communication skills presentation

krunal chaudharienrollment no:160210106033

civil semester-1

EYE'S ARE NOT HERE

RUSHKIN BOND

about authorRuskin Bond (born 19 May 1934) is an Indian author of British descent. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, in Mussoorie, India. The Indian Council for Child Education has recognized his role in the growth of children's literature in India. He got the Sahitya Academy Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, for his published work in English. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014.

the plot of the story is this: a man (presumably a young man) is sitting in a compartment in a train when a woman (apparently a young woman) also enters the compartment. The woman doesn’t notice that the man is blind, and he does not tell her. Instead, he asks her a series of questions that allow him to infer certain facts about her. She also converses pleasantly with him. After she gets off the train at her stop, another male enters the compartment and mentions in passing that the young woman who just left the compartment was blind.

PLOT

Thus, the young man on the train failed to perceive that the young woman was blind, as did the reader of the story. The young woman apparently also failed to perceive that the young man was blind, and this may also be true of the male who enters the compartment near the end of the story. In a very brief tale, then, Bond has managed to create a remarkably complex story about the limits of human perception and perceptiveness and about how people tend to make assumptions and then take those assumptions for granted in ways that influence what they perceive or fail to perceive.

We learn at the beginning of the story that the man waiting in the train compartment is blind. Truly his "eyes are not here" in that he can only distinguish between light and darkness. The first sign that the girl shares his blindness is the concern of her parents when they put her on the train. They tell her where to put her luggage and how to act.

The next sign the girl is blind is that she is startled when the man begins a conversation. The girl obviously thought she was alone in the train compartment. The two eventually talk with general conversation about where they are going before the girl reaches her stop. Before she exits, the man tells her she has an "interesting" face, which the girl loves because she is usually told she is simply "pretty."

Justification of title

The true realization of the story comes when the next passenger enters and apologizes for not being as attractive as the previous one. Due to his blindness, the man asks if the girl had long or short hair. The new passenger didn't notice because he was entranced only with her eyes: the things that were of no use to her because she was blind.

So, truly, the passenger "with good eyesight fail[s] to see what is right in front of [him]." The title of the story shows that the eyes of the girl and the man "are not here" because both are blind. The irony is that people who can see are "blind" as well.

Well, before justifying the most-used title, please realize that this story is often given other titles as well: "The Girl on the Train" and "The Eyes Have It." In short, the title refers to the fact that the two main characters, the girl and the man, are blind.

Well, it often happens that people with good eyesight fail to see what is right in front of them. They have too much to take in, I suppose. Whereas people who cannot see (or see very little) have to take in only the essentials, whatever registers most tellingly with their remaining senses.

The eyes are not here(also known as the girl on the train and the eyes have it) is a short story by RUSHKIN BOND that was originally published in contemporary indian english stories the narrator of this story ,a blind man whose eyes where sensitive only to light and darkness, was going todehradun by train when he met a girl and had chit- chat with her, it was only after she left and another passenger came into the compartment that the narrator realise the girl was blind

Summary