Question

last week was spent glued to tv, watching india getting thrashed by a rejuvenated england at lord’s. like most indians, i too was dispirited by india’s inability to live up to its reputation as the number one team. but at least there was the immense satisfaction of watching the match live and even listening to bbc’s good-humoured test match special on internet radio. it was such a change from my schooldays when you had to tune in to a crackling short wave broadcast for intermittent radio commentary. alternatively, we could go to the cinema, some three weeks after the match, to see a two-minute capsule in the indian news review that preceded the feature film. it is not that there was no technology available to make life a little more rewarding. yet, in 1971, when bs chandrasekhar mesmerised the opposition and gave india its first test victory at the oval, there was no tv, except in delhi. those were the bad old days of the shortage economy when everything, from cinema tickets to two-wheelers, had a black market premium. telephones were a particular source of exasperation. by the 1970s, the telephone system in cities had collapsed. you may have possessed one of those heavy, black bakelite instruments but there was no guarantee of a dial tone when you picked up the receiver. the ubiquitous ‘cable fault’ would render a telephone useless for months on end. what was particularly frustrating was that there was precious little you could do about whimsical public services. in the early 1980s, when opposition mps complained about dysfunctional telephones, the then communications minister cm stephen retorted that phones were a luxury and not a right. if people were dissatisfied, he pronounced haughtily, they could return their phones. inefficiency was, in fact, elevated into an ideal. when capital-intensive public sector units began running into the red, the regime’s economists deemed that their performance shouldn’t be judged by a narrow capitalist yardstick. the public sector, they pronounced, had to exercise ‘social’ choices. ‘india’, wrote jagdish bhagwati (one of the few genuine dissidents of that era), “suffered the tyranny of anticipated consequences from the wrong premises.” questions (a) on the basis of your reading of the passage, answer the following questions briefly.
(i) about what was the author satisfied, even though india lost to england at lord’s?
(ii) what were the options for indians to watch or listen about cricket matches in england during the author’s schooldays? (iii) what example does the author give to justify his statement about ‘whimsical public services’?
(iv) how did the government’s economists justify the losses in the public sector units?
(v) which word in paragraph 1 is the synonym of ‘tremendous’? ​

Answer 1

Answer:

1) india getting thrashed by a rejuvenated england at lord’s. like most indians, i too was dispirited by india’s inability to live up to its reputation as the number one team.

2) at least there was the immense satisfaction of watching the match live and even listening to bbc’s good-humoured test match special on internet radio.

Answer 2

Answer:v. immense

Explanation: