1. One morning, while attending to my father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theatre of death, I was in pain. I was frustrated and angry. Finally when the nurse relented and came, my father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet ?" Here was a man on his deathbed more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state ! I was stunned. I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another... Show more

1. One morning, while attending to my father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theatre of death, I was in pain. I was frustrated and angry. Finally when the nurse relented and came, my father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet ?" Here was a man on his deathbed more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state ! I was stunned. I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being, and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. Father died the next day.
2. Father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of post-Independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Pabna, Bangladesh, my mother, then a school girl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords.
3. Consequently, our household saw diversity in thfe political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state ; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
4. It was at the age of 82 that Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneshwar. I flew down from the US, where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralyzed state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work.
5. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me ? Go kiss the world." Her river was nearing the end of its journey.
6. At the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, who was raised by a widowed mother, no more than high school educated, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rs 300, who was robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity—she was telling me to go and kiss the world !
7. Success to me is about vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extraordinary success with ordinary lives.
8. Good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world. (526 words)

Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow choosing the correct options from, the ones given below each question :

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