Glimpses of India

“Glimpses of India” is not one story. It is three separate pieces of writing placed together under a single title, and each one is by a different writer. The first, A Baker from Goa, is by Lucio Rodrigues. The second, Coorg, is by Lokesh Abrol. The third, Tea from Assam, is by Arup Kumar Dutta. Matching each name to the right piece is the single most useful thing you can do before you start revising, because a wrong author name spoils an otherwise good answer.

The word glimpse means a short, quick look. That is exactly what the chapter offers. It does not try to describe all of Goa, all of Coorg or all of Assam. Each writer picks one ordinary thing that you can see, smell or taste, and lets that one thing open up a whole way of life. In Goa it is a loaf of bread carried around the village in a basket. In Coorg it is the smell of coffee drifting over hills and rainforest. In Assam it is a cup of tea bought on a railway platform. Small things are used as doors into big places.

The three pieces are also written in three different ways, and noticing this helps in style questions. A Baker from Goa is a memoir. It is written by someone looking back at his own childhood, so it is warm, personal and full of remembered sounds and smells. Coorg reads like a travel feature in a magazine. It is written mostly in the present tense, it addresses the reader directly, and it mixes landscape, history, legend and practical suggestions for a visitor. Tea from Assam is a narrative with two characters and real dialogue, so the information reaches us through a conversation rather than through description.

Why put them together at all? Because side by side they make a point that no single piece could make on its own. India is not one culture with one history. Goa carries a Portuguese layer in its food and its vocabulary. Coorg carries a martial tradition and stories of ancestors who may have come from far away. Assam carries the tea trade, its Chinese and Buddhist legends and its plantation life. Put the three together and you get variety held inside one country, which is why the plural word glimpses in the title matters.

A good way to revise is to keep the three parts in three separate boxes in your mind: writer, place, key objects, key words, key people. Then, at the end, spend a little time on what links them. That way you are ready whether a question digs into one part or asks you to see the pattern across all three.

The piece opens with memory rather than fact. The narrator says that the elders of Goa still talk fondly about the Portuguese days and, above all, about the famous loaves of bread that belonged to those days. Portugal ruled Goa for a very long time, and when that rule ended a great deal of it stayed behind in the kitchen — in the bread, the cakes, the sweets and the words people still use for them. The eaters of those loaves may have vanished, the narrator says, but the makers are very much alive.

The Goan village baker is called a pader. His furnace is old and time-tested, and the work passes from father to son, so that even when the father is no longer alive the son carries on the same trade. The mixers, the moulders and the men who actually bake the loaves are all still at work. This is the narrator’s proof that bread-making has not died in Goa: the trade has changed hands, not disappeared. If a question asks whether the profession survives, this is the evidence to give — the furnaces, the sound of the bamboo, and sons following fathers.

The part of the piece students usually enjoy most is the baker’s arrival. He announced himself with the thud and jingle of his bamboo staff, a sound the children knew before they were properly awake. He came at least twice a day: once in the morning on his selling round, and again on his way back after his huge basket was empty. He would greet the lady of the house, set his basket down and hand the loaves to the servant. The children were pushed aside with a mild scolding, but they refused to go in. They climbed on to a bench or the parapet and peeped into the basket, because what they really wanted was not plain bread but the bread bangles, and sometimes a sweet bread of a special make. Nobody worried about brushing teeth first. The narrator jokes that a tiger does not brush its teeth either, and that hot tea washed everything clean anyway — a naughty, teasing tone that tells you how young the memory is.

Bread in this piece is not a snack; it is a social duty. Marriage gifts are meaningless without the sweet bread called bol. Sandwiches must be prepared by the lady of the house when a daughter’s engagement is announced. Cakes and bolinhas are a must at Christmas and at other festivals. A party or a feast loses its charm without bread. That is why the narrator insists that the presence of a baker’s furnace in the village is absolutely essential. The baker is therefore described as a friend, companion and guide — a person woven into family life, not simply a shopkeeper.

