CAT 1998 VARC | Previous Year CAT Paper

Direction: A part of each sentence given below has been underlined. You have to select the option that best replaces the underlined part.

Direction: Fill in the blanks of the following sentences using the most appropriate word or words from among the options given for each.

Direction: Arrange sentences A, B, C and D between sentences 1 and 6 to form a logical sequence of six sentences.

Direction: In each of the following questions, a paragraph has been split into four parts. You have to rearrange these parts to form a coherent paragraph.

Direction: Read the passages given below and answer the questions that follow.

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The narrator of Midnight's Children describes it as a kind of collective fantasy. I suppose what he, or I, through him was trying to say, was that there never had been a political entity called India until 1947. The thing that became independent had never previously existed, except that there had been an area, a zone called India. So it struck me that what was coming into being, this idea of a nation-state, was an invention. It was an invention of the nationalist movement. And a very successful invention.

One could argue that nation-states are a kind of collective fantasies. Very similar things happened with the unification of Italy, and also with the unification of Germany. The history of India is a history of independent
nation-states. It is a history of Oudh or Bengal or Maratha kingdoms. All those independent histories agreed to collectivise themselves into the idea of the nation of India. In the case of Pakistan, it was less successful. Pakistan was under-imagined. It did not survive as a nation-state.

If you ask people in general, they would have absolutely no problem with the idea of India at all. I think, in a way the strength of the nationalist idea is shown by its ability to survive the extraordinary stresses that it was placed under. I think the stresses of things — communalism, the high degree of public corruption, of regional rivalries, of the tension between the centre and the state, the external pressures of bad relations with Pakistan — these are colossal pressures which any state could be forgiven for being damaged by. I think the thing to say about the success of the idea is that it remains an idea though people might not find it very easy to give a simple definition of it. But that it does exist and that it is something to which people feel they belong, I think is now the case. That it survives these stresses is an indication of its strength.

I'm not interested in an idealised, romantic vision of India, I know it is the great pitfall of the exile. So you know for me, always, the issue of writing about India has been not to write as an outsider. On the other hand, evidently something has changed in the last 10 years, which is that as a result of various circumstances, I've not been able to return. All I can say is that I have felt it as the most profound loss and I still do. There have been many losses in the last decade but the loss of the easy return to India has been for me an absolute anguish, an inescapable anguish. I feel as if I've lost a limb. I am very anxious to bring that period to an end.

I do not think that one of the most interesting phenomena for India as a country is the phenomenon of the Indian Diaspora. I often think Indian — Indian Indians — find that very hard to understand. In England, when people call themselves British Indian, they mean both halves of that. And yet, what it means to be a British Indian is very alien to an Indian Indian. The same is true in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Canada, in the United States, and so on. The thing that has interested me is that there are now many, many ways of being something which you can legitimately call Indian. Being an Indian in India is just one of those ways. The forces of disintegration are always there. I think in every society there is the tension between the forces that bring it together and the forces that pull it apart. I'm worried, above all, of the communal issue because half a century is no time at all in the eye of history, and half a century ago something of colossally horrible proportion took place. The fact that it hasn't happened for 50 years on quite the same scale means nothing. It could still happen tomorrow. One of the things that I remember very vividly, being there 10 years ago at about the time of the killings that took place in Assam, is discussing this with good friends and fellow writers. And I remember somebody said to me, until we understand that we are capable of these things, we can't begin to move beyond them. Because it's a very easy response to atrocities, to say: oh those terrible people did that, and we are not like that. I think the difficult response is to accept we are also capable of that, the thing that happened there could also, in certain circumstances, be something that we were able to perpetrate. The civilising influence is what prevents most of us from giving vent to those terrible urges. Those urges are part of humanity as well as the more civilized urges.

Of course, I fear in India the recurrence of communal or regionalist inter community violence. I fear the long-term damage to a democracy that can be done by mass corruption. I think corruption is in a way a subversion of democracy and the commonplace view in India is that corruption is everywhere. In a sense, you could say that is not a democratic society. If money, favour and privilege is what makes the place work, then that's not a democracy. At least it runs the danger of being no longer able to call itself a democracy.

