IBSAT 2020 Verbal RC: lesson of the 1980s scandals

There are millions of children in India, who cannot, for a variety of reasons, be protected by their parents and adult family. They maybe dead, or alcoholic, or violent and abusive, or in jail, or lost, or have abandoned their child. The parents may also be themselves destitute, homeless, gravely ill or disabled, and therefore unable to care for their children without support. The child, who has no home or settled place or abode and any ostensible means of subsistence maybe at risk in other ways as well: due to riots, natural disasters, war and militant conflict; disabilities and incurable terminal ailments, with no one who can support or look after the child; when a child is grossly abused or tortured; is inducted into drug abuse or trafficking; child marriage and child labor. In all such situations, it is the State, which is both morally and legally responsible to protect, nurture and raise each child.
However, at present, the State in India invests miniscule resources in child protection. India today is a youthful nation: 19 percent of the children in the world live within its boundaries, and more than one-third of the population is below 18 years. Accounting for the largest number of children in work, and the second largest number of children affected by HIV, India arguably has the highest number of children facing exploitation and neglect in the world. But the investment on child protection was a shocking 0.034 per cent of the budget.
Traditionally, public authorities have tried to accomplish their duty of protecting children who are at risk mainly by locking away large numbers of these children in State-run, closed institutions for many years until the child grows to adulthood, and soon after the child comes of age by abruptly discharging the child without any further support into the larger society. Private and religious charities also sometimes run orphanages for such children, but they are usually run on similar custodial principles of raising the child in confined and overly disciplined environments. For children who conflict with the law, there are statutory ‘special homes’ to which they are usually confined in conditions similar to jails. For many years, these children also shared adult jails, and many illegally continue to do so.
It is both absurd and heartless for children to be locked up only because they have no one to protect them. It is argued that this is done for the sake of the child: if the child was free in the community, the State would be unable to protect the child from abuse, and therefore she is locked up for her own good. This is quite illogical. The State must find ways to protect the child who is in need of care in ways that respect the child’s right to a happy and free childhood, while at the same time ensuring her protection, and her rights to food, education, health care, recreation, love and security.

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‘Human life has meaning only to that degree and as long as it is lived in the service of humanity’.
So said Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, in his book of prison notes titled, The Man Died. Soyinka has lived a meaningful life. As a poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist and literary critic, his contribution to literature has been immense. Soyinka is more than a writer. An outspoken social critic, political activist and tireless crusader against tyranny, he is the conscience of Afric
Born in a Yoruba family in Abeokuta, Soyinka is the inheritor of the best of two worlds. His family was Christian. In the book, Ake: The Years of Childhood, he recalls the influences of his Christian home. His father was a schoolmaster. In his well-stocked library, where young Wole spent hours, the foundation of a literary career was laid. But it was his grandfather who initiated young Soyinka into the rituals and religious beliefs of his people.
Soyinka’s creative art is anchored in his culture. With all his pride in the culture of his people, Soyinka was no blind worshipper of Africa’s past. This was startlingly proved by his play, A Dance of the Forests, written for the Independence celebrations of Nigeria in 1960. As sadistic and megalomaniac dictators emerged in independent African nations, Soyinka’s moral fervour deepened. Soyinka has been severe also in his criticism of his countrymen. His hilarious comedies and brilliant political satires like Opera Wonyosi have brought to light evils and signs of decadence in Nigerian society. In the midst of the violence and chaos that marked the history of independent Nigeria, Soyinka kept his sanity. His deep moral outrage, however, drove him to take enormous personal risks. Soyinka was arrested and held in solitary confinement for more than two years. Soyinka produced some of his best works in prison. After he was being released, he chose to go on voluntary exile for a long period. The bedrock of Soyinka’s unwavering social commitment is his deep love for Afric When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Soyinka held out the Prize in the direction of the African continent. This touching gesture was an acknowledgment of his belief that the Prize was an affirmation of African culture, literature and art that had long been trampled by the colonial powers.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Soyinka eloquently affirmed the African values. He called for the political will to dismantle all structures of racism and human inequality. The speech echoed his statement in The Man Died, ‘For me justice is the prime condition of humanity.’ It was in recognition of this passionate commitment that in 1994, UNESCO made Soyinka its Goodwill Ambassador for the promotion of African culture and human rights.