The bakers themselves were prosperous. Baking was a paying trade, and the baker, his family and his servants always looked happy and well fed; their plump build was open proof of it, and even today a person of that build is compared to a baker through the phrase about a jackfruit-like appearance. Dress marks the passing of time in the piece. In the Portuguese days the baker wore a peculiar single-piece long frock reaching down to the knees, called a kabai. In the narrator’s own childhood that had changed to a shirt and trousers that were shorter than full-length ones and longer than half pants — which is why anyone wearing half pants that reach just below the knee still invites the remark, “He is dressed like a pader!” Business was simple and trusting: the monthly accounts were written in pencil on some wall of the house.

Coorg, also called Kodagu, is described in the lesson as the smallest district of Karnataka, and the writer introduces it with the image the piece is built around: he calls it “a piece of heaven” that must have drifted down from God’s kingdom. That is a metaphor, and it sets the tone for everything after it. The writing is admiring, sensory and openly designed to make you want to go there.

Take the land first. Coorg is a country of rolling hills, evergreen rainforests, spices and coffee plantations, and those rainforests are said to cover about thirty per cent of the district. The season of joy runs from September to March, when the weather is at its best; during the monsoon it pours heavily enough to keep many visitors away. The air itself smells of coffee, and coffee estates and colonial bungalows sit tucked under the tree canopies. Water matters here as much as hills: the river Kaveri draws its water from the hills and forests of Coorg, and the mahseer, a large freshwater fish, is found in these waters in great numbers. Kingfishers dive in for their catch. Elephants enjoy being bathed and scrubbed in the river by their mahouts. Squirrels and langurs drop partly eaten fruit simply for the mischief of enjoying the splashes below. The reserves also hold macaques, Malabar squirrels, langurs and the slender loris, so a visitor sees wildlife without going far.

Then the people. The Kodavus are described as fiercely independent and famous for their hospitality, and they are more than willing to tell a guest stories of the courage of their sons and fathers. Where they originally came from is not settled, and the writer honestly gives the popular explanations instead of a final answer. One story says that a part of Alexander’s army moved south along the coast, found the return journey impractical, settled here and married among the local people; their martial customs and their marriage and religious rites, which are different from mainstream Hindu practice, are offered in support. Another story traces them to Arab ancestors, and here the evidence is a garment: the Kodavus wear a long black coat with an embroidered waist-belt called the kuppia, which resembles the kuffia worn by the Arabs and the Kurds. Notice how a piece of clothing is used as historical evidence — that is a good observation to make in an answer.

The martial reputation is not only legend. The Kodavus are the only people in India permitted to carry firearms without a licence. The Coorg Regiment is one of the most decorated in the Indian Army, and the lesson adds that General Cariappa, whom it names as the first Chief of the Indian Army, was a Coorgi. These three points together explain why the writer treats bravery as part of the local identity rather than as an occasional achievement.

Finally, Coorg as a place to visit. There are many walking trails through the forest for those who want a slow holiday, and river rafting, canoeing, rappelling, rock climbing and mountain biking for those who do not. The climb up the Brahmagiri hills opens out the whole misty landscape of Coorg at once. A walk across a rope bridge leads to the sixty-four-acre island of Nisargadhama. Birdwatchers and butterfly watchers have plenty to look at, and Buddhist monks in their bright robes can be seen at the Tibetan settlement in the district, adding one more layer to a place that is already a mixture of many.

The third piece is the only one written as a story. Rajvir and Pranjol are school friends travelling together during the holidays to Pranjol’s home in Upper Assam, where Pranjol’s father is the manager of the Dhekiabari Tea Estate. Pranjol has grown up on a tea plantation and finds nothing exciting in it; he buries his nose in a detective book. Rajvir, who is seeing all of this for the first time, cannot stop looking out of the window at the scenery. That contrast — the insider who takes his home for granted and the outsider who is thrilled by it — can be read as the quiet point of the whole piece, and it is worth saying so in a long answer.

