NEB Class 12 · Past paper
The complete NEB Class 12 2078 exam paper for English, all 13 questions with solved model answers.
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Physical dependence on alcohol specifically known as alcohol addiction-takes place gradually because drinking alters the balance of some chemicals in the brain such as gamma-aminobutyric acid, which inhibits impulsiveness, and glutamate, which excites the nervous system. Alcohol also raises the levels of dopamine in the brain, which is associated with the pleasurable aspects of drinking alcohol. Other factors can lead to excessive drinking that contributes to the addiction process. These include genetics, emotional state, psychological factors, and social and cultural factors.
Earlies drinking can make the victim on addict over time. Consuming more than 14 drinks a week for men or seven drinks a week for woman increases the risk of developing dependence on alcohol. Moreover the fact that drinking by itself is just one of the risk factors that contribute to alcoholism should be enough to keep all those who are same away from alcohol. Other risk factors may be age, genetics, gender family history and emotional orders.
Alcohol acts as a sedative. Thus it depresses the central nervous system. Initially alcohol may only stimulate, but as drinking continues, sedating or calming effects occur. By depressing the control centres of your brain, alcohol relaxes you and reduces your inhibitions. The more you drink, the more you are sedated. Excessive use of alcohol can be harmful to your brain and nervous system and cause fatigue, short term memory loss, as well as weakness and paralysis of your eye muscles. It can also have other severe health effects such as liver disorders, gastrointestinal problems, cardiovascular problems, diabetes complications.
Questions: a. How does alcohol drinking transform the person into addict? b. What are some of the factors of alcohol which contribute to the addiction process? c. According to the speaker, what is the frequency of drinks which increases risks of dependence on alcohol? d. How does alcohol depress the central nervous system? e. Summarise the passage briefly.
a. How alcohol drinking transforms a person into an addict.
The change is gradual and chemical, not sudden. Drinking upsets the balance of certain chemicals in the brain, in particular gamma-aminobutyric acid, which inhibits impulsiveness, and glutamate, which excites the nervous system. At the same time alcohol raises the level of dopamine, the chemical associated with the pleasurable aspects of drinking. So the drinker's self restraint is weakened while the pleasure is chemically reinforced, and as this continues the body comes to need alcohol to feel normal. That state of need is physical dependence, which is what alcohol addiction is.
b. Factors that contribute to the addiction process.
Besides the drinking itself, the passage names genetics, the drinker's emotional state, psychological factors, and social and cultural factors. It adds that other risk factors may be age, gender, family history and emotional disorders.
c. The frequency of drinks that increases the risk of dependence.
Consuming more than fourteen drinks a week in the case of men, or more than seven drinks a week in the case of women, increases the risk of developing dependence on alcohol.
d. How alcohol depresses the central nervous system.
Alcohol acts as a sedative. At first it may only stimulate, but as the drinking continues the sedating or calming effects appear. It works by depressing the control centres of the brain, which relaxes the drinker and reduces the inhibitions, and the more one drinks the more deeply one is sedated. Carried to excess this damages the brain and the nervous system, bringing on fatigue, short term memory loss, and weakness and paralysis of the eye muscles.
e. Summary of the passage.
Alcohol addiction develops slowly because drinking disturbs the brain's chemistry, weakening the chemical that curbs impulsiveness, exciting the nervous system and raising the dopamine that makes drinking pleasurable. Genetic, emotional, psychological and social factors all push a person towards the excessive drinking that leads to dependence, and more than fourteen drinks a week for a man or seven for a woman increases that risk. Since alcohol is a sedative, it depresses the control centres of the brain, relaxing the drinker and lowering the inhibitions, and heavy use damages the brain and nerves, causing fatigue, memory loss and muscular weakness as well as disorders of the liver, the stomach, the heart and diabetes. The passage therefore warns that drinking is only one of several risk factors, and that awareness of them should keep sensible people away from alcohol.
a. (Grandmother) The speaker expresses his closeness entirely through the senses rather than through any statement of affection. The whole poem is built as a series of conditionals, "if I were to see", "if I were to feel", "if I heard", and each one offers a different sense as proof that he would know her without needing to be told.
