HOW WOULD YOU SPEND A RAINY DAY

HOW WOULD YOU SPEND A RAINY DAY

Outline:

1.       Introduction.

2.     Ideal occupation for idle days.

3.     Conclusion.

The most difficult thing for youths is not to be able to do anything. Youth is a time for activity-good, bad or indifferent. And in the course of life there come days in which there is little or no scope for any activity. It is at such periods that youths will grumble, rebel and generally become mischievous. An idle mind is proverbially the Devil’s own workshop. And idle days are forced on the youths in many ways: Holidays, strike, rainy days and others.  

    

What would I do on rainy day I do on rainy days? Well, I will do many things. I will cite here a few of the ways in which I will use my forced idleness. For idleness is forced on me when I cannot move out of my house. There are many such days in Pakistan. Our rainy season offers several opportunities for being idle. I say, opportunities advisedly. For many friends of mine grumble at such days. They tell me that they are bored on such days. The list of their complaints is quite a long one. They cannot go out: they cannot play; they cannot work either; they cannot visit the cinema, the theater, the gymnasium or the bathing pools.

But I have no such complaints. On the other hand, I welcome a rainy day. It gives me opportunities for realizing some of my dreams.

To begin with, I will start a sanitation campaign in my own house. There are cobwebs blackened with smoke over our hearth in the kitchen. Mother is too old and busy to attend to these. I will help her; I will take a broom, tie it to a long pole and start cleaning. The ceiling is covered with sooty webs and spiders. Often soot falls down in the cooking pots. This is very dangerous. I am told soot is poisonous. Well, even if it is not, soot is ugly, black and disgusting. I must remove it, and I will on a rainy day.

You will perhaps say I am doing a woman’s work. Yes, I get joy to do so. Nothing gives me so much delight as to see a kitchen cleaned to perfection. I do not think that women have a monopoly of cleaning the kitchen. So I work in our kitchen without shame or tears.

I will then enter my father’s office room. This is forbidden room for me, for father does not like his pens and pencils to leave their rack and disappear. But I will seek his permission to enter and I am sure I will get it. With that I begin my second period in house cleaning. Father is very busy, like mother, and cannot attend to this part of house-hold work. So I step in. I will start emptying the waste paper basket of tin, first filing it with all the bits of waste paper. I will rearrange the books on the shelves. I will remove ink-pots on the table cloth and the dust on the cabinet. I will polish the flower pots and mirrors and I will end with putting everything in its proper place. I am sure father will be delightfully surprised when he re-enters his office. He will no longer refuse permission enter his room.

The craving for thoughtless leisure elands us in restlessness. We do not get real rest if we do not properly use our days of rest. our desires become unlimited. They will rule us if we do not rule them. And thus we will be ceaselessly desiring for this and that if we want more holidays than are good for us.  

The place of holidays in our lives is a very important one. Only they must really be days of holy thoughts and holy living. They are there because men want leisure and rest form labour. They are useful for giving us rest so that we can resume our work with more vigour. So the end and aim of holidays is not really rest and leisure. This is only incidental. The real aim of holidays is not really rest and leisure. This is only incidental. The real aim of holidays is to renew ourselves for more work. For life is a ceaselessly struggle and holidays give freshness to our tired spirits. Let us have holidays by all means but let us be careful that we don’t get them by bad means. We know that in modern times we, the students, often agitate for holidays most stupidly. Let us stop this and be careful in the utilization of our holidays. Holidays are good servants but bad masters. We should not be slaves to holidays. That is to say we should not be demand more holidays than are good for our physical, mental and moral health. 

IF I WERE A MILLIONAIRE

IF I WERE A MILLIONAIRE

Outline:

1.     Introduction.

2.     My plan for investment

3.     Conclusion.

There are many ways in which money could be usefully or uselessly employed. However, people usually do not have millions; they have not even thousands, nor even hundreds. One among a millions, perhaps, has a million. In Pakistan at any rate, it is rarity to become a millionaire. And when one is a millionaire one does not write essays, unless, the essays bring millions-which they do not. So, when a choice is given, we should gladly take it and proceed to say what we may and can do in the matter.

Here are a few ways in which millions could be used, misused and abused. If one is a millionaire, one usually becomes a bankrupt. Why? Just because money is like strong liquor. It intoxicates. Money brings power, and power easily degenerates most of us. Charles Lamb, a fine essayist, tells good story about a man who misused his money. It seems this man was born in a rich family. He inherited much but he spent more. And if your asked him to be careful, he would give you his philosophy. He would say, for example, that money kept for more than three days gives a bad smell, and therefore, he spent it away quickly. He even buried it on the bank of a river, and declared that this was the bank where he kept his money. Very god. A very wise fellow, you will say? He was, of course, wise.

