Answer any four of the following in 30-40 words each.

(a) What was the aim of the game, ‘Dragonquest’?
(b) What was Patol Babu’s role in Baren Mullick’s film?
(c) How was the ancient mariner punished for his crime?
(d) Why does the narrator in the poem, ‘Snake’ consider himself a coward?
(e) What makes Helen and the other ghosts organize ‘The Writer’s Inspiration Bureau’? What was their mode of working?

a) The aim of the game was that Michael had to rescue Aurora, the fair princess from the wicked dragon as she was imprisoned at the top of a tall tower. He also had to collect the wicked dragon's treasure.

b) Patol Babu's role in Baren Mullick's film was that of a pedestrian. He was supposed to act as an absent-minded and short-tempered pedestrian with whom the hero Chanchal Kumar would collide into as he rushed out of his car and run across the pavement.

c) The ancient mariner was punished for his crime of killing an innocent albatross by the other sailors. They hung the dead albatross around the mariner's neck so he felt the burden of his sin and harboured the guilt in his mind even in the future.

d) The narrator in the poem ‘Snake' considers himself a coward because he had thrown a log at the snake which had come to drink water from the trough. When the snake had appeared, he was honoured by the presence of the creature, but his human education had taught him that snakes were venomous so he had committed this unprovoked act. He was unable to kill it because it was a creation of God.

e) Helen and the other ghosts organized ‘The Writer's Inspiration Bureau' because they wanted to lend their help to mortals who were suffering from lack of inspiration and ideas for their works. Helen had suffered immensely as a writer from lack of good plots, inspirations for her works when she was alive, so she sought out like-minded ghosts in the afterlife to form this organization and help writers come up with good plots for ghost stories.