Q1 of 14 Page 21

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.


l Look around and find examples of such paradoxes.


l Write a paragraph of about 200 to 250 words on any one of them. You can start by making notes.

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.


More from this chapter

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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 labour be eliminated and how?

 1

Although this text speaks of factual events and situations of misery it transforms these situations with an almost poetical prose into a literary experience. How does it do so? Here are some literary devices:

• Hyperbole is a way of speaking or writing that makes something sound better or more exciting than it really is.


For example Garbage to them is gold.


• A Metaphor, as you may know, compares two things or ideas that are not very similar. A metaphor describes a thing in terms of a single quality or feature of some other thing; we can say that a metaphor “transfers” a quality of one thing to another. For example The road was a ribbon of light.


• A simile is a word or phrase that compares one thing with another using the words “like” or “as”. For example: As white as snow.


Carefully read the following phrases and sentences taken from the text. Can you identify the literary device in each example?


(a) Saheb-e-Alam which means the lord of the universe is directly in contrast to what Saheb is in reality.


(b) Drowned in an air of desolation.


(c) Seemapuri, a place on the periphery of Delhi yet miles away from it, metaphorically.


(d) For the children it is wrapped in wonder; for the elders, it is a means of survival.


(e) As her hands move mechanically like the tongs of a machine, I wonder if she knows the sanctity of the bangles she helps make.


(f) She still has bangles on her wrist, but not light in her eyes.


(g) Few airplanes fly over Firozabad.


(h) Web of poverty.


(i) Scrounging for gold.


(j) And survival in Seemapuri means rag-picking. Through the years, it has acquired the proportions of a fine art.


(k) The steel canister seems heavier than the plastic bag he would carry so lightly over his shoulders.