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NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 2 Somebody's Mother — Let us explore

Book page 80 & 81 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Did you know that even Earth has been referred to as mother in the ancient scriptures of India? In section 12.1.12 of Pṛthvi-Sūkta (hymn-to-the-earth) of Atharva Veda, Earth is referred to as mother and us as her children by stating: “माता भूमिः पुत्रोऽहं पृथिव्याः”. It can be translated as ‘Earth is my mother and I am her child’.
Answer

The line is mātā bhūmiḥ putro'haṃ pṛthivyāḥ — “The earth is my mother; I am the son of the earth.” It comes from the Pṛthvī Sūkta, the hymn to the earth in the Atharva Veda, which is one of the longest hymns in the Vedic corpus and is devoted entirely to the earth.

Why the book places it here, just after this poem

  • The poem's whole argument is that calling someone “somebody's mother” changes how you treat her. The hymn does exactly the same thing on a much larger scale: call the earth mother, and you can no longer treat it as a thing to be used up.
  • The relationship named is two-way. A mother sustains; a child owes care in return. That is why this verse is quoted so often in discussions of the environment.
  • The image is not unique to one tradition. Rivers are called Ganga Maiya, the country is Bharat Mata, and languages have their matru-bhasha. The idea that what nourishes you is a mother runs right through Indian usage.
A note on the words: mātā = mother; bhūmiḥ = the earth, the ground; putraḥ = son, child; aham = I; pṛthivyāḥ = of the earth. Both bhūmi and pṛthivī mean “earth”, and using both in one line is a Vedic way of giving the statement weight.
For your notebook: find one more line from any language or scripture that speaks of the earth as a living relative, and write the two side by side. Comparing them is more interesting than collecting them.
Q2.
Work in groups of four. Find out the names of countries that refer to their country as ‘motherland’ and a few others as ‘fatherland’. Share your findings with your classmates and teacher.
Answer

Both words exist in many languages, and which one a country prefers usually depends on its own language and history rather than on any rule.

Usually “motherland”The word used
IndiaBharat Mata / मातृभूमि (mātṛbhūmi)
RussiaRodina-Mat (Родина-мать), “Mother Homeland”
BangladeshMaa (in “Amar Sonar Bangla”)
FranceLa patrie is grammatically feminine; Marianne personifies the republic as a woman
Sri Lanka, Nepal and much of South and Southeast AsiaThe land is commonly addressed as mother in anthems and songs
Usually “fatherland”The word used
GermanyVaterland
The NetherlandsVaderland
PolandOjczyzna (from ojciec, father)
Sweden, Denmark, NorwayFäderneslandet / fædreland
Russia (also)Otechestvo (Отечество), “fatherland” — Russian uses both words
The interesting finding is that many countries use both. Russia is the clearest example: Rodina (mother) is warm and personal, used in songs and memorials, while Otechestvo (father) is formal and official, used of the state and its defence. So the choice of word is not really about a country's opinion of mothers and fathers — it is about which feeling the speaker wants to call up.
How to divide the group work: one member takes South Asia, one Europe, one Africa and West Asia, one the Americas and East Asia. Each finds the word in the country's own language, not just the English translation — that is where the real discovery lies.
Q3.
Read the poem and enjoy. “A Nation's Strength — Not gold, but only men can make / A people great and strong… / Men who for truth and honour's sake / Stand fast and suffer long. / Brave men who work while others sleep, / Who dare while others fly… / They build a nation's pillars deep / And lift them to the sky.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson (Note: Here, men refers to both men and women)
Answer

The poem is a short argument in two stanzas, and it belongs in this unit because it answers the question the whole unit has been asking — what actually makes a country strong?

What the poem says

  • Stanza 1 — not wealth, but character. “Not gold, but only men can make / A people great and strong.” The strength of a nation is not what it owns but who its people are. And the quality named is not brilliance or bravery in battle: it is the endurance to “stand fast and suffer long” for “truth and honour”.
  • Stanza 2 — the strength is unseen. “Brave men who work while others sleep, / Who dare while others fly.” Emerson praises the unglamorous half of courage — persistence when nobody is watching.

How he says it

  • The controlling image is a building: “They build a nation's pillars deep / And lift them to the sky.” A pillar is only as tall as its foundation is deep, and the poet puts deep and sky at the ends of consecutive lines so that the reader feels the whole height of it.
  • The poem is built on contrasts — gold against men, work against sleep, dare against fly (here fly means run away). Each pair separates the people who build a nation from the people who do not.
  • The rhyme is ABAB (make/sake, strong/long; sleep/deep, fly/sky) — an interlocking pattern that suits a poem about things being fitted together.
The connection to this unit: Major Somnath Sharma “stood fast and suffered long”; the boy in the poem “dared while others” hurried by; Dr. Kurien, in the piece that follows, “worked while others slept” in a small town in Gujarat for fifty years. Emerson's eight lines describe all three.
About the note the book adds: “Here, men refers to both men and women.” Emerson wrote in the nineteenth century, when men was used to mean all human beings. Reading the poem today, we supply the word he would now have used — and the note is the book teaching you to read an old text fairly, in its own time, without accepting its limits as your own.
Q4.
Make a gratitude card for your mother/grandmother to thank her for at least five things that she does for you. Also write two things that you would do regularly to help them. Use recycled material to make and decorate the card. Write your own message.
Answer

What a good card needs. Five specific thanks and two specific promises. The word to avoid is “everything” — “Thank you for everything” says less than “Thank you for waking at half past five so that my tiffin is hot.” Be exact, and the card becomes a record of things she may not know you noticed.

Making it from recycled material

  • Fold a piece of stiff card from an old carton, or the back of a used notebook, into a card shape.
  • Cut shapes from old greeting cards, newspaper headlines, cloth scraps or dried leaves for the front.
  • Use thread from an old spool instead of ribbon; press a flower from the garden instead of buying a sticker.
Sample message

Dear Aaji,

Thank you for five things I have never actually said out loud:

  1. For sitting beside me with your knitting on the evenings before my exams, without saying a word.
  2. For remembering that I do not like too much salt in the dal, and cooking a separate small bowl.
  3. For your stories about Ratnagiri, which are the only history I have never had to memorise.
  4. For getting up first every single morning, even on Sundays, when nobody asked you to.
  5. For never telling anyone about the vase I broke in the summer of Class VI.

Two things I will do from now on, and not just this week:

  1. I will fill and put away the water bottles every evening so that you do not have to bend at the fridge.
  2. I will read the newspaper aloud to you for fifteen minutes after school, because I know your eyes tire now.

With all my love,
Meera

Why the two promises matter more than the five thanks. Gratitude that stays a feeling costs nothing. The poem you have just read is not about a boy who felt sorry for an old woman; it is about a boy who took her arm. A card that ends with two things you will actually do keeps faith with the poem.
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