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Question
'There is no sophistry in my body' – this statement expresses the brutal frankness of the Hawk. Does the poet suggest something through this statement?
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Solution
Ted Hughes in the poem Hawk Roosting portrays the Hawk as arrogant and fallaciously authoritative. The poet apprises Hawk's savage and grotesque image to the reader. The fashion in which it is personified, belittling God, and Creation is condemned as fascism by many critics. The direct way it beholds itself as the highest authority shows its audacity to challenge all the social and moral laws of this world. When it says that “there is no sophistry in my body”, the Hawk is ruthless and brutally frank about its physiology. It is disdainful and its narcissism is much apparent by its insolence and impudence as it does not pay heed to the laws of nature or even the social laws. It lacks mannerism and is gall; only knows to kill and ripping the heads off as and when it pleases the Hawk, as it all (the whole Creation) is subservient to him and it. In the fifth stanza, the Hawk declares itself inscrutable and that its ways of killing are not to be questioned. It is the Hawk who decides the allotment of death and there is no other supreme authority to challenge its flight, which is “through the bones of the living”.
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| 1. | Our history makes it evident that the Indian Plastics Industry made a vigorous beginning in 1957 but it took more than 30 years for it to pervade Indian lifestyles. In 1979, "the market for plastics' was just being seeded by the state-owned Indian Petro-Chemicals and it was only in 1994 that plastic soft drink bottles became a visible source of annoyance. |
| 2. | In the same year, people in other cities were concerned about the state of public sanitation and also urged regulatory bodies to ban the production, distribution and use of plastic bags. However, the challenge was greater than it appeared at first. |
| 3. |
The massive generation of plastic waste in India is due to rapid urbanisation, spread of retail chains, plastic packaging from grocery to food and vegetable products, to consumer items and cosmetics. The projected high growth rates of GDP and continuing rapid urbanisation suggest that India's trajectory of plastic consumption and plastic waste is likely to increase.
|
| 4. | According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report of 2018, India stands among few other countries like France, Mongolia and several African countries that have initiated total or partial nationallevel bans on plastics in their jurisdictions. On World Environment Day in 2018, India vowed to phase out single-use plastics by 2022, which gave a much needed impetus to bring this change |
| 5. | In this context, thereafter ten states (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Odisha, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu) are currently sending their collected waste to cement plants for co-processing, twelve other states/UTs are using plastic waste for polymer bitumen road construction and still four other states are using the plastic waste for waste-to-energy plants and oil production. A world of greater possibilities has now opened up to initiate appropriate and concrete actions to build up the necessary institutions and systems before oceans turn, irreversibly into a thin soup of plastic. |
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