By sight, he says that if he saw her shape from a mile away he would know at once that it was she, by the purple scarf and the plastic shopping bag. By touch and smell together, if he were to feel hands on his head he would know they were her hands, "warm and damp with the smell of roots", the dampness and the earth smell being the marks of a life spent working with the ground. And by sound, if he heard a voice coming from a rock he would know it was hers, and her words would flow inside him "like the light of someone stirring ashes from a sleeping fire at night".
That last image is the finest thing in the poem, and it is worth noting that the light belongs to her words, not to her hand: her speech does for him what a stirred fire does in a dark room, uncovering a warmth that was banked but never out. Because he needs no face and no name to recognise her, and identifies her by scarf, by damp hands and by voice alone, the bond is made to feel older and deeper than words, and the grandmother becomes a presence felt in the body rather than a person described from outside.
b. (About Love) The words are Alyohin's own, spoken about himself, and they describe not love but the farm work his circumstances forced on him. Telling his story to Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, he explains that when his father died the estate at Sofino was left burdened with debts, partly run up in educating him, and that he decided he could not honourably leave them unpaid. So a university man of refined tastes settled down to work the land with his own hands, and of those years he says: "I myself ploughed and sowed and reaped, and was bored doing it, and frowned with disgust, like a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen-garden."
The significance of the image lies in its unnaturalness. A cat lives on flesh, and a cucumber is no food for it; only real hunger would bring it to eat one. In just the same way Alyohin is doing work that is not his by nature or training, and doing it from plain necessity rather than choice or liking. The homely, almost comic comparison also carries his distaste: he is bored and frowning, not ennobled. Chekhov is refusing the romantic picture of the gentleman who returns to the soil and finds himself there, and he makes the refusal through one small concrete image instead of a paragraph of explanation, which is characteristic of his method.
Its importance to the story as a whole is that it prepares the love that follows. The drudgery keeps Alyohin on the estate, coarsens his days, wearies him and shuts him off from company, so that when he is taken into the Luganoviches' warm, cultured drawing room it is like coming in out of the cold, and his feeling for Anna Alekseyevna grows in that contrast. It also helps to explain his fatal hesitation: a man who sees his own life as this grinding, joyless thing can hardly believe he has anything to offer a woman, and so he says nothing for years, until it is too late and they part on the train with everything still unspoken. The cat in the kitchen garden is therefore the measure of what his life had become, and of what his silence cost him.
c. (The Children Who Wait) Not the family that adoption agencies traditionally had in mind. A fifteen year old boy and a sickly eleven year old are exactly the children the essay calls hard to place, passed over because agencies assumed that what people wanted was a healthy, white, perfect infant. The homes that actually come forward for such children are the unconventional ones: older couples past the age once thought suitable, single men and women, working class and low income families, black families, families that already have children of their own, and above all foster parents who have looked after the child and grown attached. What these families have in common is not money or an ideal profile but the willingness to accept a child as he is, with his age and his handicaps. The essay's point is that the children wait not because no one wants them but because the agencies' narrow idea of a fit family keeps the willing families out.
d. (Traveling through the Dark) The one who is travelling through the dark is the speaker himself, driving alone at night on the narrow Wilson River road, and in a wider sense the poem's title covers everyone who travels that road, including the dead doe he finds and the living fawn still waiting inside her.
No, they did not all express concern. The speaker alone feels the weight of it. He stops, drags the deer to the edge, and when he discovers by the warmth of her side that the fawn is alive he hesitates and "could hear the wilderness listen". Everything else around him is indifferent: his car stands with its parking lights on, the engine purring steadily, the exhaust turning red in the tail light, the machine going quietly about its business while a life waits to be decided. Earlier travellers had shown no concern at all, since the doe lies there because a car struck her and drove on. And the speaker's own concern, real as it is, ends in the practical act of rolling her into the canyon, because leaving her on the road would kill the next driver. The poem's power lies in that gap between the feeling and the necessary deed.
e. (The Tell-tale Heart) What compels the confession is not evidence but the narrator's own guilt turned into sound.
Having murdered the old man and buried him under the planks of the bedroom floor, the narrator is perfectly composed when three policemen arrive at four in the morning, a neighbour having reported a shriek. He is so confident that he shows them over the whole house, invites them to rest in the very chamber, and sets his own chair directly over the spot where the body lies. They sit talking pleasantly and he is at ease.
