Directions ; Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been printed in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.

Capitalism is a great slave, but a pathetic master. This truth unfortunately gets lost in our chase for that elusive dream ____especially in the West, the land that has been marketed as the land of the dreams – the great Western dream. It’s the dream of being independent masters of our lives of making big bucks and being happy – even if that happiness is being bought by money which all of them chase out there. No doubt, the West, on its part, has been fairly successful in creating material comforts aplenty. It has improved the living standard of its average citizen. However it has been achieved as a result of more than 200 years of unbridled growth and exploitation. And that is what has made the rest of the World mindlessly chase Westernism, not necessarily happiness or an ideal form of society. All because the shop window looks very impressive and it has been marketed very well.

But a deep look inside the shop tells a different tale. A different World lies behind, a World that is not quite visible to the starry eyed millions – for whom the Western way of life seems to be the

ultimate dream. Thus, we have Indians dreaming to become or to get married to an NRI and Indian middle class fathers dreaming of their sons reaching the Bay area and landing tech jobs, unmindful of the second class life they end up leading in the West. What goes unseen and almost unheard is that the West also happens to be the land that is right amongst the top in terms of the number of divorces per thousand, the number of single parents families per thousand, the number of old people in old age homes, the number of suicides, homicides and of course, the number of college/school shootouts.

And why not! After all, such societies are constantly driven towards higher profits and materialism. Expectedly, this materialism comes at a cost that the World is paying today. This is the reason why we have millions dying of curable diseases in Africa and other underdeveloped countries, while the rich grow richer. Their growth will be reduced, if they were to start thinking of the poor. So what do they do to justify their greed for more? They most shrewdly propagate and market a ridiculously primitive law of the jungle for our 21st century civilization, the ‘Law of Survival of the Fittest’!

The interesting thing about material things is that they only give an illusion of happiness, however such happiness is always momentary in nature. Ergo, at this juncture, you feel you are the happiest person in the World, after buying your new car or flat screen TV, and just a few days later ,these are the very possessions that cease to make you happy. While you chase the bigger car and spend that extra bit of the wealth, you intercept someone’s share of the daily bread and also sacrifice those who have the maximum power to make you happy – family, emotions and love. Prolonged abstinence in feeling emotions finally destroys bliss, and you don’t even realize when you’ve become a dry-eyed cripple …. And then you land up in a sermon workshop to find out the real meaning of life – or whatever these workshops are capable of the explaining. The truth is that such workshops are also driven by merchants who cash in on the dejected state of the people, a state created by their own fictional dreams. But by then its really too late.

By then, you have made profits out of arms, and engineered wars to keep that industry alive. You’ve sold guns across counters at supermarkets and made more profits. You’ve lobbied that guns should be made accessible to the common man, and all for the sake of profits. This makes you realiaze one day that they are your own children who are in the line of fire against the school goer who opens fire at his schoolmates.
This is the society that finally creates an emotionless monster, who gets satisfaction in killing innocent adults and children alike for no cause, no reason and for none, but himself. It is the utter destruction of spiritualism and the total focus on endless self-gratification. Where so many single parent families and divorces exist, it is impossible to bring up children or influence the killers, any better.

Q:

The author’s main objective in writing the passage is

• 1
  To explain that consumerist societies have their own drawbacks, which are overlooked by those who are blinded by its material glare
• 2
  To explain how too many material comforts have improved the living standard of common man in the West
• 3
  That young children should not be given access to guns and other ammunitions
• 4
  All NRIs are leading unmindful, second-class lives abroad
• 5
  None of these