What was happening, I thought, was that people were trying to seize control of that rhetoric. That is to say, special interest groups. You could say Hindus are a very large special interest group. If any group inside such a complex and many faceted country tries to define the nation exclusively in its own terms, then it begins to create terrible stresses. I do think that the kind of attempt to define India in Hindu terms is worrying for that reason. It creates backlashes, it creates polarisation, and it creates the risk of more upheaval. Partly, I am saying this as a kind of objective observer, but nobody is an objective observer.
I come from an Indian minority, I no doubt have a minority perspective. I can't ignore that and nor would I wish to. Partly, also I am speaking temperamentally. That is to say, the kind of religious language in politics is something I find temperamentally unpleasant. I don't like people who do that, whether they be sectarians in Northern Ireland or India. I believe in, if possible, separating one's personal spiritual needs and aspirations from the way in which a country is run. I think in those countries where that separation has not taken place, one can see all kinds of distortions of social and ordinary life which are unpleasant. Iran is an obvious example. The country in which that kind of separation has completely fragmented it.
Where Naipaul is right, although I don't share his conclusions about it, but I think where he is right, is in saying that this is a great historical moment. One reason why the 50th anniversary is interesting is that it does seem to represent the end of the first age and the beginning of second age. And to that extent that is true now, if someone was born today, they would be born into a very different set of cultural assumptions and hopes than somebody born 50 years ago. We were entirely sold on the Nehru-Gandhi kind of plan. We grew up and that was the portrait of the nation we had hung on our wall, and to the extent that you never entirely lose those formative ideas, that's still the picture of the country I've got on my wall. But it's clear that for somebody being born now, they are being born into a very different country.
I also think of taking the Naipaul point on what would happen if the BJP were to form a government. Well, what I would like to think is that in order for the BJP or anybody of that persuasion to form a government, they would have to change. There is even some kind of suggestion that it may even be happening a little bit because they are intelligent people. They understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Clearly, for a Hinduist party to form the government of the country is not at all unlikely. So I think one does have to engage with that in the same way as many people in the country who, like myself, were not remotely in tune with the Thatcherite revolution but have to engage with it because it was in fact happening, and kept winning elections, and the world was not going to go back. So, of course, both people inside the Hindu political enterprise and people outside it will have to shift. I am optimistic about India's ability to force those changes that are necessary because I do believe it is not fundamentally an intolerant country and will not fundamentally accept intolerant politics.
On the other hand, there has to be reckoning with the fact that these are ideas, which are gaining in popularity. I'll tell you where I would draw the line myself. I think there was a great historical mistake made in Europe about the Nazi Party. People attempted to see whether they could live with it and discovered very rapidly that was a mistake, that appeasement was a great historical mistake. So, it seems to me, the question is: What do we make of this political enterprise? Is it fundamentally democratic or fundamentally anti-democratic? If democratic, then we must all learn to make the best of it. If anti-democratic, then we must fight it very hard.

What happened in India happened before the book (Satanic Verses) had actually entered. It happened because of an article in India Today, which, I must say, I thought was an irresponsibly written article, because it was written by somebody, who, as a friend, asked me for an early copy of the book, and then presented that book in the most inflammatory sort of way.
This was one of the things that disappointed me, that after a lifetime of having written from a certain sensibility, and a certain point of view, I would have expected people in India to know about it since it was all entirely about India. It was written from a deep sense of connection and affection for India. I would have expected that I had some money in the bank. That is to say, if Salman Rushdie wrote any book, then we know who he is. He is not some idiot who just arrived from nowhere shouting abuse. This is somebody whose work, whose opinions, whose lectures and whose stories we know. I would have hoped that my work would have been judged in the context of what people already knew about me. Instead, it seemed as if everything I had been in my life up to that point suddenly vanished out of the window and this other Rushdie was invented who was this complete bastard who had done this terrible thing. There did not seem to be any attempt to correct that or to combat that. I was surprised and disappointed it did not. It didn't happen here either. It didn't happen anywhere in the world. It was as if the force of history, the force of a historical event was so huge that it erases all that goes before it.
The negative response to the Satanic Verses, let us remember that there was also a positive response, was such that it erased my personality and put in its place some other guy who they didn't recognize at all. Anybody who knows anything about these countries, and I do know something about these countries, knows that every cheap politician can put a demonstration in the street in five minutes. That doesn't represent in any sense the people's will. It represents a certain kind of political structure, political organization. It doesn't represent truth.

But I always believed and I still believe that India would come back. I never believe that the loss of India is forever. Because India is not Iran, it’s not even Pakistan, and I thought good sense will prevail in India because that's my life experience of Indian people and of the place.