Then he becomes aware of a low, dull, quick sound, "much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton". It grows steadily louder, and he takes it for the beating of the dead man's heart. He talks faster, raises his voice, paces the room, swings his chair and grates it on the boards, but the noise only swells. Convinced that the officers must hear it too, and that their calm smiles and continued chatting mean they hear it and are mocking his agony, he can bear the pretence no longer. In a frenzy he shrieks out, "Villains! dissemble no more! I admit the deed! tear up the planks! here, here! it is the beating of his hideous heart!" The sound, of course, is in his own overstrained nerves, which is why the story is a study of a guilty mind destroying itself.
f. (Hansel and Gretel) The tale moves through all three feelings in turn, which is what gives it its shape.
Fear dominates the opening and the middle. There is the fear of famine, which makes the parents plan to lose the children in the wood; the terror of being abandoned twice and of the great dark forest at night; the hunger that draws the children to the house of bread and sugar; and worst of all the witch, with her red eyes and her keen smell, who cages Hansel to fatten him and orders Gretel to climb into the oven.
Hope is what the children set against it. Hansel overhears the plan and answers it each time with a plan of his own, the white pebbles and then the crumbs of bread; he comforts his sister with "God will not forsake us"; the moon rises to light the pebbles, and a white bird leads them to the house. Even in the cage Hansel keeps his wits and holds out a little bone in place of his finger. The children's steady refusal to despair is the moral centre of the story.
Victory comes at the end, and it is complete. Gretel, the frightened younger child, is the one who pushes the witch into her own oven and shuts the door. The children fill their pockets with the witch's pearls and jewels, a white duck ferries them over the water that bars the way home, and they return to find the stepmother dead and their father full of remorse. The treasure ends the poverty that began the whole trouble, and they live in perfect joy together.
So the story takes its characters from fear, through hope, to victory, teaching that courage and presence of mind in children can overcome even the worst that adults and witches devise.
a. (Two Long-term Problems: Too Many People, Too Few Trees)
The picture Nissani draws. Nissani argues that although the world faces a great many environmental troubles, two of them are fundamental and long term, and that the rest largely follow from these: there are too many people and too few trees. He treats them together because each drives the other.
On population, his picture is of growth that is exponential while the resources to support it are not. Numbers that took thousands of years to reach the first billion now add a billion in a decade or so, and every additional person needs food, water, fuel, land and space. The result is pressure that the earth cannot meet: shortage of food and of clean water, land divided into holdings too small to live on, unemployment, crowded and unhealthy cities, poverty that hardens into famine and disease, and competition for what is left, which breeds conflict. Human numbers, he insists, are not a separate problem but the multiplier behind every other one, since pollution, waste and consumption all rise with the count of people.
On forests, the picture is of steady and often irreversible destruction. Trees are felled for farmland, for timber, for firewood and for grazing, and the loss is not merely of the trees. Without roots to bind it the topsoil washes away, so that fertility is lost and rivers silt up; rain that the forest would have absorbed runs off at once, giving floods in the plains and landslides and drought in the hills, a pattern Nepal knows well. Habitats vanish and with them countless species, so biodiversity falls. The water cycle is disturbed, deserts spread at the edges, and because trees absorb carbon dioxide their removal loads the atmosphere and contributes to global warming and climate change.
The two problems reinforce one another in a vicious circle: more people need more cropland and more firewood, so more forest is cleared, and the degraded land then supports fewer people still, driving them on to clear more. Nissani's warning is that the damage is cumulative and slow to reverse, so that delay is itself costly: a forest takes generations to grow back, and a population's momentum carries it on rising for decades even after birth rates fall.
The solutions he proposes.
To check population growth, he looks first to family planning, making contraception and advice freely and cheaply available, supported by public education about the cost of large families. He stresses education, particularly of girls and women, and the raising of women's status, since educated women marry later and choose smaller families; this is treated as the single most effective measure. He adds economic and social development, because security in old age, low infant mortality and a decent income remove the reasons people have for wanting many children, together with incentives and disincentives applied by governments, and a later age of marriage.
To restore the forests, he urges afforestation and reforestation on a large scale, the strict protection of the forest that remains through law and enforcement, and above all community forestry, which hands the forest to the people who live by it so that they have an interest in its survival. He recommends agroforestry and the planting of fast growing species on private and waste land, alternatives to firewood such as biogas, solar energy and fuel efficient stoves, controlled grazing and selective rather than clear felling, and the recycling of paper and wood to lower demand.
Underlying all of these he sets two conditions: public awareness, so that ordinary people understand what is at stake, and political will together with international co-operation, since no single country can solve problems of this size alone. His conclusion is that the two problems must be attacked together and at once, because they are the root from which the other environmental evils grow.
b. (The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship)
The significance of the repetition. The sentence "Now they are going to see who I am" is the boy's refrain, and it returns at every turn of the story, so that it works almost like the beat of the tide the ship rides in on.
Its first significance is psychological. The boy has seen the immense ocean liner, dark and silent, glide in each March and sink before the village wakes. When he tells people what he has seen, no one believes him: they laugh at him, his own mother thinks him mad, and she beats him for it before she dies. The repeated words are his answer to that humiliation, the promise he makes to himself each time he is disbelieved. They express defiance, wounded pride and a fixed determination to be proved right, and as they recur they show the feeling hardening into an obsession that fills the years of his waiting.
Its second significance is structural. The whole story is told in a single enormous sentence, and the refrain breaks it into stages, marking the passing of the Marches and driving the narrative forward towards its climax. Each time it comes round the reader is reminded what the boy is waiting for, so that the phrase carries the suspense.
Its third significance is that it turns out to be fulfilled. At the end the boy takes a lantern, goes out to meet the ship, and guides it with his little light through the dark until it runs aground in front of the church, "eighty thousand five hundred tons" of it, so that in the morning the whole village at last has to see what he alone had seen. The refrain is therefore not idle boasting but a prophecy, and the story vindicates the boy against everyone who mocked him.
The purpose of the boy. Several purposes work together in him.
He wants above all to be believed, to have his own eyes trusted; and having been called a liar, he wants to prove his truth by producing the evidence where no one can deny it. Bound up with this is revenge and justice, for his mother died disbelieving him and the village made him a laughing stock, so the grounding of the ship before the church is both his triumph and his reply to them. Beyond these lies the deeper purpose of asserting his own identity and worth, which the words themselves declare: not "now they will see the ship" but "now they are going to see who I am". The recognition of the ship and the recognition of the boy are the same event.
In a wider sense his purpose is to make the invisible visible, to force a practical, unimaginative community to admit the reality of what it cannot see, which is the story's own claim for imagination. And there is a note of the tragic in it too, since he gives his whole childhood and youth to this single vindication, and what he finally brings into the village is a wreck.
a. You ought to ask him politely.
b. There's no point in buying it.
c. You ought not to take your shoes off.
d. You might as well use this pen.
e. You ought not to talk here.
The choice in each case follows from what the second half of the sentence gives as the reason. Where the reason makes the action advisable, ought to is used, as in (a), and where it makes the action inadvisable, ought not to is used, as in (c) and (e). Where the reason shows the action would be useless or pointless, there's no point in with the -ing form is used, as in (b), since a thing worth nothing is not worth buying. And where there is simply no reason against an action and a mild reason for it, might as well is the natural form, as in (d).
a. He seems to be a very hard working student.
b. The children seem to enjoy going to school.
c. These labourers seem to be comfortable working till 8 p.m.
d. The farmers seem to have had a very good harvest of rice this year.
e. My mother seemed to be very particular about punctuality.
Seem is used to state the conclusion that the facts point to, rather than the facts themselves, so in each answer the observed behaviour of the original sentence is replaced by the inference it suggests. Note the two points of form. Seem is followed by the infinitive, either simple (seems to be, seem to enjoy) or, when the inference is about something already completed, perfect (seem to have had), as in (d). And the tense of seem follows the tense of the original: (e) describes the past, so it takes seemed, while the rest describe present habits and take seem or seems.
a. If there is one thing I loathe, it is people who drive carelessly.
b. If there is one thing I dislike, it is people who forget to feed their pets.
c. If there is one thing that annoys me, it is people who lose other's possessions.
d. If there is one thing I hate, it is people who make me wait for a long time.
e. If there is one thing that annoys me, it is people who take other's books without asking.
