TS ICET 2022 Question Paper Shift-1 (27th July)

Read the Passage and answer the questions

I have been unusually fortunate as a writer, in that my life has given me more than one gold nugget of good and bad feeling or experience. To begin with, I had India, that inexhaustible horn of plenty, that endlessly nourishing well. After that I had migration because the journey, I made from East to West was made by millions of others. Migration is an old subject in America, but now it's the world's subject too. For good or ill this is the age of the migrant, the time in human history in which more people than ever before have ended up in places in which they did not begin, driven by economic necessity, political turmoil!, or simply the lure of the big city's bright lights. This too became my subject, thanks to the accidents of my life. And then, there is a third, the one that preoccupies me more and more - the desire to show how the world joins up, how 'here' connects to 'there', how the little boxes we live in now open out into other little boxes often very far away; and how in order to explain our lives, we often need to understand things happening on the other side of the world. I once wrote that the British didn't fully understand their own history because so much of it happened overseas.

Read the Passage and answer the questions

More than the biological coronavirus, civilization is indeed experiencing an excruciating world-wide pandemic of barriers and barricades. The fence is a testimony of death and terror of race and ultranationalism. If one listens carefully, one can hear the whispering voices from below, the voices the rich and the powerful refrain from hearing. How long will they refrain from hearing? How long will their voices go unheard from across the fences, voices fortified with the words of resistance not for rewards but for the vision of peace and freedom, of human rights and dignity? Absorbed in t he landscape, I begin to imagine a world undivided by barriers, a global consciousness unabashedly pro-diversity, and a land that gives you a deep sense of belonging. The world needs to rise above the frenzy of labels of race, gender, caste, religion and political bias. It needs to address as one people the issues that are far more crucial to humanity. Threats and detentions clash with the deep sense of peace that I experience, resonating a flash of some utopian borderless world that might someday become a reality.