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

If Western civilization is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education. No civilization, I am sure, has ever devoted more energy and resources to organised education, and if we believe in nothing else, we certainly believe that education is, or should be, the key to everything. In fact, the belief in education is so strong that we treat it as the residual legatee of all our problems. If the nuclear age brings new danger; if the advance of genetics engineering opens the doors of new abuses; if commercialism brings new temptations, the answer must be more and better education. The modern way of life is becoming more complex: this means that everybody must become more highly educated. “By 1984,” it was said recently, “it will be desirable that the most ordinary of men is not embarrassed by the use of a logarithm table, the elementary concepts of the calculus, and by the definitions and uses of such words as electron, coulomb, and volt. He should further have become able not only to handle a pen, and ruler but also a magnetic tape, valve, and transistor. The improvement of communications between individuals and groups depends on it.” Most of all, it appears, the international situation calls for prodigious educational efforts. The classical statement on this point was delivered by Sir Charles (now Lord) Snow in his Rede Lecture some years ago: To say that we must educate ourselves or perish, is a little more melodramatic than the facts warrant. To say we have to educate ourselves or watch a steep decline in our lifetime, is about right. According to Lord Snow, the Russians are apparently doing much better than anyone else and will 'have a clear edge', unless and until the Americans and we educate ourselves both sensibly and imaginatively'.
Lord Snow, it will be recalled, talked about 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution' and expressed his concern that 'the intellectuals life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups . . . At one pole we have the literary intellectuals . . . at the other the scientists'. He deplores the 'gulf of mutual incomprehension' between these two groups and wants it bridged. It is quite clear how he thinks this 'bridging' operation is to be done; the aims of his educational policy would be, first, to get as many 'alpha-plus scientists as the country can throw up'; second, to train 'a much larger stratum of alpha professionals' to do the supporting research, high class design and development; third, to train 'thousands upon thousands' of other scientists and engineers; and finally, to train 'politicians, administrators, and entire community, who know enough science to have a sense of what the scientists are talking about'. If this fourth and last group can at least be educated enough to 'have sense' of what the real people, the
scientists and engineers, are talking about, so Lord Snow seems to suggest, the gulf of mutual incomprehension between the 'Two Cultures' may be bridged.
These ideas on education, which are by no means unrepresentative of our times, leave one with the uncomfortable feeling that ordinary people, including politicians, administrators, and so forth, are really not much use, they have failed to make the grade: but, at least, they should be educated enough to have a sense of what is going on, and to know what the scientists mean when they talk to quote Lord Snow's example about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is an uncomfortable feeling, because the scientists never tire of telling us that the fruits of their labours are 'neutral': whether they enrich humanity or destroy it depends on how they are used. And who is to decide how they are used? There is nothing in the training of scientists and engineers to enable them to take such decision, or else, what becomes of the neutrality of science?
If so much reliance is today being placed in the power of education to enable ordinary people to cope with the problems thrown up by scientific and technological progress, then there must be something more to education than Lord Snow suggests. Can education help us to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?
To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives. There is no doubt also the need to transmit know-how but this must take second place, for it is obviously somewhat foolhardy to put great powers into the hands of people without making sure that they have a reasonable idea of what to do with them. At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.
The essence of education, I suggested, is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up. This means that they are more than mere formulae or dogmatic assertions: that we think and feel with them, that they are the very instruments through which we like and interpret, and experience the world. When we think, we do not just think: we think with ideas. Our mind is not a blank, a tabula rasa. When we begin to think we can do so only because our mind is already filled with all sorts of ideas with which to think. All through our youth and adolescence, before the conscious and critical mind begins to act as a sort of censor and guardian at the threshold, ideas seep into our mind, multitudes of them. These years are, one might say, our Dark Ages during which we are nothing but inheritors; it is only in later years that we can gradually
learn to sort out our inheritance.
First of all, there is language. Each word is an idea. If the language which seeps into us during our Dark Ages is English, our mind is thereby furnished by a set of ideas which is significantly different from the set represented by Chinese, Russian, German, or even American. Apart from words there are the rules of putting them together: grammar, another bundle of ideas, the study of which has fascinated some modern philosophers to such an extent that they thought they could reduce the whole of philosophy to a study of grammar.
All philosophers and others have always paid a great deal of attention to ideas seen as the result of thought and observation; but in modern times all too little attention has been paid to the study of the ideas which form the very instruments by which thought and observation proceed. On the basis of experience and conscious thought small ideas may easily be dislodged, but when it comes to bigger, more universal, or more subtle ideas, it may not be so easy to change them. Indeed, it is often difficult to become aware of them, as they are the instruments and not the result of our thinking just as you can see what is outside you, but cannot easily see that with which you see, the eye itself. And even when one has become aware of them it is often impossible to judge them on the basis of ordinary experience.
We often notice the existence of more or less fixed ideas in other people's minds — ideas with which they think without being aware of doing so. We then call them prejudices, which is logically quite correct because they have merely seeped into the mind and are in no way the result of judgement. But the word prejudice is generally applied to ideas that are patently erroneous and recognisable as such by anyone except the prejudiced man. Most of the ideas with which we think are not of that kind at all. To some of them, like those incorporated in words and grammar, the notions of truth or error cannot even be applied, others are quite definitely not prejudices but the result of a judgement; others again are tacit assumptions or presuppositions which may be very difficult to recognise.
I say, therefore, that we think with or through ideas and that what we call thinking is generally the application of pre-existing ideas to a given situation or set of facts. When we think about, say the political situation we apply to that situation our political ideas, more or less systematically, and attempt to make that situation' ‘intelligible' to ourselves by means of these ideas. Similarly, everywhere else we evaluate the situation in the light of our value-ideas.
The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion-political or otherwise — which suddenly seem to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. We feel that education will help solve each new problem or complexity that arises. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our times.
When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than a mere diversion. Maybe they cannot themselves formulate precisely what they are looking for; but I think what they are really looking for is ideas that could make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. 'Well, I don't know', you hear people say, as an impotent protest against the unintelligibility of the world as they meet it. If the mind cannot bring to the world a set — or, shall we say, a tool box — of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as a chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events. Such a man is like a person in a strange world and without any signs of civilization, without maps or signposts or indicators of any kind. Nothing has any meaning to him; nothing can hold his vital interest; he has no means of making anything intelligible to himself.
 