This is a cleft sentence, used for emphasis: the thing complained of is held back to the end of the sentence, where it falls with much more force than in the plain statement. The pattern has two forms according to where the subject stands in the original. When the speaker is the subject, as in (a), (b) and (d), it becomes If there is one thing I loathe / dislike / hate, it is .... When the other people are the subject, as in (c) and (e), the verb must be carried into the clause and it becomes If there is one thing that annoys me, it is .... Note also that (d) corrects to the infinitive make me wait, since make in this sense is followed by the bare infinitive and not by the -ing form.
a. Cars are likely to be obsolete by the end of the century.
b. The leader is unlikely to reach in time.
c. The fertilizer is likely to be supplied in time.
d. The price of computers is bound to go down.
e. A new C.E.O. is sure to be appointed soon.
These expressions grade the speaker's degree of confidence, and the word used in the original sentence shows which one is wanted. "Probably" marks a fair likelihood but no certainty, so it becomes likely to, as in (a) and (c). "I doubt if" marks the opposite, so it becomes unlikely to, as in (b). "Definitely" and "I am sure" mark full confidence, and are carried by bound to, certain to and sure to; bound to suits (d) because a fall in the price of computers follows inevitably from the way the trade works, while sure to suits (e), which is the speaker's own conviction. (Certain to would be equally correct in (d), and bound to in (e), since the three are close in strength.) Note that the subject of the original clause becomes the subject of the new sentence, and the verb follows in the infinitive.
a. Can you remember whether she likes classical music these days?
b. They want to know how long you will be staying in Pokhara.
c. I have been trying to know when your next record is going to be released.
d. Did you notice whether he looked angry?
e. She has no idea what time the class begins.
Two changes are made in every case. First, the inverted order of the question disappears and the subject goes back before the verb, so does she like becomes she likes and is your next record going becomes your next record is going. With that inversion goes the auxiliary do, does or did, which was there only to form the question: does she like gives she likes and did he look gives he looked, the tense being carried by the main verb instead.
Second, the clause must be joined on. A question beginning with a question word keeps that word as the link, as in (b), (c) and (e). A question that could be answered yes or no has no such word, so whether (or if) must be supplied, as in (a) and (d).
Finally, the punctuation follows the opening words, not the original. Sentences (a) and (d) begin with a question of their own and so keep the question mark, while (b), (c) and (e) begin with statements and end with a full stop, even though what is reported is a question.
a. He must have been rewarded.
b. He may have gone home. (or might have gone)
c. They can't have been serious.
d. They can't have been present at the meeting.
e. He must be working.
These are the modals of deduction, used to say how sure the speaker is of a conclusion drawn from evidence rather than to talk about obligation or permission. Must expresses a confident positive conclusion and so replaces "obviously" and "I am sure" in (a) and (e). Can't expresses the confident negative conclusion, which is why it and not mustn't replaces "I am sure they were not" and "I am certain they were not" in (c) and (d); mustn't would express a prohibition, which is not the sense here. May or might expresses a genuine uncertainty and so replaces "perhaps" in (b).
The other thing to watch is the time referred to. Where the deduction is about the present, the modal is followed by the simple infinitive, as in (e), must be working. Where it is about the past, it must be followed by the perfect infinitive, have plus the past participle, as in (a), (b), (c) and (d): must have been, may have gone, can't have been.
WANTED
Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu
The police are looking for a man wanted in connection with the kidnapping of a businessman from New Road on the night of 12 Bhadra. Anyone who has seen him is requested to inform the nearest police station at once, and not to approach him.
The suspect is a man of about thirty five years of age, tall and powerfully built, standing roughly five feet ten inches and weighing about seventy five kilograms. He has a dark complexion, a square face and a heavy jaw, with short black hair that is thinning at the temples and a thick moustache. His eyes are small and deep set, and his eyebrows are unusually thick and almost meet above the nose.
His most distinctive mark is a long scar, about two inches, running down the left cheek from below the ear, said to be the result of a knife wound. The little finger of his right hand is missing. He walks with a slight limp in the right leg, and those who know him say he has a habit of glancing quickly over his shoulder as he walks.
