CLASS-12

SUBJECT- ENGLISH
CHAPTER – 2
LOST SPRING
BY
ANEES JUNG
TONE
 MOOD
• The sad reality of the
downtrodden are shown in these
two episodes which makes the
mood little heavy.
• It represents the harsh reality of
child labor, shattered dreams,
broken hearts.
• But still the life goes on this way
and the struggle of living
persists.
 Theme
The theme of the chapter is the
grinding poverty and the traditions
which condemn poor children to a life
of exploitation. The two stories taken
together depict the plight of street
children forced into labor early in life
and denied the opportunity of
schooling.
 CONFLICT
• The ‘Lost Spring’ written by Anees Jung
talks about the national shame of
children being forced to live a life of
poverty and exploitation.
• The main two protagonists of the
chapter, Saheb-e-Alam and Mukesh don’t
live their childhood as they have to carry
the burden of poverty and illiteracy.
• In their miserable stories of
exploitation, the author provides
glimpses of fortitude and resilience.
 CHARACTERS

• Saheb-e-Alam: A rag picker

• Mukesh: Son of a bangle
maker
• Author : Anees Jung
 UNFAMILIAR WORD
MEANINGS

Encounter – meet

Scrounging – searching
for something

Amidst – situated or
located among

Mutters – grumbles

Glibly – without caring

 VALUE POINTS
• The author examines and analyses the
impoverished conditions and traditions that
condemn children to a life of exploitation.
• These children are denied an education and forced
into hardships early in their lives.
• The chapter starts with a casual conversation
between the author and Saheb (the protagonist).
• The writer encounters Saheb – a rag picker whose
parents have left behind the life of poverty in
Dhaka to earn a living in Delhi.
• They lost everything their homes, fields, land etc
in storms.
• Author suggests Saheb to go to school but then
immediately realizes her mistake.
 UNFAMILIAR WORD
MEANINGS
Embarrassed - uncomfortable
Abound – exist in large amount
Bleak – cold and miserable
Saheb – e – Alam – lord of
universe
Roams – an aimless walk
Barefoot – wearing nothing on
the feet
 VALUE POINTS
• Author jokes about opening a school and asks Saheb
will he join if she opens one.
• Saheb smiles and agrees of joining the school
willingly.
• After few days Saheb asks her if her school is ready.
• Author feels embarrassed as the whole world is
filled with promises like her but none fulfilled.
• Author asks his name after months of knowing him.
• Saheb e Alam he announces but he is not aware
about it’s meaning.
• Unaware of what his name represents he roams
about in streets with his friends.
• An army of barefoot boys who appear like morning
birds and disappear at noon.
• Author is concerned about them being barefoot.
 Cont…
• One boy responds that his mother didn’t
bring it down from the shelf.
• Another boy contradicts that then also
he would throw it away even if his
mother gave him the sleepers.
• Another boy expresses his desire to own
a pair of shoes which he never had in his
life.
• Author expresses her views about
children walking barefoot when ever she
travelled across the country.
• It is not lack of money but as if it is a
tradition to stay barefoot.
 UNFAMILIAR WORD MEANINGS

 Excuse – justify
 Perpetual –everlasting
 Briefly – for short time
 Drowned – submerge
 Desolation – sadness, misery
 Panting – out of breath
 Acquaintance – familiarity
 Periphery – borderline, outskirts
 Metaphorically – symbolically
 Squatters – a person who unlawfully
occupies an uninhabited building or
unused land.
 Wilderness – uncultivated
region, wild
 Tarpaulin –heavy-duty waterproof cloth
 Tattered – old and torn
 Pitch – set up, raise
 Transit – transport
 VALUE POINTS
 Author remembers a story about a man from Udipi.
 As a young boy who use to pray briefly at a temple for a
pair of shoes.
 Thirty years later there is another boy who prays for
never loosing his pair of shoes.
 Of course goddess has answered their prayers but there
are still many rag pickers who strive for it.
 Author got in touch with the squatters of Seemapuri who
came from Bangladesh back in 1971.Saheb’s family was
among them.
 Seemapuri was then a wilderness. But it is no more
empty now as it is occupied by 10,000 rag pickers.
 It is filled with structures of mud, with roofs of tin and
tarpaulin, devoid of sewage, drainage or running water.
 They have lived here for more than thirty years without
an identity, without permits but with ration cards that
get their names on voter’s lists that enable them to buy
grain.
Cont…
 Author asked a group of women that why they
left their beautiful land of green fields and rivers.
 They responded that going to bed without an
aching stomach is better than to live on the land
which give no grains.
 Food is more important for survival than an
identity.
 Wherever they find food, they pitch their tents
that become transit homes.
 Children grow up in that and become the part of
rag pickers and that becomes their ultimate
mode of survival.
 Garbage to them is gold. It is their daily bread, a
roof over their heads, even if it is a leaking roof.
 UNFAMILIAR WORD MEANINGS