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The highest priced words are ghost-written by gagmen who furnish the raw material for comedy over the air and on the screen. They have a word-lore all their own, which they practise for five to fifteen hundred dollars a week, or fifteen dollars a gag at piece rates. That's sizable rate for confounding acrimony with matrimony, or extracting attar of roses from the otter.
Quite apart from the dollar sign on it, gagmen's word-lore is worth a close look, if you are given to the popular American pastime of playing with words — or if you're part of the 40 per cent who make their living in the word trade.
Gag writers' tricks with words point up the fact that we have two distinct levels of language: familiar, ordinary words that everybody knows; and more elaborate words that don't turn up so often, but many of which we need to know if we are to feel at home in listening and reading today.
To be sure gagmen play hob with the big words, making not sense but fun of them. They keep on confusing bigotry with bigamy, illiterate with illegitimate, monotony with monogamy, osculation with oscillation. They trade on the fact that for many of their listeners, these fancy terms linger in a twilight zone of meaning. It’s their deliberate intent to make everybody feel cozy at hearing big words, jumbled up or smacked down. After all, such words loom up over-size in ordinary talk, so no wonder they get the bulldozer treatment from the gagmen.
Their wrecking technique incidentally reveals our language as full of tricky words, some with 19 different meanings, others which sound alike but differ in sense. To ring good punning changes, gag writers have to know their way around in the language. They don't get paid for ignorance, only for simulating it.
Their trade is a hard one, and they regard it as serious business. They never laugh at each other's jokes; rarely at their own. Like comediennes, they are usually melancholy men in private life.
Fertile invention and ingenious fancy are required to clean up ‘blue’ burlesque gags for radio use. These shady gags are theoretically taboo on the air. However, a gag writer who can leave a faint trace of bluing when he launders the joke is all the more admired — and more highly paid.
A gag that keeps the blue tinge is called a ‘double intender’, gag-land jargon for double entendre. The double meaning makes the joke funny at two levels. Children and other innocents hearing the crack for the first time take it literally, laughing at the surface humour; listeners who remember the original as they heard it in vaudeville or burlesque, laugh at the artfulness with which the blue tinge is disguised.
Another name for a double meaning of this sort is ‘insinuendo’. This is a portmanteau word or ‘combo’, as the gagmen would label it, thus abbreviating combination. By telescoping insinuation and innuendo, they get insinuendo, on the principle of blend words brought into vogue by Lewis Caroll.
‘Shock logic’ is another favourite with gag writers. Supposedly a speciality of women comediennes, it is illogical logic more easily illustrated than defined. A high school girl has to turn down a boy's proposal, she writes:
Dear Jerry,
I'm sorry, but I can't get engaged to you. My mother thinks I am too young to be engaged and besides, I'm already engaged to another boy.
Yours regretfully.
Guess who.
Gag writers' lingo is consistently funnier than their gags. It should interest the slang-fancier. And like much vivid jargon developed in specialised trades and sports, a few of the terms are making their way into general use. Gimmick, for instance, in the sense either of a trick devised or the point of a joke, is creeping into the vocabulary of columnists and feature writers.
Even apart from the trade lingo, gagmen's manoeuvres are of real concern to anyone who follows words with a fully awakened interest. For the very fact that gag writers often use a long and unusual word as the hinge of a joke, or as a peg for situation comedy, tells us something quite significant: they are well aware of the limitations of the average vocabulary and are quite willing to cash in on its shortcomings.
When Fred Allens' joke-smiths work out a fishing routine, they have Allen referring to the bait in his most arch and solemn tones: "I presume you mean the legless invertebrate." This is the old minstrel trick, using a long fancy term, instead of calling a worm a worm.
Chico Marx can stretch a pun over 500 feet of film, making it funnier all the time, as he did when he rendered, "Why a duck?"
And even the high-brow radio writers have taken advantage of gagmen's technique. You might never expect to hear on the air such words as lepidopterist and entymologist. Both occur in a very famous radio play by Norman Corvine, ‘My client Curly’, about an unusual caterpillar which would dance to the tune ‘yes, sir, she's my baby’ but remained inert to all other music. The dancing caterpillar was given a real New York buildup, which involved calling in the experts on butterflies and insects which travel under the learned names above. Corvine made mild fun of the fancy professional titles, at the same time explaining them unobtrusively.
There are many similar occasions where any one working with words can turn gagmen's trade secrets to account. Just what words do they think outside the familiar range? How do they pick the words that they ‘kick around’? It is not hard to find out.