When last seen he was wearing a black leather jacket over a grey shirt, blue jeans and brown boots, and carrying a dark green shoulder bag. He was also wearing dark glasses and a black cap.
He speaks Nepali with a strong accent of the eastern hills and is believed to understand Hindi. He is thought to be moving about in the Balaju and Kalanki areas of the city, and may be travelling on a red motorcycle without a number plate.
The suspect is considered dangerous and may be armed. Any information may be given to the Metropolitan Police Range on 100 or at any police station. The identity of the informant will be kept confidential, and a suitable reward has been announced.
Pokhara: The Lake City
Of all the beautiful places in Nepal, none holds a visitor quite as Pokhara does. It lies in a broad green valley some two hundred kilometres west of Kathmandu, and the first thing one notices on arriving is the Annapurna range standing up on the northern horizon, so near and so white that it seems to lean over the town, with the sharp fin of Machhapuchhre, the Fish Tail, rising in front of the others. At the heart of the town lies Phewa Lake, still and green, holding the whole range upside down on its surface in the early morning before the wind rises; a small island in the middle carries the two tiered Tal Barahi temple, and brightly painted wooden boats cross to it all day. Along the eastern shore runs Lakeside, a long street of cafes, bookshops and craft stalls where one can sit in the shade of a jacaranda and watch the water. There is a great deal for a visitor to do. One may row on the lake or on the quieter Begnas and Rupa lakes; climb at dawn to Sarangkot to watch the sun strike the snows one peak at a time, or to the World Peace Pagoda on the ridge across the water; go down into the limestone caves at Mahendra and Bat, or stand on the bridge over the Davis Falls, where the Pardi river drops with a roar into a deep gorge. Pokhara is also the gateway to the Annapurna trails, so its streets are full of trekkers, and it has become the home of paragliding in Nepal, the coloured canopies drifting over the lake for much of the day. What makes the place memorable in the end, though, is not any single sight but the combination: snow peaks, still water, warm air and an unhurried way of life, all within an hour's walk of one another.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media
Few inventions have changed ordinary life as quickly as social media. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X and the messaging services have been with us for hardly two decades, and yet a majority of the people on earth now use them daily. In Nepal too the mobile phone and cheap data have brought them into the remotest village. Like every powerful tool they carry good and harm together, and the balance depends very much on how they are used.
The advantages.
The first and plainest advantage is communication. Social media has abolished distance. A family whose son is working in Qatar or studying in Australia can see his face and hear his voice every evening, and for the millions of Nepali households that depend on foreign employment this is no small thing. Friends scattered by work and marriage keep up with one another's lives at no cost.
The second is the free flow of information. News reaches people in minutes, and it no longer passes only through the hands of the state or the large newspapers. Ordinary citizens can report what they see, so that abuses which would once have been hidden are brought to public notice, and public opinion can be mobilised quickly. During the earthquake of 2015 social media was used to locate survivors, to direct relief and to reassure anxious relatives, and it has done the same in every flood and landslide since.
Third, it is a powerful instrument of education. Lectures, tutorials and whole courses are available free on YouTube, students exchange notes and doubts in groups, and a learner in a district school can hear a teacher he would never otherwise have met. During the closure of schools in the pandemic this was for many children the only schooling available.
Fourth, it has opened opportunities in business and employment. A weaver in Bhaktapur or a farmer with organic vegetables can reach customers directly, without a shop and without a middleman, and advertising that once cost lakhs is now within the reach of a single person with a phone. Thousands of young Nepalis earn a living as content creators, designers and online sellers, occupations that did not exist a generation ago.
Finally it gives a voice and a community to those who had neither. Campaigns for justice, for the environment, for the rights of women and of the disabled have all gained strength from it, and people suffering from rare illnesses or living far from their own kind find others like themselves.
The disadvantages.
Against all this stands, first, the spread of misinformation. A rumour travels faster than its correction, and false cures, communal provocations and political lies have caused real violence and real deaths. Because anything can be published, the reader must judge for himself what is true, and many cannot.