 Heap – pile, stack

 Wrapped – enfold
 Hums – murmur
 Discarded – throw
away
 Intently – Carefully
 Canister – a metal
container
 Value points
 Saheb admits happily that he sometimes get a ten
rupees note in the heap of garbage.
 They hope of finding more money in the pile of
garbage.
 It seems that for children, garbage has a meaning
different from what it means to their parents.
 For the children it is wrapped in wonder, for the
elders it is a means of survival.
 Author comes to know about Saheb’s liking for the
tennis game.
 He tells that he goes inside when no one is around,
the gatekeeper lets him use the swing.
 Saheb too is wearing tennis shoes that look strange
over his discolored shirt and shorts.
 The shoes were discarded by some rich boy, who
perhaps refused to wear them because of a hole in
one of them, but it does not bother Saheb.
Cont…
 The game he is watching so intently is out of
his reach.
 Another morning, Saheb was on his way to
the milk booth with a steel canister.
 He told the author that now he works for a
tea stall down the road and is paid 800
rupees with meals.
 Author asked weather he liked the job but
his face lost the carefree look.
 The steel canister seems heavier than the
plastic bag he would carry so lightly.
 The bag was his but the canister belongs to
the man who owns the tea shop.
 Saheb is no longer his own master!
Unfamiliar word meanings
Insists – urge
Looms – appear
Mirage –illusion
Amidst – surrounded by
Dingy –gloomy, dark
Enforced – impose, apply
Slog – struggle, effort
Hovels – hut, slum
Crumbling – fall down
Wobbly – unsteady
Primeval – ancient
Shack – hut, cabin
Thatched – straw used to make roof
Sizzling – very hot
Platters – plate, dish
Chopped – cut up

•
 Value points
 “I will be a motormechanic,” Mukesh anounces.
 Author asks him if know anything about cars.
 “I will learn to drive a car,” Mukesh answers, looking straight
into mauthor’s eyes.
 His dream looms like a mirage amidst the dust of streets that
fill his town Firozabad, famous for its bangles.
 Every other family in Firozabad is engaged in making
bangles.
 It is the centre of India’s glass-blowing industry.
 Generations of the family are engaged around furnaces,
welding glass, making bangles for all the women in the land.
 Mukesh’s family is among them.
 No one knows that it is illegal for children like him to work in
the glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells
without air and light.
 The law, if enforced, could get him and all 20,000 children
out of the hot furnaces where they slog their daylight hours,
often losing the brightness of their eyes.
Cont…
Mukesh was elated to take the author his newly
reconstructed house.
It was located amidst of stinking lanes choked with
garbage, past homes that remain hovels with crumbling
walls, wobbly doors, no windows, crowded with families
of humans and animals coexisting in a primeval state.
 He stops at the door of one such house, bangs a wobbly
iron door with his foot, and pushes it open.
A half-built shack, at one part dead grass was thatched.
On a firewood stove sits a large vessel of sizzling
spinach leaves & on the ground, in large aluminum
platters, are more chopped vegetables.
A frail young woman cooking the evening meal for the
whole family.
Through eyes filled with smoke she smiles. She is the
wife of Mukesh’s elder brother.
 UNFAMILIAR WORD MEANINGS

 Withdraws – leave the place

 Veil – cover
 Impoverished – poor
 Renovate – redevelop
 Lineage – ancestry
 Implies – hint, suggest
 Mounds – heap, stack
 Unkempt – untidy
 Shanty – hut, cabin
 Flickering – burning unsteadily
 Drab – colorless
 Sanctity – holiness, purity
 Auspicious – holy, pious
 Dawn – arrive
 Draped – wrapped
 Value points
 The girl is very young and holds the respect of ‘bahu’ &
has responsibility of three men of the family – her
husband, Mukesh and their father.
 She covers her favce with vail when elder men enters
as per the customs.
 Mukesh’s father was once a tailor then he took over the
job of bangle making. He failed to renovate the house.
 He could only teach his sons the Art of Bangle Making.
 Mukesh’s grandmother has seen her own husband go
blind with the dust from polishing the glass bangles.
 They believe that their destiny can’t be changed.
 They have seen nothing but the bangle every where
around them.
 They are of variety of colors and lie in mounds and are
piled on four wheeled handcarts pulled by men in
narrow lanes of shanty town.
Cont…
 Young Boys and girls sit with their fathers and
mothers, welding pieces of coloured glass into
circles of bangles.
 Their eyes are more adjusted to dark than the
light outside & they end up losing their eyesight
before turning adult.
 Savita, a young girl in a drab pink dress, sits along
side an elderly woman, soldering pieces of glass,
unaware of the sanctity of it.
 Bangles symbolises an Indian woman’s suhaag,
auspiciousness in marriage.
 Some day Savita will also become bride like the
old woman beside her who became one many
years ago.
 She wear those bangles on her wrist but there is
no light in her eyes.
UNFAMILIAR WORD mEANINGS