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

From ancient times, men have believed that, under certain peculiar circumstances, life could arise spontaneously: from the ooze of rivers could come eels and from the entrails of dead bulls, bees; worms from mud, and maggots from dead meat. This belief was held by Aristotle, Newton and Descartes, among many others, and apparently the great William Harvey too. The weight of centuries gradually disintegrated men's beliefs in the spontaneous origin of maggots and mice, but the doctrine of spontaneous generation clung tenaciously to the question of bacterial origin.
In association with Buffon, the Irish Jesuit priest John Needham declared that he could bring about at will the creation of living microbes in heat-sterilised broths, and presumably, in propitiation, theorised that God did not create living things directly but bade the earth and water to bring them forth. In his Dictionaire Philosophique, Voltaire reflected that it was odd to read of Father Needham's claim while atheists conversely should deny a Creator yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels. But, wrote Thomas Huxley, 'The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact — which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers, was played, almost immediately, for the benefit of Buffon and Needham.
The Italian Abbé Spallanzani did an experiment. He showed that a broth sealed from the air while boiling never develops bacterial growths and hence never decomposes. To Needham's objection that Spallanzani had ruined his broths and the air above them by excessive boiling, the Abbé replied by breaking the seals of his flasks. Air rushed in and bacterial growth began! But the essential conflict remained. Whatever Spallanzani and his followers did to remove seeds and contaminants was regarded by the spontaneous generationists as damaging to the 'vital force' from whence comes new life.
Thus, doubt remained, and into the controversy came the Titanic figure of Louis Pasteur. Believing that a solution to this problem was essential to the development of his theories concerning the role of bacteria in nature, Pasteur freely acknowledged the possibility that living bacteria very well might be arising anew from inanimate matter. To him, the research problem was largely a technical one: to repeat the work of those who claimed to have observed bacterial entry. For the one that contended that life did not enter from the outside, the proof had to go to the question of possible contamination. Pasteur worked logically. He found during the experiments that after prolonged boiling, a broth would ferment only when air was admitted to it. Therefore, he contended, either air contained a factor necessary for the spontaneous generation of life or viable germs were borne in by the air and seeded in the sterile nutrient broth. Pasteur designed ingenious flasks whose long S-shaped necks could be left open. Air was trapped in the sinuous glass tube. Broths boiled in these flask tubes remained sterile. When their necks were snapped to admit ordinary air, bacterial
growth would then commence — but not in every case. An occasional flask would remain sterile presumably because the bacterial population of the air is unevenly distributed. The forces of spontaneous generation would not be so erratic. Continuous scepticism drove Pasteur almost to fanatical efforts to control the ingredients of his experiments to destroy the doubts of the most sceptical. He ranged from the mountain air of Montanvert, which he showed to be almost sterile, to those deep, clear wells whose waters had been rendered germfree by slow filtration through sandy soil. The latter discovery led to the familiar porcelain filters of the bacteriology laboratory. With pores small enough to exclude bacteria, solutions allowed to percolate through them could be reliably sterilised.
The argument raged on and soon spilled beyond the boundaries of science to become a burning religious and philosophical question of the day. For many, Pasteur's conclusions caused conflict because they seemed simultaneously to support the Biblical account of creation while denying a variety of other philosophical systems. The public was soon caught up in the crossfire of a vigorous series of public lectures and demonstrations by leading exponents of both views, novelists, clergymen, their adjuncts and friends. Perhaps the most famous of these evenings in the theatre — competing perhaps with a great debate between Huxley and Bishop Wiberforce for elegance of rhetoric — was Pasteur's public lecture at the Sorbonne on April 7, 1864. Having shown his audience the swan necked flasks containing sterile broths, he concluded, "And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it! — begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; It is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man does not know how to produce: from the germs that float in the air, from life, for life is a germ and a germ is life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment." And it is not. Today these same flasks stand immutable: they are still free of microbial life.