At a station a vendor calls out for hot tea in a high-pitched voice, and the boys buy cups of steaming tea at their window. This gives Rajvir his opening. He tells Pranjol that over eighty crore cups of tea are drunk every day throughout the world. He has clearly read up about tea before the trip, and he goes on to offer two legends about how tea was discovered, because no one really knows who discovered it.

The Chinese legend is about an ancient emperor who always had his drinking water boiled before he drank it. One day a few leaves from the twigs burning under the pot fell into the water and gave it a delicious flavour. Those, the story says, were tea leaves. The Indian legend is about Bodhidharma, an ancient Buddhist ascetic, who cut off his eyelids because he kept feeling sleepy during meditation. Ten tea plants grew out of the eyelids, and the leaves of those plants, put into hot water and drunk, banished sleep. Both legends explain the same thing in two different ways, and both make tea sound like a gift rather than an invention.

Rajvir adds hard history to the legends. Tea was first drunk in China as far back as 2700 B.C. Words such as tea, chai and chini come from Chinese. Tea reached Europe only in the sixteenth century, and even there it was taken more as a medicine than as an everyday beverage. Notice how neatly the writer slips facts into a friendly conversation instead of lecturing the reader.

Then the landscape takes over. Still on the train, Rajvir watches soft green paddy fields give way to tea bushes, and soon there is nothing else — a sea of tea bushes stretching as far as the eye can see, with tall sturdy shade-trees dwarfing the small plants and, in the orderly rows between them, workers who look like doll-like figures from a distance. Rajvir is thrilled; Pranjol only remarks that this is tea country now, and it is Pranjol, not Rajvir, who supplies the flat piece of information here — Assam, he says, has the largest concentration of plantations in the world. Only after the train reaches the junction does Pranjol’s father drive them through the gate of the Dhekiabari estate, where groups of tea-pluckers wearing plastic aprons and carrying bamboo baskets on their backs are picking the newly sprouted leaves. There Rajvir identifies exactly what he is looking at: this is the second flush, the sprouting period that lasts from May to July and yields the best tea. Pranjol’s father is impressed and tells him he seems to have done his homework before coming. Rajvir agrees that he has read up, but adds that he hopes to learn much more while he is there — and that eagerness is the note the piece ends on.

The first and largest theme is variety. Three writers, three regions, three completely different daily routines — and yet all three are ordinary Indian life. A Goan child waiting for bread bangles, a Kodavu family telling stories of soldiers in the house, an Assamese tea estate at the height of the plucking season: none of them can stand for the whole country, and the chapter never pretends that any one of them does. The plural in the title is the argument. India is understood in glimpses, not in a single portrait.

The second theme is that culture is carried in food. Bread in Goa is not simply something to eat. It marks a marriage, an engagement, Christmas and every feast, and the loss of the baker would mean the loss of the ceremony. Coffee gives Coorg its smell and much of its economy; the air is said to breathe of coffee, and the estates and their bungalows sit under the tree canopies as part of the view itself. Tea in Assam is a world crop with legends attached to it and thousands of hands working on it. In all three pieces, if you want to understand a place, you look at what the people there put on the table.

The third theme is the past living inside the present. Goa’s Portuguese period is over, but it survives in the kabai, in the bol and in the word pader itself. The Kodavus’ ancestry is uncertain, but it survives in a coat, in customs and in a permission to carry arms. Tea’s origin is unknown, but it survives in two legends that people still repeat. In each case history is not kept in a museum; it is kept in habits.

The fourth theme is the value of looking. Pranjol lives on a tea estate and is bored; Rajvir arrives with a book’s worth of reading and sees wonders. The narrator of the Goan piece only understands how special the baker was once he has grown up and the world has changed. Familiarity dulls the eye. This is why all three writers work so hard on detail — the jingle of a bamboo staff, the ripple made by half-eaten fruit, the plastic aprons of the pluckers. Detail is how a writer forces a reader to look again.

Running through everything is respect for ordinary work. The baker with his basket, the mahout scrubbing an elephant, the pluckers moving through the bushes: nobody in this chapter is famous, and the chapter treats all of them as worth writing about. When you answer a question about the message of the lesson, that is a strong point to make.