 Reaped – harvest, cut

crop
 Lament – groan, weeping
 Mind numbing –
paralyzing
 Toil – hard work
 Vicious – brutal,
dangerous
 Trapped – confined, shut
in
 Hauled – drag, pull
 Apathy – lack of interest
 Burdened – load
 Value points
She says, in a voice drained of joy that she has not
enjoyed even one full meal in her entire lifetime —
that’s what she has reaped!
Her husband tells that all he did was made this house
for them to live in as he know only bangle making.
He has achieved what many have failed in their
lifetime because he has a roof over hishead!
Except to carry on the business of making bangles
they don’t have any other way to earn money.
Young men echo the lament of their elders.
Author asked a group of young men – “Why not
organize yourselves into a cooperative?”
They answered – “Even if we get organized, we are
the ones who will be hauled up by the police, beaten
and dragged to jail for doing something illegal”. they
say.
 Cont…

 There is no leader among them.

 Their fathers are as tired as they are.
 They talk endlessly in a spiral that moves
from poverty to apathy to greed and to
injustice.
 Author sees two distinct worlds —
• the family, caught in a web of poverty,
burdened by the stigma of caste in which
they are born;
• the other a vicious circle of the sahukars,
the middlemen, the policemen, the keepers
of law, the bureaucrats and the politicians.
 UNFAMILIAR WORD MEANINGS

 Stigma – shame,
disgrace
 Vicious – brutal
 Bureaucrats –
minister
 Imposed – force
 Dare – courage
 Regret – feel sorry
about
 Content – satisfied
 Hurtling –rush,
speed
 Value points

 They have imposed the baggage on the child that he

cannot put down.
 Before he is aware, he accepts it as naturally as his father.
 To do anything else would mean to dare.
 And daring is not part of his growing up.
 Author feels cheered when children like Mukesh hold the
courage to dream.
 “I want to be a motor mechanic,’ he repeats by going to a
garage.
 But the garage is a long way from his home.
 “I will walk,”he insists.
 Author asks – “Do you also dream of flying a plane?”
 He is suddenly silent. “No,” he says, staring at the ground.
 There is an embarrassment in his voice that has not yet
turned into regret.
 He is content to dream of cars that he sees hurtling down
the streets of his town. Few airplanes fly over Firozabad
 SUMMARY
EPISODE - I
• Sometimes I find a rupee in garbage
• The author examines and analyses the impoverished conditions and traditions
that condemn children to a life of exploitation these children are denied an
education and forced into hardships early in their lives.
• The writer encounters Saheb – a rag picker whose parents have left behind the
life of poverty in Dhaka to earn a living in Delhi.
• His family like many other families of rag pickers lives in Seemapuri. They
do not have other identification other than a ration card.
• The children do not go to school and they are excited at the prospect of
finding a coin or even a ten rupee note for rummaging in the garbage.
• It is the only way of earning.
• The writer is pained to see Saheb, a rag picker whose name means the ruler of
earth, Lose the spark of childhood and roams barefooted with his friends.
• From morning to noon the author encounters him in a tea stall and is paid Rs.
800 He sadly realizes that he is no longer his own master and this loss of
identity weighs heavily on his tender shoulders.
 Cont…
EPISODE - II
•  I want to drive a car
• The author then tells about another victim,
Mukesh who wants to be a motor mechanic.
• He has always worked in the glass making
industry.
• They are exposed to various health hazards like
losing their eyesight as they work in abysmal
conditions, in dark and dingy cells.
• Mukesh’s father is blind as were his father and
grandfather before him.
• So burdened are the bangle makers of
Firozabad that they have lost their ability to
dream unlike Mukesh who dreams of driving a
car.
 ASSIGNMENT
• Understanding the text (2 marks each)
1. What could be some of the reasons for the migration of people from villages to
cities?
2. Would you agree that promises made to poor children are rarely kept? Why do
you think this happens in the incidents narrated in the text?
3. What forces conspire to keep the workers in the bangle industry of Firozabad in
poverty?

• Talking about the text (6 marks each)

1. How, in your opinion, can Mukesh realize his dream?
2. Mention the hazards of working in the glass bangles industry.
3. Why should child labor be eliminated and how?