It is an interesting fact that despite the ringing declaration of Pasteur, the issue did not die completely. And although far from healthy, it is not yet dead. In his fascinating biography of Pasteur, Rene Dubos has traced the later developments which saw new eruptions of the controversy, new technical progress and criticism, and new energetic figures in the breach of the battle such as Bastion, for, and the immortal Tyndall, against, the doctrine of spontaneous generation. There was also new 'sorrow' for Pasteur as he read years later, in 1877, the last jottings of the great physiologist Claude Bernard and saw in them the 'mystical' suggestion that yeast may arise from grape juice. Even at this late date, Pasteur was stirred to new experiments again to prove to the dead Bernard and his followers the correctness of his position.
It seems to me that spontaneous generation is not only a possibility, but a completely reasonable possibility which should never be relinquished from scientific thought. Before men knew of bacteria, they accepted the doctrine of spontaneous generation as the 'only reasonable alternative' to a belief in supernatural creation. But today, as we look for satisfaction at the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, we must not forget that science has rationally concluded that life once did originate on earth by spontaneous generation. It was really Pasteur's evidence against spontaneous generation that for the first time brought the whole difficult question of the origin of life before the scientific world. In the above controversy, what was unreasonable was the parade of men who claimed to have 'proved' or who resolutely 'believed in' spontaneous generation on the face of proof — not that spontaneous generation cannot occur — but that their work was shot through with experimental error. The acceptable evidence also makes it clear that spontaneous generation, if it does not occur, must obviously be a highly improbable event under present conditions.
Logic tells us that science can only prove an event improbable: it can never prove it impossible — and Gamow has appropriately remarked that nobody is really certain what would happen if a hermetically sealed can were opened after a couple of million years. Modern science agrees that it was highly improbable for life to have arisen in the pre-Cambrian seas, but it concluded, nevertheless, that there it did occur. With this, I think, Pasteur would agree.
Aside from their theoretical implications, these researchers had the great practical result of putting bacteriology on a solid footing. It was now clear how precisely careful one had to be to avoid bacterial contamination in the laboratory. We now knew what 'sterile' meant and we knew that there could be no such thing as 'partial sterilization'. The discovery of bacteria high in the upper atmosphere, in the mud of the deep sea bottom, in the waters of hot springs, and in the Arctic glaciers established bacterial ubiquity as almost absolute. In recognition of this Lord Lister introduced aseptic technique into the practice of surgery. It was the revolution in technique alone that made possible modern bacteriology and the subsequent research connecting bacteria to phenomena of human concern, research, which today is more prodigious than ever. We are just beginning to understand the relationship of bacteria to certain human diseases, to soil chemistry, nutrition, and the phenomenon of antibiosis, wherein a product of one organism (e.g. penicillin) is detrimental to another.
It is not an exaggeration then to say that the emergence of the cell theory represents biology's most significant and fruitful advance. The realisation that all plants and animals are composed of cells which are essentially alike, that cells are all formed by the same fundamental division process, that the total organism is made up of activities and inter-relations of its individual cells, opened up horizons we have not even begun to approach. The cell is a microcosm of life, for in its origin, nature and continuity resides the entire problem of biology.

