blazesolutions

      Hard Times                                              Charles Dickens Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her father, a circus entertainer. As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a dissipated, self-interested hedonist, and Louisa struggles with deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is missing something important in her life. Eventually Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner and banker more than twice her age. Bounderby continually trumpets his role as a self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his mother as an infant. To

SHOULD THE ASSASSIN OF GANDHI BE KILLED?                         Pearl S. Buck Introduction       Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries she spent most of her life before 1934 in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best selling fiction in 1931 and 1932. In 1938 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” On 30th January 1948 India witnessed the tragic assassination of Mahatma Gandhi at the Birla House in New Delhi. Naturam Vinayak Godse was his assassin. Gandhi’s greatest weapon was non-violence. His life and teachings touched people outside India and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. He has inspired people around the world and Pearl S.Buck, the American writer and novelist was one among them. In her words: “Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the door of India’s destitute millions, clad as one of th

                        TOBA TEK SINGH                       Saadat Hasan Manto Introduction Saadat Hasan Manto is an Urdu short story writer who wrote much about the communal killings of 1947. His stories are best known to have depicted the partition of the sub continent immediately following independence in 1947. He produced 22 collections of short stories, a novel, five series of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches. Much of his writings are translated into English. Summary The greatest of Manto’s 1947 stories is ‘Toba Tek Singh’. The madness that has gripped the subcontinent permeates even the lunatic asylums and the great decision makers of the two countries decide that since there has been such a transfer of populations as well as assets, it is only logical that non-Muslim lunatics should be reported to India and Muslim lunatics in India transferred to Pakistan. On the day of the great exchange, there is only one man, Bishan Singh, who re