Because there are three writers, there are three voices, and it is worth training yourself to hear the difference. Lucio Rodrigues writes in the first person and often uses “we”, which pulls the reader into a shared childhood. His tense is mostly the past, and he leans on the form used to for repeated habits: the baker used to come twice a day, the children used to climb the parapet. Lokesh Abrol writes in the present tense and speaks to a “you” who might travel, which is the standard voice of travel writing. Arup Kumar Dutta writes in the past tense with dialogue, so facts arrive as speech between two boys rather than as a list.

The devices are worth naming. Metaphor: Coorg as a piece of heaven that drifted down; the plantation as a sea of tea bushes. Simile and comparison: a well-fed person compared to a baker through the jackfruit-like appearance. Onomatopoeia: the thud and jingle of the bamboo staff, and the vendor’s cry of hot tea on the platform. Imagery works through more than one sense at a time — you hear the bamboo, smell the coffee, see the green of the bushes, taste the sweet bread.

Loan words carry a lot of the meaning, so spell them correctly. From Goa: pader (the baker), kabai (his old single-piece frock), bol (sweet bread), bolinhas (small cakes). From Coorg: Kodagu (the district), Kodavu (the people), kuppia (their long black coat), kuffia (the Arab and Kurdish garment it resembles), mahout (an elephant keeper), mahseer (a large freshwater fish). From Assam: chai, flush (a sprouting period), and the estate name Dhekiabari. A common mistake is to swap kabai and kuppia, since both are garments from different parts of the chapter.

Three grammar points from this lesson are useful in your own writing. First, used to plus the base verb describes a habit that has stopped, which is exactly what the Goan piece needs; do not write “used to came”. Second, relative clauses with who, which and that let you pack a fact into a sentence without starting a new one: the coat which the Kodavus wear is called the kuppia; Bodhidharma, who was an ancient Buddhist ascetic, cut off his eyelids. Third, watch adjectives of place and origin — Goan, Portuguese, Kodavu, Assamese — and keep their capital letters.

Finally, tone. None of these pieces is angry or argumentative. They are affectionate. If a question asks about the writer’s attitude, words like fondness, nostalgia, admiration, curiosity and pride will serve you better than dramatic words like shock or protest.

Answers from this chapter tend to lose marks for one of three reasons: the wrong author is attached to the wrong piece, the answer is vague praise with no detail from the text, or the student writes about all three parts when the question asked about one. Fix those three things and the rest is straightforward.

Start every answer by fixing the part in your mind. If the question mentions the pader, bread bangles, the kabai or a Portuguese memory, you are in A Baker from Goa by Lucio Rodrigues. If it mentions coffee, rainforest, the Kaveri, the kuppia or firearms, you are in Coorg by Lokesh Abrol. If it mentions legends, plantations, the second flush or two boys on a train, you are in Tea from Assam by Arup Kumar Dutta.

Then use a simple three-step shape for each idea: make the point, give the evidence from the text, explain what it shows. For example: the baker was more than a tradesman (point); he came twice a day, greeted the lady of the house, and no marriage gift was complete without the bol (evidence); so his basket carried the village’s ceremonies, not just its breakfast (explanation). Two or three such units make a complete long answer.

Use quotations sparingly and accurately. One short, correct phrase is worth more than three long half-remembered ones. If you cannot recall the exact words, write the idea in your own sentence instead of inventing a quotation. Two short phrases that are safe to learn by heart are the description of Coorg as “a piece of heaven” and the remark “He is dressed like a pader!”

For value-based or extended questions, work outwards from the text to an idea. A question about the baker can end with the dignity of traditional work and how modern convenience threatens it. A question about Coorg can end with the way a community keeps its identity through dress, custom and service. A question about Assam can end with how curiosity turns an ordinary journey into a discovery, using Rajvir and Pranjol as the two sides of that argument. Always land your final sentence on the idea, not on a summary of events.