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Forty years after man first set foot on the moon, the United States has dispatched two unmanned lunar spacecraft to earth’s natural satellite to pave the way for humans to return there. The search for deposits of water is high on the agenda of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe, too, may well join the quest. ‘Discovering water on the moon would be like finding a gold mine,’ said U.S. space agency NASA in a recent press document. It estimates that getting a bottle of water to the moon would run to about $50,000 at current launch costs. Therefore, the ability to extract water locally would be immensely useful if humans want to establish bases on the celestial body.
It is believed that water could have been brought to the moon by comets and meteorites that have crashed on its surface over billions of years. Likewise, hydrogen ions streaming out from the sun might have combined with oxygen from chemical compounds in the lunar soil and turned into water. The question is whether all this water has boiled off in the face of the moon’s scorching daytime temperatures and its low gravitational hold.
In a paper published in 1961, three scientists at the California Institute of Technology, put forward the idea that water ‘may well be present in appreciable quantities in shaded areas in the form of ice’. The paper appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research around the same time President John F. Kennedy committed the U.S, to landing a man on the moon. Some thirty years later, two U.S. space probes that went to the moon, Clementine and Lunar Prospector, provided evidence that water might persist as patches of ice mixed with soil at the bottom of craters at the poles. Sunlight never reaches the bottom of some craters at the lunar poles, which therefore remain at temperatures far below the freezing point of water. So these would be ideal locations for trapping water ice on the moon. But the evidence has been disputed and scientists continue to argue vigorously about whether or not earth’s nearest neighbour holds any water.
The LRO and the LCROSS were launched from Cape Canaveral in Florid The two spacecraft, along with Chandrayaan-1, will undoubtedly throw a great deal of new light on the issue. Once the spacecraft is commissioned, a slew of instruments on it will look for signs of water ice and hydrogen in different ways.
The LCROSS and the spent upper stage of the Atlas rocket that launched the two spacecraft have swung past the moon for the first time. NASA plans to send the empty upper stage, weighing over 2,000 kg, hurtling into a crater near the lunar south pole at a speed of about 9,000 km per hour.

