Q1.
Identify similar values in any story or local tradition etc. known to you. You could ask your guardians or relatives too. Collect these stories and create a class manuscript. You could include illustrations.
Answer
The value to look for is the one the chapter has been describing: treating a stranger as one of your own. Stories carrying it exist in every Indian language, and most families have one.
Method — three steps.
- Collect. Each student brings one story or one custom from home. Ask a grandparent, an aunt, a neighbour. Write down who told it to you and when — that line makes your page a source instead of a rumour.
- Sort. On the board, group the stories by the value they carry: welcoming a guest, feeding whoever comes, sharing water, protecting someone weaker, forgiving. You will find several stories land in the same group even though they come from different districts and different faiths.
- Make the manuscript. One story to a page. Give every page the same four parts — title, the story in about ten lines, an illustration, and one closing line naming the value and the source (“told to me by my grandmother, October 2025”). Add a title page and a contents list, stitch or tie the pages, and keep it in the class library.
What a good entry needs: a real source, the story in your own words, one sentence saying what the story is for, and no borrowed pictures — draw your own.
Sample answer (one page of the manuscript):
Title: “Every town our town”
The tradition: In summer my grandmother sets out an earthen pot of water and a steel tumbler on the wall outside our gate, and refills it twice a day. Anyone passing may drink — the postman, a labourer, a stranger asking for an address. She calls it a pyaau. She says her own mother did it in the village, and that you never ask who a thirsty person is before giving water.
The value: a stranger has the same claim on water as a neighbour. It is atithi devo bhava in its smallest, cheapest form. The classical Tamil poet Kaṇiyan Pūngundranār said the same thing in a famous line — yāthum ūrē yāvarum kēḷir, “every town is our town, everyone is our kin” — which is very close to the Hitopadeśha verse at the start of this chapter, vasudhaiva kutumbakam.
Illustration: the pot, the tumbler and the gate.
Source: told to me by my grandmother, and the Tamil line was shown to me by our language teacher.
The tradition: In summer my grandmother sets out an earthen pot of water and a steel tumbler on the wall outside our gate, and refills it twice a day. Anyone passing may drink — the postman, a labourer, a stranger asking for an address. She calls it a pyaau. She says her own mother did it in the village, and that you never ask who a thirsty person is before giving water.
The value: a stranger has the same claim on water as a neighbour. It is atithi devo bhava in its smallest, cheapest form. The classical Tamil poet Kaṇiyan Pūngundranār said the same thing in a famous line — yāthum ūrē yāvarum kēḷir, “every town is our town, everyone is our kin” — which is very close to the Hitopadeśha verse at the start of this chapter, vasudhaiva kutumbakam.
Illustration: the pot, the tumbler and the gate.
Source: told to me by my grandmother, and the Tamil line was shown to me by our language teacher.
Why the chapter ends with this activity: the whole chapter has been an argument that vasudhaiva kutumbakam “is not just a slogan but has been a practice for millennia”. A class manuscript full of small local practices is the proof, gathered by you — and it is exactly how such traditions have always been passed on, one household telling the next.