the nature of a true gift summed up. 

There are gifts that are no gifts, just as there are books that are no books. A donation is not a gift. A portrait painted, a teapot presented by subscription, is not a gift. The true gift is from one to one. Furthermore, tea, sugar, and clothes are not gifts. If I bestow these conveniences on one old woman, she may regard them in that aspect; but if I bestow them on eleven others at the same time, she looks upon them as her right. By giving more I have given less. The dole is no more like the gift than charity is like love. A thousand rupee cheque on the occasion of a marriage is not a gift; it is a transfer of property. 

In fact, presents given or received on occasions like birthdays and weddings are not true gifts. In many cases, they signify not love but respect or convention. Secondly, a person receives too many presents on such an occasion. It is not within the bounds of possibility that a human being can appreciate more than, say, fifty presents at a time. As a lily blooming in winter, so is the unexpected gift. But the gift that arrives by tens and tens is a nightmare and an oppression. 

A gift - to be a gift - must not be asked for. If it is asked for it ceases to be an expression of love and becomes a commercial transaction. A gift should reflect the personality and preference not only of the giver but on the recipient. If I love reading, I should not present my friend who is a sportsman with voluminous books. 

It is a complicated business altogether. Three minutes of serious thinking makes it impossible for anyone to give anyone anything. Yet the deed is done every year boldly and openly, and few are aware that they have undertaken a more delicate transaction than the robbery of a bank in broad daylight. A true gift, then, is a symbol of love and affection. It is spontaneous, unexpected, rare, and surprising. It need not be spectacular and expensive. In many cases, the smaller, the more insignificant the gift, the longer it is remembered, There may be many motives for keeping the Golden Rose; there can be one for keeping a rose - leaf. As an ancient writer has said, "Great grace goes with the little gift, and all the offerings of friends and precious."

Difficult Words: Subscription - contribution. Dole - Food etc. distributed to poor people. 

Essay: Those People, Next Door

Essay: Those People, Next Door

Outline: People in cities do not know their neighbours - villagers known all about their neighbours - we tend to think ill of our neighbours - we must remember that we ourselves are neighbours to others. 

We who live in the cities all have neighbours, and for the most part 'thin partitions do our realms divide'. It is true that, however thin the walls, we seldom know our neighbours. If the man who has lived next door to me in a suburb of Mumbai for the last half - dozen years came and sat down beside me in a restaurant, I should not, as the saying is, know him from Adam. In this vast whirlpool of Mumbai he goes his way and I mine, and our paths are not likely to cross though we go on living beside each other. 

I do not know whether he is short or tall, old or young, or anything about him, and I am sure he is in the same state of contented ignorance about me. Our intercourse is limited to the noises we make with the piano, the radio, the television and so on. When he has friends to visit him we learn something about him from the sounds they make, the music they play, and the time they go away (often inexcusable late). But apart from that vague intimation, my neighbor might be living on Mars or on the moon. Perhaps some day his house (or mine) will be on fire, and then I dare say we shall become acquainted. But apart from such catastrophe as this there seems no reason why we should ever exchange a word on this side of the grave. 

It is not pride or incivility on either side that keeps us remote from each other. It is simply our way of living in a metropolis. People are so plentiful that they lose their identity. In villages and small towns a person knows all about his neighbour, his affairs, his family, his calling, and his habits. Neighbours commonly borrow from one another all sorts of things they need - newspapers, sugar, milk and so forth. This is not always so desirable as it seems. Village life can be poisoned by neighbours until the victim pines for the solitude of a city street, where neighbours are so plentiful that you are no more conscious of their individual existence than if they were blackberries on a hedgerow. 

On the occasions when we become acutely conscious of our neighbours, the temptation is to think ill of them. They always manage to be gay when you are sleepy. If they are not guilty of criminal waste, they can be convicted of shabby parsimony. They either dress too luxuriously or do not dress luxuriously enough for the decencies of the neighbourhood. Their habits and their friends, the music they play, the pets that they keep, the newspapers they read - all these things confirm our darkest fears. It is possible to believe anything about them - especially the worst. What are those sudden shrieks and gusts of laughter? Is there not an alcoholic suggestion about such undisciplined hilarity?

The truth is that we know too much about our neighbours, and do not know enough. They are revealed to us in fragments, and in putting the fragments together we do not spare them. There is nothing so misleading as half-heard and half-understood scraps. The curious thing about those people next door is that, if you ever come to know them, you find they are not a bit like what you thought they were. You find to your astonishment that they have redeeming features. Perhaps they find that we have redeeming features, too. For the chastening truth is that we all play the role of those people next door to somebody. We are all being judged, and generally very unfavourable judged, on evidence which, if we knew it, would greatly astonish us. It might help us to be a little more charitable about those people next door if we occasionally remembered that we are those people next door ourselves. 

Difficult words: Know him from adam - recognize or identify him. catastrophe - calamity, pine for - long for. parsimony - miserliness. hilarity - merriment. fragments - pieces chastening - which corrects us by punishing or humbling us.