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‘When were you in Morocco?’ a globetrotter friend excitedly asked me. ‘Never been there, I’m keen to visit it, though,’ I sallied. ‘This is Morocco,’ he said emphatically, pointing to an image on the monitor. ‘This is Punjab,’ I countered. ‘It’s the Grand Mosque of Marakesh,’ he stressed. ‘It’s the Moorish Mosque in Kapurthala,’ I smiled. Our rebuttal session got a tad extended leaving my friend utterly flummoxed and I thought of bailing him out. ‘You’ve been partially accurate all along. The mosque is a replica.’ He was astounded. So are a host of others initially when they see the images of Kapurthala, an erstwhile royal province defined by its architectural grandeur. Their surprise springs not from the verity that a facsimile structure exists, but from the knowledge that it stands in Punjab!
The feisty agrarian land of Punjab has always been shy in boasting about its built heritage, instead letting its overenthusiastic bhangra and scrumptious tandoori chicken do most of the talking. Nonetheless, it does have stunning edifices dotting its landscape and is quite an indulgence for the history-digger. Amongst them all, Kapurthala is definitely the crowning glory. Its lineage dates back to founder, Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, an astute warrior, who played a pivotal role in crushing numerous invasions to become the first leader who consolidated large parts of Punjab. In a way, Jassa Singh laid the path for Punjab’s most exceptional monarch, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, to establish an impregnable Sikh empire years later.
However, Kapurthala owes its structural legacy to Maharaja Jagatjit Singh. A widely-travelled royal, his voyages allowed him to see exceptional architecture and he chose the blueprint of some of the finest in the world to adorn his State with. That’s how Kapurthala got the Moorish Mosque. Recreated by the French architect, Manteaux, on the pattern of the Koutoubia or Grand Mosque of Marakesh, Morocco’s signature structure, it was erected in 1930 at a cost of ` 4 lakh. Far removed from the Indo-Islamic, marble-domed mosques found around the country, it has instead a brick-work facade, no dome, a flat roofed entrance and, uniquely, a single cuboidal minaret.
What appealed instantly were the joyous colors that reflected a Mediterranean ambience. I was gripped by a rose pink wall meeting a lemon one round the corner, mustard-colored arches, glazed dark turquoise ridged tiles capping a hexagonal dome or the touch of green in its minaret. The intricate, brick-filigreed minaret is further adorned with a spire which is three copper balls in reducing size, signifying the traditional style of the Almohads, a dynasty that originated in 1121 A.D. with Ibn Tumart, a Berber tribe member of the Atlas Mountains; and by 1149 A.D., it had established its control over Marakesh. The Grand Mosque was built between 1184 and 1199 A.D. Centuries later, the Moorish Mosque in Punjab stood as a splendid link in the six degrees of separation from a passage of history that played out in distant Africa.
Today’s Kapurthala has a reticent charm. In addition to this slice of Morocco, the town is dotted with other European replicas too. I observed a bit of France in the Jagatjit Palace, a close reproduction of the Palace of Versailles, that is now the Sainik School. A touch of Greece came across in the Jagatjit Club that’s designed on the lines of the Acropolis. A bevy of places that completed the impressive line-up were the IndoSaracenic Jhagar Singh War Memorial; Elysee Palace that’s now MGN Public School; the Islamic-patterned former Durbar Hall which at present serves as the District Court; and the Randhir College that was set up in 1856 and named after a former ruler.

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Read the passages given below carefully and answer the question that follow:
PASSAGE
The Bush Administration may be unsure about Saddam Hussein, but it has already decided how to go after alleged evildoers in Big Business - with guns blazing. "If you're a CEO and you think you can fudge the books in order to make yourself look better, we're going to find you, we're going to arrest you and we're going to hold you to account, *President Bush sa id last week in Charleston, South Carolina
It didn't take long for the FBI to make good on that promise. A week after hauling in adelphia Communication's frail, white-haired founder, John Rigas, and two of his sons if they were armed and dangerous, FBI agents gave former WorldCom executives Scott Sullivan and David Myers the same star treatment, parading the handcuffed quarry in an early-morning prep walk and prompting Sullivan's lawyer to complain about "the unfair taint of the current political climate."
"We didn't have anything to do with it," a senior administration official says of the high-profile collars. "But of course they're a big help. It means the system is working, and that helps with [investor] confidence. "If so, that wasn't reflected in the stock market,which swooned on Thursday and Friday.
Arrests and indictments don't necessarily result in convictions- think back to the Wall Street scandals of the 1980s. But for now, with mid-term congressional elections looming and control of the House and Senate at issue, that's almost beside the point. Nor is the spectacle over. The House Energy and Commerce Committee in particular is contemplating more hearings later this year, with an invitation list that might include everyone from Global Crossing to Imclone, a committee source told TIME. And as Democratic opponents seize on the White House's cozy links to corporate America- and especially to Harken Energy and Halliburton - the Bust administration seems to believe that the best defense is a full-scale offensive.
Though by far the most visible, the World Com duo wasn't the only prey: telecom firm Qwest, already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), is close to restating the past three years of earnings by more than $1 billion; apparel maker Warnaco is now in the SEC's cross hairs; and prosecutors were driving a hard bargain in plea negotiations with Imclone's ex-CEO Samuel Waksal, insisting that he accept at least seven years in prison on insider - trading charges and declining to spare his family members from prosecution.

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The Correct Option is C

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