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

The end of mutual funds, when it came, was sudden but not unexpected. For over 10 years, mutual fund has been scripting its own growth demise, embarking on a reckless course of high risks, unhealthy pastimes, and unchecked maladies. Ironically but fittingly too, the very hand that had supported and sustained it through the turbulent early period of its existence was the one that, finally wielded the euthanasian syringe. The individual investor it was who had made the mutual fund post-liberalisation, India's most vibrant vehicle for individual investment. The individual investor it was who brought the curtain down on an act that had started with a virtuoso performance, only to putrefy into a show of ineptitude, imprudence, and irresponsibility.
The mutual fund, as we know it, may be dead. It died of many things. But, primarily, of a cancer that ate away at its innards. A cancer that destroyed the value of the investments, the mutual funds was made to service the Rs. 85,000 crore that India's investors had entrusted them with ever since they began life way back in 1964 as The Unit Trust Of India's (UTI), now disgraced Unit Scheme 64(US 64). A cancer that grew from the refusal of the men and women to manage the mutual fund to exercise a mixture of caution and aggression, but to adopt, instead, an indisciplined, unplanned, fire-from-the hip approach to investment. A cancer that ultimately, robbed the mutual funds of the resources they would have to use to pay back their investors, leaving them on Death Row.
Indeed, the scandal that US 64 had been brewing for years, was only one, but not the first, of the warningbells that pointed to the near emptiness of many a mutual fund's coffers. In quick succession have emerged reports of more and more fund-schemes that have been laid bare, their corpuses empty, their ability to meet their promises of assured returns to investors demolished. At least 37 per cent of the 235 fund schemes in operation in the country have promised investors assured returns of over 15 per cent for 5 years, and repurchase-prices well above their Net Asset Values (NAVs).
According to a study conducted by the Delhi-based Value Research, at least 18 big schemes due for redemption over the next three years will be unable to service their investors, or even return their money at the time of redemption. The shortfall? Rs. 4,685.10 crore. Or 75.87 per cent of the amount handed over by trusting investors to fund managers. Worries Ajai Kaul, 38, president, Alliance Capital Asset Management: "When an assured-returns scheme runs into problems, investors view it as one more let-down by the mutual funds."
Had they but known of the actual practices seen in the offices and hallways of the mutual funds, which have translated into these results, investors would have shown their disgust long ago. Take the case of a mutual fund company that manages more than a dozen schemes. According to an unwritten, but formalised, principle, each scheme takes it in turn to sell some of its holdings to its sister-schemes, booking fat notional gains and posting NAVs. While investors responded by pouring in even more of their savings, the profits were clearly only on paper. In the offices of another asset management company half way across Mumbai, the demand for cellular-phones peaked six months ago.
Its employees had, suddenly, realised that making their personal deals using information gathered in the course of their professional work, was best done over cell phones so that the company's records wouldn't show the call being made. Obviously, the hot tips went to fatten their — and not investors' — pockets. Earlier, quite a few merchant bankers entered the mutual funds industry to use the corpus to subscribe to the issues they were managing. It took a crash in the primary market — not ethics or investigations — for this practice to stop.
Filled with fear and loathing — and righteous anger — the investor has, therefore, decided to adjure the mutual fund. According to Marketing And Development Research Associates (MDRA) opinion poll of 342 investors conducted last fortnight in the five metros — Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai — mutual funds as an investment instrument now ranks a lowly fourth on safety — after bank deposits, gold, and real estate — and fifth on returns — ahead only of bank deposits and gold. And only 14.20 per cent of the sample will even consider investing in a mutual fund in the future.
Still, it is the species that has died, not its every member. The ones that have survived are the bright performers who beat the market benchmark — the 100 — scrip. The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) National Index — by the widest margins within their three genres: growth, income and balance. However, even their star turns have not been able to stave off the stench of death over the business. In fact, an autopsy of the late — and, at the moment not particularly lamented — mutual funds reveal a sordid saga of callousness and calumny.
Sheer disaster stares the mutual funds in the face and a cataclysm could destroy the savings of lakhs of investors too. A Value Research estimate of probable shortfall that 18 assured-returns schemes will face at the time of their scheduled redemptions over the three years adds up to a sense-numbing Rs. 4,685 crore. An independent audit of the 60 assured-returns schemes managed by the public sector mutual funds conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers at the behest of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) estimated a shortfall of between Rs. 2,500 crore and Rs. 3,000 crore. In 1999 alone judging from their present NAVs, the four schemes due for redemption — Canbank Asset Management Company's Cantriple, IndBank Asset Management Company's IndPrakash, SBI Funds Management's Magnum Triple Plus, and BOI Mutual Fund's (BOIMF) Double Square Plus — are heading for a collective shortfall of Rs. 1,639.55 crore.
As of June 30, 1998, the country's 252 fund-schemes managed assets with a market value of Rs. 69,599 crore, with the UTI alone controlling the fate of Rs. 50,000 crore. That is Rs. 11,000 crore less than the money invested in these schemes as of June 30, 1997, which means that the mutual funds have wiped out Rs. 11,000 crore from the investors' hard earned money in the intervening 12 months. Of course, every fund is paying for the sins of the black sheep. For, the villain of the piece was UTI and the 95 funds managed by the public sector banks and institutions, the value of whose corpuses fell from Rs. 66,748 crore to Rs. 57,350 crore in the past year. In fact, these funds contributed 85.40 per cent of the overall value-loss, with the private sector funds boosting their corpuses from Rs. 4,000 crore to Rs. 4,120 crore to lower the extent of the erosion.
