NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 1 A Bottle of Dew — Let us think and reflect

Rama Natha did not ‘give up’ because he firmly believed that a magic potion really existed, and he was sure that one day he would find the person who knew its secret.

Other correct ways of completing it:

• … because his wish to turn things into gold was stronger than his fear of being cheated.
• … because he thought each new person he met might finally give him the true secret.

Answer: (b) B, A, D, C, E

Follow the passage sentence by sentence:

sprinkled

Seeing that the plant had dried up, the gardener sprinkled some water on it.

To sprinkle means to scatter something in small drops or small bits. In the passage, “Rama Natha sprinkled a few drops on a copper vessel.”

He must have felt shocked, bitterly disappointed and cheated.

He had waited six long years for that one moment. When the copper vessel stayed a copper vessel, his first thought was that the sage had fooled him, and his anger came out at once: “This is cheating. I have wasted six precious years of my life.”

Mixed with the anger there would also have been sadness and a sense of shame — the fear that the years of dawn-time dew collecting, and all the money spent before that, had been for nothing.

The sage gave him four clear instructions:

1. Plant a banana plant — and as many more as he wished.
2. Water it regularly with his own hands.
3. In winter, collect the morning dew from the leaves with his own hands and store it in a bottle.
4. When he had five litres of dew, bring it to the sage, who would chant magic words over it to turn it into the potion. “A drop of the potion will change any object into gold.”

Because the sage's real aim was to make Rama Natha work with his own hands on his own land. That was the cure for his laziness.

If a servant had watered the plants and collected the dew, Rama Natha would have gone on dreaming about magic and would have learnt nothing. By insisting — “you must look after them yourself and collect the dew with your own hands” — the sage made sure that:

• the empty fields would finally be cleaned and planted;
• Rama Natha would spend six years doing honest, daily labour instead of chasing cheats;
• at the end, he could not deny that the wealth in the box was his own doing.

That is why the sage could say with confidence at the end, “It was your hard work that created this wealth, not magic.”

Because collecting five litres of dew forced him to keep planting more and more banana plants, year after year.

The dew on a few leaves is only a few drops. To fill a five-litre bottle he needed thousands of leaves. So he first “started cleaning his large fields, which had been lying empty all these years”, then “planted rows and rows of banana plants”, “tended them carefully”, and “over the years … planted more and more plants”. Six winters of this turned the empty land into “a huge banana plantation”.

The sage proved it in three quick steps, instead of merely saying it:

1. He let the “potion” fail in front of him. He muttered over the water, returned the bottle and said, “Try it out.” Rama Natha sprinkled it on a copper vessel and nothing at all happened.
2. He showed the real gold. He called Madhumati, who came with a big box; when she opened it, “inside shined stacks of gold coins”.
3. He explained where that gold came from. “You worked hard on your land and created this plantation. While you looked after the trees, your wife sold the fruits in the market. That's how you got this money.”

Rama Natha could not argue with what he could see. The magic had failed and the hard work had paid — “Rama Natha understood the wisdom behind these words.”