Fancy and fun apart, there are ways of dealing with money that are not funny or fanciful. Let us see if there is meaning in money. There is, Money is a means to buy more. Now what are the things that are most worth perishable goods. They are goods, not good. But there are many really good things that can be had with money. And if ever I become a millionaire, I would invest in buying such really good goods.

I would, for example, invest part of my millions in building schools. I say schools were primary education is imparted to our poor millions. For I see that such schools are few in proportion to our population. I do not say that high schools, colleges and universities are not to be build. I am in fact pupil in a college. But I think that we should first increase the number of primary schools. They are the basis on which we have to build our national education. We should not, and cannot, build from the top. If we do so, it will topple down. That is why our educational system has broken down. We have begun wrongly-at the wrong end.

Look at the condition of our primary schools. First, about the teachers of the primary schools. They are supposed to be the shapers of the character and ability of our children. They are, of course. But how can they do their duty by their pupils if they cannot feed and clothe themselves decently? The salary they get is pitifully small. They have, therefore to supplement their salary with other means. And what are their means? Private tuitions. That is to say, they have to teach more and more children outside their schools. Now the law of life is that if you overdo a thing you undo it. If the teacher has to teach more and more, his pupils will learn less and less. And the teacher himself will lose all interest in his profession. If he has to teach and teach, inside the schools and outside, why, he will get confounded. His teaching will become confounded. It will no longer be teaching it will be cheating! I know this because my younger brothers are being privately tutored at home. When I see the poor primary school teacher trying to teach them I feel very sorry for him. I have at such times dreamt of millions. Now if I am a millionaire, and I will first start raising the salary of our primary schools teachers.

This will be the first installment of the investment of my millions. My second will be the setting up a hospitals in our rural areas. Our towns and cities are now better in point of medical service, though there is the best yet to be reached. But our villagers have to walk all the way to towns when they want medicines and treatment. My money will therefore go into the building of hospitals and maternity homes in the villages. I will also see if I can raise the salary of village doctors. They like the village school masters, are over-worked and under-paid. Besides, there are several thousand of qualified young physicians whose services may well be offered to the villagers. They usually practice in towns and cities, where they are getting overcrowded. Why don’t they settle in villages? Because village life is unattractive. Part of my millions will go to make it more attractive. 

Thirdly, I would invest part of my millions in setting up a chain of permanent industrial exhibitions for a start, around a hundred villages. The function of these industrial shows would be to popularize new techniques of industry and agriculture. I know that our villagers are ignorant of such things as machines fertilizers, tools and implements which help to grow and produce more. The farmers and artisans and craftsmen in our villages work in the traditional manner, which does not yield good results. The problems of our agriculture and rural industries are very well known. New devices, tools and chemicals are now available, with the use of these, our production  might be stepped up and the villagers might get the best results. In short, I would appoint several experts to demonstrate to our villagers the uses of modern agricultural and industrial inventions. These exhibitions will be a permanent feature of our rural educational facilities. I am sure that our villagers are not opposed to mechanization of agriculture and industries. All they are opposed to is the way in which the fruits of their labour are exploited by the rich investors. I, therefore, will see to it that villagers get all the modern devices for stepping up production, and that their labour is fruitful to them.

Fourthly, and finally, I would invest the rest of my millions in organizing the artistic and cultural activities of our villagers. My plan is to supplement agriculture with culture. That is to say, I hold that we must first feed and clothe and house our villagers, and then feed their minds and hearts and souls. For this purpose I will build theaters and gymnasiums in the hundred villages of my experiment with my millions. Our villages will be thus turned into decent, healthy and self helping centers of service. To feed our villagers is not enough, we must also develop in them a taste for cultural activities’ dramas, songs, dances and physical exercises to keep them fit. 

I think that my millions will be exhausted in these investments for building up a better Pakistan. This is how I would proceed if and when I ever become a millionaire. 

YOUR IDEA OF LIFE

YOUR IDEA OF LIFE

 Outline:

(a)  Introduction. (b) Description of my ideal. (c) Conclusion.

Ideals are food for the mind as bread is food for the body. They are dreams of perfection. Men are both angels and beasts. They have bodies and instincts of hunger and thirst, and these must be satisfied. But they have minds and souls and by these they become human and even divine. if we do not cherish ideals we are no better than our dumb brotheren, the beasts of the field and birds of the airs.

But even the birds of the air sing songs when their bodies are fed and so men too begin to think and dream as soon as the wants of their bodies are fulfilled. As soon as we fill our bellies, our minds begin to wake up and look about. We look up at the stars and begin to wonder. We respect our nursery rhymes:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

He I wonder what  you are;

Up above the world so high;

Like a diamond in the sky!

This is a rational and healthy state of mind. The beauty of the world makes us think, wonder and ream ans deals are the bright stars in our brains. They give beauty and light to our life. They keep us hoping. They sweeten our moments of despair and bitterness. They push us on to follow a path which promises to reach heaven. But for these dreams and ideals, our life on earth would be a dreamy journey. It is they that inspire us to strive after perfection. They provide us with standards by which we measure our progress in life. They change we grow up. For example, our ideal in school life is to pass the Secondary School Examination, but as soon as we do so we begin to dream of passing higher examinations. It is such dreams and desires which keep us marching on from one stage to another which is higher. They are a guarantee that we do not remain beasts only. They drive us onwards to stages of men, angels and gods.      

Ideals by definition are unattainable. For if we attain some goal, it is no longer a dream: it becomes a fact and a reality. That is why ideals are always unattainable. They should be so. Else there will be no ideas. We must keep on going from one ideal to another, for the path of progress and perfection is really endless and eternal. This is the glory and beauty of human life. It is an endless journey from the lower to the higher. This is beautifully described by Shelley, one of the greatest idealists in literature. Listen to his description of his skylark:

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest,

Like a cloud of fire.

The singing still doest soar,

And soaring ever singest:

This is the best description of those who follow their ideal. Always rising higher and higher and also joyous and happy because they fix their eyes on their ideals and keep on approaching towards them.

My ideal ion life is simple living and high thinking. I have come to adopt this ideal after reading the lives of great men and women who followed this ideal. This is one of the grandest ideals in the world. Why do I choose such an ideal? Well, I choose it because it costs nothing and buys everything. Simple living means a great economy of one’s energy. Everyone in his world has to spend his energy in earning his living. Now if we are not satisfied with simple living, we will have to spend a good deal of our energy for living a life of luxury and comforts. There is no limit to one’s desires. A life of luxury and high living means working from morning till night for making enough money to live such a life. if we wish to live in costly places and eat costly places and eat costly food drive in luxury cars we will have to spend enormous sums of money. If we are honest, we will have to be slaves from day to day in order to earn money for leading such a life. All this means that we will be really working for money. It means concentrating all our energies in producing money. Now even if we get all this money we will never be peaceful and happy. We will be wanting more and more. Under such conditions of life we will become wholly selfish in our outlook and will become money-making machines. We will have no time even for enjoying our money. We will end our lives most miserably. We will have lived the most selfish, narrow-minded and useless lives. In possessing riches we will be possessed by them.

That is why I do not wish to live in such a way. I wish to spare my energies and time for a better thing than money and luxuries. I will earn enough to maintain a frugal, simple, life and I will then be able to devote my time to social work. I will be able to serve the poor and the needy only if I limit my ambition to a life of simplicity. When I have earned enough to maintain my simple life I will have enough energy spared for devoting myself to the service of others. The field of social service of others. The field of social service is so wide that I will have enough to do in that field. For this purpose I will have to prepare myself.

Living thus I will be in a position to devote some of my time to thinking. I will be free to read noble thought and to put them into practice. I love to accept a vow of poverty and so work constructively. It is in the villages of our country that social work is largely needed. I will go to those places and live like the poor people. I will show them how to make their life good, healthy and happy. I will serve the poor and be happy in such a service. I am sure that I will be then really happy because I know that only they can be happy who forget their own self and become interested in that of others.

It might seem that I am trying to do the impossible. I agree that this might be foolish on my part. It requires great discipline and self-control to do what all I wash to do this nevertheless. As I said, an ideal is by definition an impossible thing, an unattainable perfection. It is because of this that an ideal is an ideal. Our ideals must remain great and unattainable. Otherwise they will not be inspiring enough. An impossible thing inspires precisely because it is impossible. Its glory and grandeur are so great that it is enough to inspire even small things like myself. When we desire to be great we do so because there is the seed of greatness in us. The only precaution we should take is that we should not become vain, proud and boastful. We must nurse our ideals in our hearts, keep them in Purdah (as it were), and cherish them as our beloved. They must be like lamps lit in our hearts to light up our path to perfection. The greater the lamp the steadier will be its light and guidance. 

