Starting from coming Monday, every day, Insights will post varying number of questions on current events. Questions will be picked form important articles that appear in The Hindu.
Reading The Hindu with questions in mind will help in increasing keenness. For this to happen, questions should be thought provoking. I will try to take care of that.
For next Mains, one should be thorough with current events from this October to next November (minimum requirement). By the next Mains, you will have hundreds of questions for practicing.
Questions will be accompanied by links to the source articles.
Number of questions depends upon number of syllabus related articles that are published every day.
Two or three questions will be analytic in nature, and few others will be factual, mainly demanding short notes (5 marks type). Latter questions might help in Prelims too.
The intention is to provide food for thought while reading newspaper. Just ‘reading’ is not enough. After going through questions, you should read articles and try to answer those questions.
You may not find exact answers in the articles. In that case, you may have to search net for related information (like backgrounder of an issue from Wikipedia).
Maintaining a separate notebook is advised. You can also paste answers below in the comment box. Someone will comment and correct if any mistakes are there. Or if your answer is good, freshers who struggle with writing answers might get benefited.
Feeding content is an easy task (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V). You have access to thousands of sites that feed loads of information, but when it comes to what to read and what not to read the real confusion kicks up. This initiative might help in clearing such confusion little bit (don’t want to claim like – This Is Gonna Make Your Life Easier!)
This initiative is a separate one from that of Daily Answer Writing Challenge where mainly General Studies papers are covered. Both initiatives will run parallel every day (Hopefully).
This new initiative is named ‘Secure – 2014’. We will have to see if it lives up to its fancy name.
This new initiative might look like this:
Date:26/09/2013, The Hindu
Opinion Page
1.” The recent ordinance overturning the Supreme Court order mandating disqualification of legislators immediately upon their conviction is a case of executive overreach.” Do you agree? Explain why. (250 Words)
2. “The 2013 UNICEF report exposes systemic failures on part of the governments in the Indian health sector.” Comment. (250 Words)
3. Do you think the Nuclear Liability Law is biased in favour of nuclear industry? Substantiate your claim. (250 Words)
4. “In 2013, India, the world’s largest democracy ranked 140th out of 179 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.” Critically comment on the increasing threat to freedom of expression in India in the light of recent events. (250 Words)
If interested, you can try answering above questions today itself.
Disclaimer: This initiative is just a direction for you to focus on important articles and help you to cultivate critical perspective on burning issues. In no way, you should entirely depend on this initiative to cover all the current events.
