Hi Everyone!! This article will share Within and Without Questions & Answers.
In my previous posts, I have shared the questions and answers of Growing Up, Clouds and Waves and Daffodils so, you can check these posts as well.
Within and Without Questions & Answers
Question 1: Were the children of the Tagore family a pampered lot? What does the author tell us about his upbringing?
Answer: No, the children of the Tagore family were not a pampered lot. Tagore says that luxury was almost unknown in the days of his infancy. The standard of living then was much simpler than it is now.
Question 2: Who looked after the children? Why did the children have no freedom?
Answer: The children used to be under the rule of the servants. The servants had restricted the children’s right to free movement. They didn’t allow the children to step out of the house.
Question 3: What do we know about the food and clothing habits of the Tagore children?
Answer: The children’s food included no delicacies. They wore slippers and not socks or shoes till they were ten years old. In the cold weather, they would simply wear a second cotton tunic over the first one.
Question 4: How did the children play with their slippers?
Answer: The children used to kick their slippers ahead and then run up after them. So, more often than not the slippers were found missing from their feet.
Question 5: Explain how the elders were distant from the children in the author’s house.
Answer: The elders of the Tagore family were not easily accessible to their children. The children would dream of living the kind of life their elders used to live only when they themselves were old enough.
Question 6: How does the author compare his childhood with that of the ‘modern child’?
Answer: The author had a simple childhood without the luxuries the modern children grow up with. He says that modern children would have nothing but scorn for the simple clothes he wore during his childhood.
Question 7: ‘Nothing ever came so easily to us.’ What does the author mean by this and how did this have a positive impact on him?
Answer: ‘Nothing ever came so easily to us.’ By saying this Tagore means that unlike modern children whose parents fulfil every wish of theirs rather easily, the children during his childhood could never hope to get any of their desires fulfilled easily.
Question 8: How did Shyam manage to control the author’s movement? Why was the author afraid of transgressing the line he would draw?
Answer: Shyam managed to control the author’s movement when he was a small boy by putting him in a selected spot, tracing a chalk line all around and warning him of terrible consequences if he stepped out of that line.
Question 9: The author would spend the whole day gazing on this scene on a picture book. What did he observe?
Answer: The author used to observe very carefully the scene just below one of the rooms of his house. There was a tank with a flight of steps leading to the water, an immense banyan tree and a fringe of coconut palms.
Question 10: Describe the conversation between the free and tamed bird in the poem written by the author.
Answer: Since going out of the house was forbidden to the children of the Tagore family, the author could only peep at the world outside, taking in the sounds and scents as best as he could. It appeared to him that everything belonging to the ‘Outside’, that he could only see from inside his house, was inviting him to play with it.
Question 11: When the author gazed at the distant dwelling outside his house, what possible wealth did he imagine them to be full of?
Answer: The free bird which lived in the forest once met the tamed bird which lived in a cage. The former asked the latter if it would like to fly with it in the forest. The caged bird responded by asking the free bird to come and start living with it in the cage.
So, these were Within and Without Questions & Answers.