1Mediummains
Compulsory Language
Read carefully the passage given below and write your answers to the questions that follow in clear, correct and concise language:
When Tolstoy led a party composed of his family and visitors to harvest a field for a widow, he was doing two things. In part, he was saying that everyone ought to do his share of what he called "bread labour", and earn his keep by the sweat of his brow. At the same time, he was affirming that each of us should help our less fortunate neighbours. Mahatma Gandhi agreed whole-heartedly with both these principles, but he linked them more closely than Tolstoy with what he saw as the decadence of industrial life that takes people away from the home and village crafts, which are varied and rewarding, to the soul-destroying monotony of machines. Even before either of these great men had given their philosophy to the world, an American author named Thoreau, had built himself a hut in the woods to prove that he could support himself by the simplest manual work; and in Britain, Ruskin had led his students out from Oxford to build a raised footpath across the water meadows to a village to demonstrate the dignity of labour. The path remains to this day, almost one hundred and fifty years later, lined with tall poplars, as a memorial to a fine ideal.
One could trace the history of such ideas still further back, to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who preached the dignity and equality of man and the educational value of Nature and manual work, from the Swiss city of Geneva in the eighteenth century. It was however, a Swiss called Pierre Ceresole, a contemporary of Gandhiji, who took these basic principles and used them to promote international reconciliation.
Pierre was no ordinary Swiss, for it is rare for ordinary people to have the courage to dream dreams and attempt to put them into practice. Pierre's father's family originated in Italy, his mother's family came from France, he had a German grandmother and had relations in England. He used to point out the stupidity of frontiers.
Pierre described how, at the age of seventeen, he was walking in the woods and experienced "something which seemed to me like a solemn dedication to truth ... in which the first necessity was to recognise one's own faults. In a blinding fashion there came to me the Vision of Truth amid Nature's mysteries and solitude." He had the habit of keeping a pencil and a notebook with him for entering his stray thoughts, and from these notebooks, of which there are more than a hundred, it is seen that he fretted over the many failures of the Western way of life and yet was generous about the people he met. Despite being an engineer, Pierre, in order to work his way, took a job on a poultry farm and later in an oil-field. While he was in Honolulu, Hawaii, he earned his living by teaching French, but this resulted in his being paid more than he needed for his keep; he gave all his savings away to charity.
From Hawaii he moved on to Japan, experiencing there an entirely new way of life which helped him to see more clearly the virtues and follies of European culture. Returning home at the outbreak of the war, in 1914, he gave all the money inherited from his father to the State, saying, "I believe that the teachings of Christ are superior to good business sense." Later he wrote, "Two thousand years ago there came a radiant light, full of peace and loving kindness — and we immediately crucified it."
Pierre had been impressed with the sacrifice and heroism in war and wanted something equally positive mobilised in the cause of peace. He organised the first international work-camp at a war-devastated village in France. The idea was that people of different nationalities, including those whose countries had recently been enemies of one another, should be joined side by side in honest work to rebuild not only the concrete things but also the feelings of brotherhood that are shattered by war. The number of volunteers and the number of camps began to grow rapidly, and what had been the Swiss Service Civil became the Service Civil International (SCI). Pierre died in 1945 after World War II.
Pierre Ceresole had the satisfaction of doing what he believed to be right. Each year a growing number of volunteers go to work-camps and there is scarcely a country that has not heard of them. Anyone can become a work-camper, and for many this is the place to start — planting young trees and crossing the frontiers.