Livelihood
1 In every country, the poorer classes make a far larger section than the well-to-do. Then, which countries, in particular, may be named as poor? It is where the means of livelihood are the fewest and even those are often blocked. Where the have-nots can aspire to a better life, hope itself is a real asset.
2 It is not enough to say there is a shortage of funds in our country; worse, there is a shortage of hope. We cast all the blame on fate. It does not strike us that the remedy is in our own hands. That is why it is better to instil hope in the heart than to offer alms.
3 Man loses his true stature when he fails to unite fully with his fellows. We know that a child dreads ghosts only when he is alone. This is the one person’s fear of his own weakness. Most of our fears are replicas of this fear of ghosts.
4 There is a fear of poverty. It can be countered if we stand and act in a group. It is only by combining that man has achieved all that is worthwhile in life—knowledge, faith, power, wealth.
5 Behind the poverty of our country is the fact that we keep ourselves segregated trying to bear all our heavy burdens by ourselves. In Europe, when the steam-engine came, many handicraft workers were thrown out of employment but the people of Europe think for one another in a crisis. The realization began to grow that the combined efforts of the people could be their strength and their capital. This union leading to prosperity has been an ever-widening path in Europe and I do not see a better path anywhere else.
6 I have to visit a small village once in a while. I stand on a verandah and see the field after field stretching away for miles. This land is cultivated by many farmers, some of whom own two big has some four and some even ten. The first noticeable fact is that only a few cultivators have the requisite number of bullocks, while others have too few or too many. Ploughing may start at the right time or it may be late — that has to depend on the farmer’s resources. Further, much of the labour of the bullocks is wasted as the direction of the plough changes frequently because of the twisted boundary lines of the plots. If each cultivator did not regard his smallholding as an independent unit, if all adjoining strips were reckoned as one, fewer ploughshares and bullocks could do the tilling and much wasteful labour would be eliminated. There would again be a great saving of energy and expense if, after harvest, the farmers collectively stored and marketed their product.
7 He who can do the largest measure of work in the shortest span of time wins out. That is why men employ tools, which make one pair of hands equal to five or even ten. The savage who scratches the earth with his bare hands has to accept defeat from the man with the plough. The man worked with his small tools until the advent of modern machinery driven by steam and electricity. The small tools acknowledged defeat from the big machines, as bare hands had yielded to the hands equipped with tools.
8 These machines, it is true, can be put to work only over large tracts of land, and considerable funds are needed for their procurement and use. But if therefore we give up all hope saying that our peasantry cannot afford them, it will simply mean inviting ruin. In the present age of mechanization, our men must accept the machine.
9 He who is lacking in hope must perish. No one can save him by offering alms or some other help. He must be made to realize that what is not possible for a single individual will be possible when fifty unite in a group. A farmer can hardly do good business with a small surplus of a seer of milk, but if a hundred men collect all their spare milk, they can produce and sell ghee after they have bought a butter-churning machine. In Europe, this is a common practice. People in Denmark and other small countries have combined and by the proper marketing of butter, cheese and cream they have eliminated poverty from their lives. This combination of many people to earn a living is known in Europe as the co-operative system. It is by this system that our country can be rescued from its age-long poverty and stagnation.
(Rabindranath Tagore)
Word-Meanings:-
1.have note—poor people 2. stature-importance and reputation 3. dreads—fear 4. replicas—models a smaller scale. 5. Segregated- separated from others in the community 6. requisite—required or necessary.
1. Answer the following questions as briefly as possible :
a) What, according to Tagore, is the true cause of poverty in a country?
b) How can it be possible for the poor farmers of a village to adopt mechanization?
c) What is even worse than poverty? How?
d) How, according to Tagore, have European countries been able to make such great progress while India is still a poor country?
e) What is meant by the co-operative system?
2. Find words from the passage which mean the same as the following :
a) fear (para 3)
b) ended (para 6)
c) die (para 9)
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