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PERCEPTS ACADEMY - Comprehension 

-Lokendra Chawhan 

Passage 1 :
The distress of sensitive minds, and the zeal for truth, and the sense of the
importance of the issues, must command our sincerest sympathy. When we
consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration
to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this
generation as to the relations between them. We have here the two strongest
general forces (apart from the mere impulse of the various senses) which
influence men, and they seem to be set one against the other — the force of our
religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and
logical deduction.
A great English statesman once advised his countrymen to use large scale maps
as a preservative against alarms, panics, and general misunderstanding of the
true relations between nations. In the same way, in dealing with the clash
between permanent elements of human nature, it is well to map our history on
a large scale, and to disengage ourselves from our immediate absorption in the
present conflicts. When we do this, we immediately discover two great facts. In
the first place, there has always been a conflict between religion and science;
and in the second place, both religion and science have always been in a state
of continual development. In the early days of Christianity there was a general
belief among Christians that the world was coming to an end in the lifetime of
people then living. We can make only indirect inferences as to how far this belief
was authoritatively proclaimed; but it is certain that it was widely held, and that
it formed an impressive part of the popular religious doctrine. The belief proved
itself to be mistaken, and Christian doctrine adjusted itself to the change. Again,
in the early Church, individual theologians very confidently deduced from the
Bible opinions concerning the nature of the physical universe. In the year A.D.
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535, a monk named Cosmas wrote a book which he entitled ​Christian
Topography.​ He was a traveled man who had visited India and Ethiopia; and
finally he lived in a monastery at Alexandria, which was then a great centre of
culture. In this book, basing himself upon the direct meaning of Biblical texts as
construed by him in a literal fashion, he denied the existence of the antipodes,
and asserted that the world is a fiat parallelogram whose length is double its
breadth.

Exercise :
Write Gist in not more than 3 lines
List most important words in the passage
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Passage 2 :
With reference to COVID-19 numbers, there are many speculative reports from government
bodies themselves. For instance, in June, ​a PTI report quoted scientists associated with the
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) saying that the pandemic in India would peak
around November 2020. When ​The Hindu carried the report, the ICMR issued a clarification
on Twitter: “The news reports attributing this study to ICMR are misleading. This refers to a
non-peer reviewed modelling, not carried out by ICMR and does not reflect the official
position of ICMR.” Another report by PTI, “​Facing criticism for ‘under reporting’ of
COVID-19 deaths, Delhi issues SOP for hospitals​” (May 10), flagged the issue of
under-reporting. Since the break of the pandemic, this newspaper has carried analytical
articles as well as ground reports. The ‘Ground Zero’, “​Telangana’s COVID trials and
tribulations​” (July 18), was about lack of transparency of data and inadequate testing. It is in
this context that one has to read the recent op-ed on under-reporting of COVID-19 deaths.

Giridhara R. Babu, Professor of Epidemiology at the Indian Institute of Public Health,

Bengaluru, in his lead article, “​The challenges in counting the dead​” (August 14), explained
the complexities involved in calculating COVID-19 deaths. He wrote: “To obtain unbiased,
reliable estimates, nationally representative verbal autopsy surveys such as the Million Death
Study can be helpful. In the meantime, India has to adopt a strategy of transparency in data
flow and reporting, with increased investments in innovations for improving data collection
and reporting.”
The August 10 article flagged major lacunae in the Indian system of collecting data relating to
death. Critics pointed out that the analysis was based on the MCCD report for 2017 when the
report for 2018 had been released a few weeks prior to the publication of the article. I agree that
the writers should have revised their article based on the latest report; their arguments would have
stood ground even with the 2018 report. The article’s assumption was that COVID-19 death
reporting is similar to non-COVID-19 death reporting in the absence of specific data from the
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Indian government pertaining to COVID-19. This seems to be a fair assumption; they were not
fuelling conspiracy theories.
We have reached a situation where efforts to make sense of numbers, in the absence of rigorous
methods from government institutions, are characterised as partisan readings. In a May 20 report,
"​Is India undercounting its COVID-19 deaths?​", ​The Hindu ​had raised the same question based
on available data. If that report is read along with “​Coronavirus deaths increasing significantly in
several States​” (June 16), it is clear that the problem with the data conundrum lies with the
government and not with researchers who are trying to make sense of numbers by stitching
together pieces of available information. One can differ with the writers’ methodology and their
estimate, which is based on a raw factor of multiplication and could have been refined with other
variables that could affect the count, but that does not diminish their plea for a robust health data
system.

Exercise:
Write Facts most relevant to write gist (3 facts on priority)
Underline/Rewrite most important 3 sentences in the passage
Explain narrative of passage in 2 lines
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Passage 3:
The contrast between Tagore’s commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture, and his
near-total eclipse in the rest of the world, is perhaps less interesting than the distinction
between the view of Tagore as a deeply relevant and many-sided contemporary thinker in
Bangladesh and India, and his image in the West as a repetitive and remote spiritualist.
Graham Greene had, in fact, gone on to explain that he associated Tagore “with what
Chesterton calls ‘the bright pebbly eyes’ of the Theosophists.” Certainly, an air of mysticism
played some part in the “selling” of Rabindranath Tagore to the West by Yeats, Ezra Pound,
and his other early champions. Even Anna Akhmatova, one of Tagore’s few later admirers
(who translated his poems into Russian in the mid-1960s), talks of “that mighty flow of poetry
which takes its strength from Hinduism as from the Ganges, and is called Rabindranath
Tagore.”
Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family – one of the landed gentry who owned estates
mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom there might be in Akhmatova’s
invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of
Bangladesh from having a deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas. Nor did it stop the
newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs – the “Amar Sonar
Bangla” which means “my golden Bengal” – as its national anthem. This must be very
confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations” – with “the
Muslim civilization,” “the Hindu civilization,” and “the Western civilization,” each forcefully
confronting the others. They would also be confused by Rabindranath Tagore’s own
description of his Bengali family as the product of “a confluence of three cultures: Hindu,
Mohammedan, and British”.
Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and
Persian, and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of
Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as
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well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Rabindranath tried to produce – or had an
interest in producing – a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Moghul emperor
Akbar tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently non-sectarian, and his
writings – some two hundred books – show the influence of different parts of the Indian
cultural background as well as of the rest of the world.
Most of his work was written at Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), the small town that grew
around the school he founded in Bengal in 1901, and he not only conceived there an
imaginative and innovative system of education, but through his writings and his influence on
students and teachers, he was able to use the school as a base from which he could take a
major part in India’s social, political, and cultural movements.
The profoundly original writer, whose elegant prose and magical poetry Bengali readers know
well, is not the sermonizing spiritual guru admired – and then rejected – in London. Tagore
was not only an immensely versatile poet; he was also a great short story writer, novelist,
playwright, essayist, and composer of songs, as well as a talented painter whose pictures, with
their mixture of representation and abstraction, are only now beginning to receive the acclaim
that they have long deserved. His essays, moreover, ranged over literature, politics, culture,
social change, religious beliefs, philosophical analysis, international relations, and much else.
The coincidence of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence with the publication of a
selection of Tagore’s letters by Cambridge University Press, brought Tagore’s ideas and
reflections to the fore, which makes it important to examine what kind of leadership in thought
and understanding he provided in the Indian subcontinent in the first half of this century.

Exercise:
What is the central idea of this piece of writing? (2 lines)
Write 1-1 line gist of each paragraph separately
Write gist of this article in 4 lines