I have just started to attempt Precis writing and I want the help of the seniors to get me along the track.

Precis 1971

Passage.
The essence of poetry is that it deals with events which concern a large number of people and can be grasped not as immediate personal experience but as matter known largely from heresy and presented in simplified and often abstract forms. it is thus the antithesis of all poetry which deals with the special, individual activity of the self and tries to present this as specially and as individually as it can. The poet who deals with public themes may himself be affected, even deeply, by contemporary events at some point in his own being, but to see them in their breadth and depth he must rely largely on what he hears from other men and from mass instruments of communication. From the start his impulse to write about them is different from any impulse to write about his own affairs. It may be just as strong and just as compelling, but it is not of the same kind. He has to give his own version of something which millions of others may share with him, and however individual he may wish to be, he cannot avoid relying to a large extent on much that he knows only from second hand.
Fundamentally this may not matter, for after all what else did Shakespeare do: but the political poet does not construct an imaginary past, he attempts to grasp and interpret a vast present. Between him and his subject there is a gap which he can never completely cross, and all his attempts to make events part of himself must be to some extent hampered by recalcitrant elements in them, which he does not understand or cannot assimilate or find irrelevant to his creative task. in such poetry selection which is indispensable to all art, has to be made from an unusually large field of possibilities and guided by an exacting sense of what really matters and what does not. On one side he may try to include too much and lose himself in issues where he is not imaginatively at home, on the other side he may see some huge event merely from a private angle which teed not mean much to others. Political poetry oscillates between these extremes, and its history in our time has been largely attempts to make the best of one or the other of them or to see what compromises can be made between them.

Title: The beauty of Poetry.

A poetry is a mere reflection of collective beings. A poet simply does not produce the thoughts of his own individual experience in his poetries but he decorates the ideas and happenings of contemporary masses collectively and in that essence finds his own role. Mostly the news from others become the sources and their sayings, the material but the articulation of the words in a rhymed and synchronized way is what differs a poetry from other ordinary piece of writings. Unlike Shakespeare, a political poet does not rely on imaginary past but uses present as his center of focus which, therefore, can be the solution of the political affairs but a poet does not feel comfortable with weighing one side of the story which does not concern the other half as it is against the very idea of poetry to outshine an individuals interests.






Précis. 1972

Passage.
Up to a point the Second German War resembled the first. Each began with a German bid for power which almost succeeded in spite of the opposition of France and Great Britain. In each the United States came to the rescue after year of neutrality. Each ended with a German defeat. But the differences were easier to see than the resemblances. The powers were differently grouped: Italy and Japan were on the German side, Russia was neutral until the Germans attacked across what had been, to begin with, Poland and Baltic States. The second war lasted even longer than the other. It pressed harder on the civilian population. After a period of restraint, perhaps, intended to conciliate American opinion, both sides dropped bombs from the air, without respect for the nature of the targets, wherever the officers concerned expected to cause the greatest effect. In Great Britain 60,000 civilians were killed. Though the Island was not invaded, the population was more directly involved than it was in any former war. Children and others were evacuated from towns into the country. Food supplies ran so short that, at the worst, even potatoes were rationed. Of all the states opposed to Germany, Great Britain was the only one which fought throughout the war. The resources of the nation were concentrated in the war effort more completely than those of any other nation on either side. Labour for women as well as men, became compulsory. Nevertheless, once the war reached its full severity in the west, eight months after it was declared, there was less disunion between classes and interests than in any other five years within living memory. Fighting spread all over the world. The Pacific was as vital a theatre as Europe. Scientists, especially Physicists, made revolutionary discoveries during the war, not only in the fields of weapons and defence against them, but in supply, transport, and control in action. Strange to say the fight services suffered fewer casualties than in 1914-18: 300,000 of the armed forces and 35,000 of the navy were killed. There was nothing like the trench warfare of former war, though there was almost every other sort of warfare, from mechanized war of movement in the North African desert to hand to hand jungle fighting in Burma. Both sides experimented and built up stocks for gas warfare and biological warfare, but neither side used them. (George Clark: English History: a survey)

Title: Comparison of the world wars.

Germans' consideration for superior power against Great Britain and France and the failure to success both the times after the intervention of United States as a savior for the latter ones, are the commonalities in both the world wars. But severity of the second world war much bigger than its predecessor. The Russians, upon the attack on her allies, stood against the German. The scarcity of the food, the evacuation process and the massacre were huge loses to Britain but comparatively the second world war had fewer deaths of the troops than the former. People from either sides, in whatsoever field, were contributing to the war; be it a physicist or a biologist -unusual kinds of weapons were invented in the event of war in the defense of their respective countries.


Precis 2014.
Paragraph

Probably the only protection for contemporary man is to discover how to use his intelligence in the service of love and kindness. The training of human intelligence must include the simultaneous development of the empathic capacity. Only in this way can intelligence be made an instrument of social morality and responsibility — and thereby increase the chances of survival.

The need to produce human beings with trained morally sensitive intelligence is essentially a challenge to educators and educational institutions. Traditionally, the realm of social morality was left to religion and the churches as guardians or custodians. But their failure to fulfill this responsibility and their yielding to the seductive lures of the men of wealth and! pomp and power and documented by the history of the last two thousand years and have now resulted in the irrelevant “God Is Dead” theological rhetoric The more pragmatic men of power have had no time or inclination to deal with the fundamental problems of social morality. For them simplistic Machiavellianism must remain the guiding principle of their decisions-power is morality, morality is power. This oversimplification increases the chances of nuclear devastation. We must therefore hope that educators and educational institutions have the capacity, the commitment and the time to instill moral sensitivity as an integral part of the complex pattern of function human intelligence. Some way must be found in the training of human beings to give them the assurance to love, the security to be kind. and the integrity required for a functional empathy.

Title: Empathy lies in loving other.

The only way, for humans, to live peace fully with social harmony is to use his caliber not in developing nuclear weapons but promoting love in the broader sense for humanity. The message of love and tolerance should therefore be encouraged and promoted in the very educational grooming of the individuals. The religions along with the principles of Nietzsche and Machiavelli had failed to spread the notion of love with their orthodox mentality, pessimistic approach of morality and intense politics, respectively. The only security of the mankind lies in compassion and loving one-another.

PS. I am a good learner. Just tell me the dos and the don'ts. Please.