So I am not at all afraid of the impossibility of my ideal. I is the duty and right of ideals to be impossible. I shall keep living and trying again and again in order to achieve my ideal. I have a dream in me and I will go on cherishing it. It is a wonderful dream. It makes me a traveler and worker. It takes me out of my poor, little self which never satisfies me. It makes me big and great and good. The only price that is needed to get this ideal is simple living and high thinking. If I am prepared to pay this price, I am sure to get it. I have decided to do so because I know that men cannot be rich enough in the wordly sense. There is a limit to our capacity for getting riches in terms of money, property and gold. There is a limit to our capacity for being powerful, authoritative and famous. If we pursue money and power in the material world, we find that no one is really rich and powerful. We think we are rich if we have say, a lakh of rupees. But this is only an illusion. We already see men with two three and innumerable lakhs of rupees and we become miserable. In the same way, power too is unlimited. We think we are great if we become the chairman of our town municipality. But what is this except illusion? Is there not President of Pakistan and the President of any great country? And can more than one person be great in this sense? Clearly not, so the true path of greatness and true wealth. As we cherish these we become great in fact. That is why ideals are important. I have, therefore decided to dream my dream of simple living and high thinking. This ideal frees me from my petty self and makes me really great. It makes me a lover of mankind. I prefer the luxury of doing good to all other luxuries. This is my idea. 

YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHOR

YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHOR

Outline:

1.     Introduction.

2.     Life and work.

3.     Conclusion.

It is not easy to choose whom one likes when one has several authors. As we pass on from one class to another. In our school life we begin to like more and more writers whose works we read in elections. By the time we reach the degree classes, we would have read many stories, poems and essays prescribed in the syllabus. Each piece that we read has some fine quality in it which endears it to us. We begin to like one author after another in the course of our earlier education. A time comes when the number of these writers grows larger. And this is not all. We hear the names and stories of other writers whose works are not prescribed in our courses. We hear of those writers from our elders at home. These are equally attractive for us. We hear the stories of our own literature in those of foreign countries. The result of this is that we are very often unable to vote for one particular writer when the choice is so wide.

And yet we do make a choice because some writers appeal to us more than others. We may like several authors but we love only a few. We have many acquaintances in life but we have only a few friends, and of these friends we have often one or two very intimate ones. This is quite natural. As friendship grows with familiarity, so our love of authors grows with repeated reading. This kind of study cannot be done with several writers. Constant reading of one or two writers brings more delight than a casual reading of many writers. This is how we love our own people and homes where we live and our being literary patriotism is like local patriotism. We may for example be the citizens of Pakistan but we feel more at home in our towns and villages. So it is with the world of literature. It is very wide and expansive world, but we like to dwell in a part of it. And living thus we begin to love it more and more.

This does not mean that we become narrow-minded by choosing to live in one kind of place. Indeed our living at one place makes us fit to appreciate places, because men are the same everywhere. They may differ in dress and language but they are all one in their instincts and impulses. So it is with the world authors. They give us their own words but beneath all differences there is oneness and unity. This unity is felt when we get more and more acquainted with these words. That is why we do make a choice in reading.

Among several writers that I have come to like Charles Dickens more and more. He has delighted me more than most writers. I have selected him as my choice among English writers because he made me very happy by making me laugh most heartily. Few people can make us laugh as Dickens does we are happy when we laugh because in real life it is seldom that we laugh. Life is a serious and solemn affair, all told. There are many worries and anxieties in life. And anyone who frees us from these is very welcome. We are grateful to such people, Charile Chaplin on the screen and Dickens in his stories are two of the most delightful people in the world to meet with. They have the sense of comic which is most delightful. Dickens has this sense of the comic which he shows in most of his novels. That is why I like him very much. He shows a world of his own where men, women and children live a very wonderful life.

Now the wonder is that Dickens who laughs so well was not a very happy man in the early part of his life. I read his biography after reading some of his novels. I thought that this man who laughs so whole heartedly must have been a very happy fellow in this world I imagined him to be one who was born in very happy circumstances and in a very rich family. I thought that one who writes so mirthfully must have lived a mirthful life. But I was surprised to find that he was a very miserable lad in his life. I found that he was born of middle class parents who were poor. They were so poor indeed that they did not send him to school, for they could not do so. Dickens had to teach himself! He was forced to do this because his parents could not put him to a regular course of education. He did go to school for a few days but he did not learn anything there beyond that alphabets. He was on the other hand, forced to work at a very early age. He was employed in a factory which produced a substance called blacking. This was used for making leather black. Dickens was ten years old when joined this factory and he worked here for two years. it was a very dirty job with dirty people around him. Smoke, dirt, blacking were his environments. He was surrounded with such things from morning till night. It was the blackest period of his boyhood. He never forgot it. And the wonder is how he became such a writer of bright stories full of joy, fun and mirth.

