English Holiday Homework

1)”When people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is
as if they had the key to their prison.”
Prepare a write-up taking examples from history where a conquered people
had their language taken away from them or had a language imposed on
them.

Answer:
When people are enslaved they get all of their rights taken away from them and the most
important right which is taken from them is the freedom of speaking their language.The
prime example of a language being imposed on people of a different country is India and
Britain. When Britain came to India they were traders by nature and nobody knew that the
Britishers would start ruling our country.There were many rights that were taken from the
Indians but the most important one was their language being taken away from them. The
Indians were not allowed to speak their language publically and they were not allowed to
print newspapers in their native language and the schools in India were also forced to teach
English instead of Hindi.
The Indians also had to stop writing texts in native languages and start writing texts in
English. Indians had a lot of problems when they couldn’t express their feelings in their
native language because not everyone was educated at that point of time and English was a
totally different language for them.

2)The beauty of the glass bangles of Firozabad contrasts with the misery of
people who
produce them
This paradox is also found in some other situations, for example, those who
work in gold and
diamond mines, or carpet weaving factories, and the products of their labour,
the lives of
construction workers, and the buildings they build.
• Look around and find examples of such paradoxes.
• Write a paragraph of about 200 to 250 words on any one of them. You can
start by making
notes.
Here is an example of how one such paragraph may begin:
You never see the poor in this town. By day they toil, working cranes and
earthmovers,
squirreling deep into the hot sand to lay the foundations of chrome. By night
they are
banished to bleak labour camps at the outskirts of the city.

Answer:
The paradoxes of such kind can be found in large numbers in our daily life. One of the most
common examples is our regular housemaids.They work to make our homes more
comfortable for us, and yet they are never able to achieve the same level of comfort for
themselves. This is due to several reasons such as lack of earnings, societal degradation,
lack of access to facilities, etc. We enjoy the result of their misery and often fail to
acknowledge their services . In fact, we cannot imagine a single day go by without the help
of a housemaid, more specifically in the Indian context. Societal exclusion and degradation
due to the kind of work they do are widely prevalent. Exploitation in the form of less pay for
their services also pushes them further into poverty. Proper access to education and health
is also absent which restricts their children from earning a better livelihood. It is commonly
observed that the girl child of such housemaids is also forced to take up the same profession
very young in life, often as young as 8 years old. It is, therefore, a vicious, continuous cycle
of misery, one which is difficult to break.