Second, there is addiction and the waste of time. These platforms are deliberately designed to hold attention, and students in particular lose hours that should have gone to study and to sleep. Concentration suffers, reading suffers, and the habit of patient thought is weakened.
Third come the injuries to mental health. Seeing only the polished, happy version of other people's lives breeds envy, anxiety and discontent with one's own. Among the young, cyberbullying and trolling have driven some to depression and even to suicide, and the constant measuring of worth in likes and followers is corrosive.
Fourth, there is the loss of privacy and security. Users hand over vast quantities of personal information, which is sold to advertisers, stolen by criminals or used to manipulate opinion. Photographs are misused, accounts are hacked, and online fraud and blackmail have become common complaints at every cyber bureau.
Fifth, social media weakens real relationships and health. Families sit together in one room, each absorbed in a separate screen; conversation and courtesy decline; and long hours of sitting bring eye strain, headache, back pain and obesity.
Lastly, these platforms can be made instruments of crime and division. They are used to recruit, to incite hatred against castes, religions and communities, to circulate obscenity, and to lure children into danger.
Conclusion.
Social media is therefore neither a blessing nor a curse in itself, but a means whose value lies in the hand that holds it. The same platform that spreads a rumour also spreads a warning, and the same hour may be given to a lecture or thrown away. What is needed is not rejection, which is neither possible nor desirable, but discipline and discrimination: a limit on the time we give it, a habit of verifying what we read before we pass it on, care with what we disclose about ourselves, and courtesy towards others. Parents and teachers must guide the young in these things, and the state must provide sensible law against fraud and hatred without stifling free speech. Used with such judgement, social media can be one of the most democratic and useful inventions of our age; used without it, it will waste our time, disturb our peace and divide our society.
XYZ
15 Bhadra, 2078
Dear XYZ,
I hope this letter finds you in good health and good spirits. It is nearly two months since you last wrote, and I was very glad to hear from Ramesh that you have settled well into the hostel. I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and I am going to be frank with you, as old friends should be, about something that has been on my mind.
When I visited you last month I noticed that almost every hour you were free went to your headphones. Foreign songs in the morning, foreign songs while walking to class, foreign songs late into the night, and the shelf above your bed still carrying the same three books it did in the spring. I am not writing to scold you, and I certainly do not think music is a bad thing. I enjoy it as much as you do, and I know that a song in a language one barely understands can lift the spirits after a hard day. But when nearly all of one's leisure goes the same way, something is being lost, and I think you know it as well as I do.
What I would urge you to do is to give some of those hours to reading about the environment. I say this because it is the one subject that concerns us more directly than any other, and because we, of all people, cannot afford to be ignorant of it. Ours is a country of mountains and rivers, and what happens to them happens to us. You have seen the Melamchi floods and the landslides that cut the highway every monsoon; you have breathed the air of Kathmandu in the winter, when the valley fills with smoke and the doctors' waiting rooms fill with children. Behind each of these lies something we could understand if we cared to read: the felling of forests on the slopes, the retreat of the glaciers, the way a warming atmosphere changes the pattern of the rain. Music will not explain any of it.
Nor is such reading the dull duty you may imagine. Begin with Moti Nissani's essay on the two long term problems, too many people and too few trees, which is short and very clear, and which will show you how the whole tangle hangs together. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring reads like a story and changed the law of a great nation. Closer home there is a good deal written on community forestry in Nepal, which is one of the few environmental successes the world has to show and which our own villagers achieved. A few pages a day would be enough.
I promise you it will repay the time. It will give you something to say in any company, and something to write about when the examination asks for an essay, which it usually does. More than that, it will give you the satisfaction of understanding the place you live in, and perhaps the wish to do a little about it. You might begin with the small things, a tree planted, water not wasted, plastic refused, and you will find that a person who knows why he is doing these things does them far more steadily than one who has merely been told to.
I am not asking you to give up your songs. Keep them for the evening, and let the mornings be for reading. Trade one hour a day, no more, and write and tell me at the end of a month whether you feel the poorer for it. I am sending you a copy of the Nissani essay with this letter so that you have no excuse to delay.
Do write soon, and give my respects to your parents. I look forward to arguing all this out with you in person during the Dashain holidays.
Yours affectionately,
XYZ