Dickens learnt much from his own favourite authors. He was in school for some time after his apprenticeship in the blacking factory. But he was never interested in the lessons of the school because the schools of his days were badly conducted. Most of the teachers were pedants, that is to say, they spoke big words which meant nothing to the little boys. Dickens makes fun of such schools and schoolmasters in many of his novels. But Dickens had a thirst for knowledge and he went to the old writers and read and re-read them repeatedly. There were the writers of the eighteenth century, such as Fielding, Somollets, Sterne and Goldsmith. These were his favourite authors and from them he learnt good deal of life and also of style. He also read the romantic stories of the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote. He found these books in the store room of his house and he picked them up and studied them. He forgot the blacking of the blacking factory while reading these stories which are full of sunshine and open air life. It is these books which did not allow him to become and experience. The actual poverty and living conditions gave him no chance to learn, but he got all that he needed form his favourtie writers whom he went on reading and enjoying. He had the genius, and he made use of the genius by writing his own stories, sketches and novels. In short, he got inspiration from his favourite writers.

I like and love Dickens because he gives me abundance of life and experience. When I open one of his good novels I enter a world which is full of sunshine and jollity. Of course, there is also much evil and sorrow and suffering in that world. There are good men and bad men in his novels. It is a very lively world; there are all sorts of people in this world of Dickens, but the wonder is that none of them is dull or uninteresting. Everyone of his characters is amusing. The wonder is greater when even his villains and bad persons become delightful to us. The spirit of delight is the unifying principle of his works. This is so because he himself took delight in studying bad people and their behavior. He got excellent delight in showing how bad such people are. That is why his stories give us such abundant joy. We being to love the good characters and we being to sympathies with victims of his bad characters. We get great fun in seeing the exposure of the villainy of his bad characters. We begin to love the good life when we see Dickens exposing the vices of the bad people. And so we get all-round fun and delight in reading his novels. Dickens never wrote a dull page. This is the secret of his genius, and that is why he is my favourite writer.

I have read a few of the stories of Dickens, and I have enjoyed reading them. It is not possible for us in modern days to read lengthy stories, and Dickens’ stories are very long indeed; they require a very leisurely life to enjoy reading them. We have no such leisure now-a-days because we are living in an age of speed and hurry. But there are good, abridged editions of his novels which are cheap as well. In reading these we get the essence of his art of storytelling. He wrote several masterpieces but there are a few of these which every educated person should not miss. I have, for example my own choice of Dickens stories. “These are David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities. These four stories are enjoyable for several reasons. David Copperfield, for example gives us much information about the early life of Dickens. It is a sort of self-revelation. It is an autobiography in the form of a novel, the hero is young Dickens. His adventures in London and in the countryside are described with great gusto. There is much fun in all this because Dickens sees the comic side of life in every experience. Humour and comedy are his ruling passions. There is nothing that has not some comic side to it for Dickens. That is how he makes everyone and everything interesting. In Pickwick Papers’ for example, there is Mr. Pickwick, the principal figure and his servant, Sam Weller. These two persons are extremely funny and enjoyable. Sam Weller is famous for making remarks which seem to be proverbial. It is rare experience to read the adventures of these.

Side by side with comedy, there is also suffering and tragedy in the world of Dickens’ as there is in real life. This is brought out for example, in the story of Oliver Twist. This is the story of a young lad (like David Copperfield) named Oliver Twist who suffers very much from poverty, want, neglect and abuse. He falls into the company of thieves and pickpockets and he is very much abused by these people. Being good and innocent, Oliver becomes the victim of these bad characters. He is finally saved and he escapes from this sad stay with a bright ending. In “A Tales of Two Cities” we get a story of the days of French Revolution, it is a splendid, heroic story of love and romance and self-sacrifice.

For these reasons I have come to regard Dickens as one of my very favourite authors. As I said in the beginning, it is not easy to choose only one writer as one’s favourite, when there are number of good writers. But as I also said we have to make a choice because only intimate and intensive reading of one or two authors gives us a good deal of experience and joy. It is, therefore, to be understood that when I say that Dickens is my favourite author it does not at all mean that I have no other favourites.