For investors, that has translated into an option of either exiting at a loss — or holding on in vain hope. On November 20, 1998, a depressing 77 per cent of the 58 listed fund schemes were quoting at discounts of between 5 per cent and 40 per cent to their NAVs. And what of the NAVs themselves? The units of a shoulder-slumping 15 per cent of the schemes were worth less than their par values. And US 64, of course continued to languish, with an estimated NAV of Rs. 9.68. Even if there are schemes that have performed individually well, that the mutual funds have collectively failed to deliver couldn't be more obvious. So investors' murderous mood can hardly be debated.
Their genesis and growth reveals just what blinded the mutual funds to the possibility of failure. Forty per cent of the banks-and-insurance companies-promoted funds in operation were launched between 1987 and 1993, when the stock markets were bull-dominated. In a period that saw only one bear phase, the BSE Sensitivity Index (the Sensex) climbed by 346 per cent. Being successful with equity investments required no skills; only investible funds. Nor was fund-raising a problem, as investors desperately sought ways to grab a piece of equity boom. Between 1984 and 1989, the mutual funds collected Rs. 13,455 crore as subscriptions, but, in the next five years, they picked up Rs. 45,573 crore.
In January, 1994, the UTI's Mastergain mopped up a stunning Rs. 4,700 crore while the most awaited Morgan Stanley Growth — a showcase for the fabled fund-management metier of the foreign mutual funds — took in Rs. 1,000 crore in just three days. Low entry-barriers — a so called sound track-record, a general reputation of fairness and integrity, an application-fee of Rs. 25,000, a registration fee of Rs. 25 lakh and an annual fee of Rs. 2.50 lakh — made entering the business a snap. Explains Ajay Srinivasan, 34, CEO, Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund: "Mutual funds were misunderstood by investors. Everyone thought they were a one way ticket to a jackpot."
Intoxicated, fund-managers poured in more and more of their corpuses into equity, ignoring the downsides, confident that the boom would last forever. In the process, they ignored the very concept of risk-management, blithely ignoring the safety net of fixed-income instruments, and accusing those who advised caution of being cowards. In 1995, for instance, ABN estimated 70 per cent of the money being managed by the mutual funds had been funnelled into equity. Whether they knew it or not, they were breaking away from the trend set by the mutual funds in the US, where the industry began by investing primarily in the money market, with only 25 per cent of their corpus set aside for stocks. Only in the past 15 years, after operating for more than seven decades, have those funds ventured into equity. Unfortunately, their success blinded the fund-managers to the fact that they were riding a wave-not navigating the treacherous seas. As Vivek Reddy, 36, CEO, Kothari-Pioneer Mutual Fund, puts it: "It was the stock market conditions that helped the mutual funds deliver returns, not superior investment skills." Then, the stock markets collapsed and never quite recovered. Between July 1997 and October 1998, the Sensex free-fell from 4306 to 2812 finally nullifying the theory that if you wait long enough, share-prices are always bound to rise. And the mutual fund, unused to a diet of falling equity indices, collapsed too.
The quantum of money mopped up by the mutual fund may suggest that the reports of its extinction have been greatly exaggerated. In 1997-98, Indians entrusted Rs. 18,701 crore to the mutual funds, with new schemes alone mopping up Rs. 12,279 crore. Questions R. G Sharma, 58, CEO, LIC Mutual Fund: "How do you explain that Dhanvarsha 12 and Dhanvarsha 13, floated in April and September 1998, managed to mop up Rs. 335 crore?" Not quite a loss of faith, would you say? Think again. In those 12 months, those very investors also took away Rs. 16,227 crore in the form of repurchases and redemptions, leaving only Rs. 2,474 crore more in the hands of fund-managers. What's more, since none of the withdrawals could have been made from the new schemes, the old schemes, obviously, gave it all up, effectively yielding Rs. 9,805 crore to angry investors who took away their money. It is the same story this year: in the first quarter of 1998-99, old schemes collected Rs. 2,340 crore, compared to the new schemes' Rs. 1,735 crore but they gave up Rs. 2,749 crore ending up Rs. 409 crore poorer.
Sure, some people are still putting money into the mutual funds. The real reason: money is flowing in from two genres of investors — neither of whom is the quintessential urban. The first comprises people in the semi-urban and rural areas, for whom names like the LIC and GIC still represent safety and assured schemes of income. Importantly, this category investor isn't clued into the financial markets, and is not, accordingly, aware of the problems that confront the mutual funds. Confirms Nikhil Khatau, 38, Managing Director, Sun F & C Asset Management: "That market is fairly stable. "However, as soon as the fundamental problems hit their dividend-paying ability, even the die hard mutual fund investor from India's villages and small towns — who, don't forget, has already been singed by the disappearance of thousands of nonbanking finance companies — will swear off their favourite investment vehicle.
The second genre of investor explains why the private sector funds have been successful in soaking up large sums: 31.10 per cent of the total takings in 1997-98, and 10.70 per cent in the first quarter of 1998-99. They are the so called high net worth players — corporates and individuals — who in Khatau's terms, ‘are aggressive about managing their wealth, and look closely at comparative performance’. While their fastidiousness has forced them to pick the private sector mutual funds, whose disclosures and performance has both been ahead of their public sector cousins, their interest does not represent every investor's disillusionment.