St Anthony’s College BBA Entrance Test Model Question Paper : www.anthonys.ac.in

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St Anthony’S College Shillong
Entrance Test For Admission Into
Under Graduate
Professional Courses 2010
Business Administration
Duration: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Model Question List : http://www.anthonys.ac.in/questions.html
Model Question Paper : http://www.anthonys.ac.in/downloads/...ussAdm2010.pdf

SECTION I : ENGLISH USAGE AND VERBAL ABILITY
Direction for questions 1 – 5:
Read the following passage and answer the questions following it.

PASSAGE
Why did Arundhati Roy win the 1997 Booker Prize? Well, in a year of levelling mediocrity, The God of Small Things had a radical difference; it was quite unlike any other book we read. What the judges most admired was not its Indian setting, its slightly hackneyed reworking of the old duchess-and-thegamekeeper plot in the story of cross-caste erotic love between a Paravan and a Syrian Christian, or the admittedly valuable insight Roy offers into the complicated politics of Kerala. It was, rather, her verbal exuberance : almost alone among the 106 entries, Roy has her own voice, her own signature.

There is something childish about Roy. She has a heightened capacity for wonder, seeing the world as a child might. This accounts for the defamiliarising quality of her prose, her metaphorical exactitude and striking similies : a moon-lit river falling from a swimmer’s arms like “sleeves of silver”; the smell of shit hovering over a village “like a hat”. Yet overall this was not a good year for the British, or indeed the Commonwealth novel. A quirk of the prize (set up in 1968 by Booker Plc. an international conglomerate), is that it does not fully embrace the English-speaking world: American writers are cautiously excluded. Which is probably sensible.

“A single shelf of a good European library,” wrote Macaulay in 1835, “is worth the whole native literature.” The Indian writers of this century have enacted a thrilling revenge of Macaulay’s intolerable snobbery - Roy included. There is, though, a deep ignorance about Indian fiction in the West; we have only read those writers working in English. This was demonstrated in May when the New Yorker magazine gathered what it lazily called “India’s leading novelists” in one room in London for a monumental photograph. What was notable about the photograph, apart from the prominence given to Roy before she had published any fiction, was the exclusion of any writer not working in English. Salman Rushdie may argue that the “true Indian literature of the first post-colonial half century has been in the language the British left behind”, but without the help of expert translators and farsighted publishers we in the West will always struggle to refute this characteristically bombastic assertion. Before the Booker Prize dinner at Guildhall in London I asked Roy, mistakenly described as a magical realist, about this aspect of work. She spoke with passion about her continuing dialogue with Rushdie, and of her disappointment at his disregard for Indian writers working in the vernacular languages. She said: “When I was in America I went on a couple of TV shows with Rushdie. And he said (she borrowed the voice of an officious schoolmaster). “The trouble with Arundhati is that she insists that India is an ordinary place”. Well, I ask, ‘Why the hell not?’ It is my ordinary life. The difference between me and Rushdie begins there.

“I don’t want brownie points because I’m from India. My book doesn’t trade on the currency of cultural specificity, even though the details are right. That is why, I think, it has been bought in so many countries, and why Americans come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got an aunt like Baby Kochamma’ (a malign character who schemes to destroy Ammu and the twins).”

Structurally the book is interesting, too. The main action of the book takes place on one day in December 1969 and concerns the drowning of a little Anglo-Indian girl, Sophie Mol, on holiday from England. Sophie spends the fortnight of her stay in a rapture of discovery. Together with her young cousins, the twins Estha and Rahel, she explores the hot, lush waterways and meadows of Kerala. She encounters, too, Velutha, a despised Paravan, with whom the twins’ mother has an intense, doomed yet ultimately lifeenhancing affair.

Though the ending is flagged as early as page four, Roy employs a circuitous narrative so that events emerge elliptically and out of chronological sequence. she cannily uses cinematic techniques - time shirts, endless fast forwards and reversals, rapid editing - simultaneously to accelerate and delay the coming disaster. An atmosphere of foreboding, sometimes lapsing into portentousness, hangs over the narrative.

The God of Small Things fulfils the highest demand of the art of fiction : to see the world, not conventionally or habitually, but as if for the first time. Roy’s achievement, and it is considerable, is never to forget about the small things in life: the insects and flowers, wind and water, the outcast and the despised. She deserved to win.

1. Why was “The God of Small Things” chosen for the Booker Award?
a. Because of its levelling mediocrity
b. Because of its Indian setting
c. Because it was radically different from any other book read
d. Because of the valuable insight it offers into the complicated politics of Kerala

2. What was the most striking feature of the work?
a. The Indian setting of an old hackneyed plot
b. The exuberant reworking of the old duchess-and-the-gamekeeper plot
c. The sympathetic look at the story of cross-caste erotic love.
d. The verbal exuberance of the book

3. What is the comparison between a child and Arundhati Roy?
a. Both have a heightened capacity for wonder
b. The prose of both Arundhati and a child would have the same quality
c. Both are capable of using very apt metaphors
d. The defamiliarizing quality of the prose of both

4. What is the West’s misconception of Indian novelists?
a. That only those working in the English language are proper Indian novelists
b. That all Indian novelists may be stuffed into a single room
c. That a photograph may be taken of them
d. There aren’t many Indian novelists

5. What is Salman Rushdie’s opinion of Indian literature?
a. Indian literature is what is written in any Indian language
b. True Indian literature of the first half century after independence was in Hindi
c. Only what is written in any of the Indian languages can be true Indian literature
d. True Indian literature of the first half century after independence has been in English

[Unregistered]

Logical and analytical skills.