Flamingo

Chapter 1 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "The Last Lesson", is a short story by French author Alphonse Daudet set during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), in which an order from Berlin forces the schools of Alsace to replace French with German — making M. Hamel's class the last French lesson ever taught there.

• 1Franz is the young narrator who is late for school and fears a scolding from M. Hamel over participles.
• 2An order from Berlin decrees that only German will be taught in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine, ending French instruction.
• 3M. Hamel wears his fine Sunday clothes — green coat, frilled shirt, and embroidered black silk cap — to honour the last lesson.
• 4Village elders, including old Hauser with his thumbed primer, attend to pay respect to M. Hamel's forty years of faithful service.
• 5M. Hamel calls French "the most beautiful language in the world — the clearest, the most logical" and says language is "the key to their prison" for an enslaved people.

Chapter 2 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "Lost Spring", is an essay by Anees Jung drawn from her book "Lost Spring, Stories of Stolen Childhood". It presents two real-life portraits: Saheb-e-Alam, a barefoot ragpicker from Seemapuri on the periphery of Delhi, and Mukesh, a bangle-maker's son from Firozabad. Through their stories, Jung analyses the grinding poverty and entrenched traditions that deny these children education, safety, and the freedom to dream.

• 1Saheb-e-Alam's family fled Bangladesh after storms swept away their fields; they are among 10,000 squatters in Seemapuri living in mud structures without sewage, drainage, or running water.
• 2Garbage is both livelihood and wonder for Seemapuri's children — "Garbage to them is gold" — whereas for adults it is purely a means of survival.
• 3Saheb loses his freedom when he takes a job at a tea stall for 800 rupees and all his meals; the author notes his face "has lost the carefree look" and "the canister belongs to the man who owns the tea shop."
• 4Firozabad is the centre of India's glass-blowing industry; it is illegal for children to work in the glass furnaces at high temperatures in dingy cells without air and light, yet about 20,000 children do so, often losing their eyesight.
• 5Mukesh's family is locked in a "web of poverty, burdened by the stigma of caste" — his grandmother calls bangle-making the family's "karam, his destiny" and his grandfather has known nothing else his entire life.

Chapter 3 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "Deep Water", is an autobiographical essay by William O. Douglas taken from his book "Of Men and Mountains". It recounts how Douglas developed a terror of water from childhood, nearly drowned at the YMCA pool in Yakima when a bully tossed him into the deep end, and then as an adult methodically overcame that fear by hiring a swimming instructor and training for months until he could swim across a lake alone.

• 1Douglas first developed an aversion to water around age three or four when ocean waves at a California beach knocked him down and buried him, filling him with terror.
• 2At age ten or eleven, a big older boy at the YMCA pool in Yakima yelled "Hi, Skinny!" and tossed Douglas into the nine-foot-deep end, triggering a near-drowning in which he sank three times.
• 3During the near-drowning Douglas experienced escalating panic — "sheer, stark terror seized me" — his legs became paralysed and rigid, and he finally lost consciousness before someone pulled him out.
• 4The experience left a lasting handicap: whenever Douglas was near water — canoeing in Maine, fishing on the Columbia, bathing in Warm Lake — "icy horror would grab my heart."
• 5To overcome the fear he hired an instructor and trained five days a week, an hour a day; the instructor used a rope-and-pulley belt system, then gradually taught him breathing, kicking, and full strokes piece by piece over several months.

Chapter 4 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "The Rattrap", is a short story by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf about a vagabond rattrap peddler who steals thirty kronor from a generous crofter, becomes trapped in a forest—mirroring his own rattrap philosophy—finds shelter at Ramsjö Ironworks, is mistaken for a former regimental officer by the ironmaster, and is ultimately redeemed by the compassionate kindness of the ironmaster's daughter, Edla Willmansson.

• 1The peddler conceives the 'world as a rattrap' metaphor while thinking of his rattraps: the world 'offered riches and joys, shelter and food' as bait, just as a rattrap offers 'cheese and pork', and closes in on whoever is tempted.
• 2He steals thirty kronor—three ten-kronor bills—from the crofter who had generously given him supper, tobacco, and a game of 'mjolis', then shown him the money pouch hanging on the window frame.
• 3After the theft he dares not use the public highway and enters a forest, where he walks in circles and realises 'his own turn had come'—he had been caught in the rattrap, just as he had philosophised others were.
• 4The ironmaster at Ramsjö Ironworks mistakes the ragged peddler for his old regimental comrade 'Nils Olof / Captain von Stahle' and sends his daughter Edla to persuade him to spend Christmas at the manor.
• 5Edla suspects the man 'has stolen something or else has escaped from jail', yet still invites him, assuring him he may 'leave just as freely as you came' and asking only that he stay for Christmas Eve.

Chapter 5 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "Indigo", is a non-fiction account by Louis Fischer excerpted from his book The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. It narrates how Gandhi, persuaded by the illiterate but resolute sharecropper Rajkumar Shukla, travelled to Champaran in Bihar in 1917 to challenge the exploitative indigo sharecropping system imposed by British landlords, ultimately winning a 25 per cent refund for the peasants and establishing India's first successful act of civil disobedience.

• 1Rajkumar Shukla, an illiterate Champaran sharecropper, tracked Gandhi across India — from the 1916 Lucknow Congress session to his Ahmedabad ashram — to persuade him to visit Champaran.
• 2Under the existing arrangement, tenants were compelled to plant three-twentieths (15 per cent) of their holdings with indigo and surrender the entire harvest as rent to British landlords.
• 3When Germany developed synthetic indigo, landlords sought compensation agreements from sharecroppers to release them from the arrangement; peasants who had already signed wanted their money back.
• 4Gandhi defied a British official's order to quit Champaran, pleaded guilty in court citing a 'conflict of duties', and the mass turnout of thousands of peasants around the courthouse marked the beginning of their liberation from fear — the first act of civil disobedience in modern India.
• 5An official commission of inquiry, on which Gandhi was the sole representative of the peasants, assembled evidence against the planters; they agreed to refunds, and Gandhi accepted 25 per cent rather than the full amount, explaining that the planters' surrender of prestige mattered more than the sum.

Chapter 6 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "Poets and Pancakes", is a memoir by Tamil writer Asokamitran drawn from his book My Years with Boss. It offers an insider's account of life inside Gemini Studios in Chennai during the early days of Indian cinema, covering the make-up department's routines, the colourful people who worked there — including Kothamangalam Subbu (No. 2 at the studio), a frustrated office boy, and an enigmatic legal adviser — and memorable visits by the Moral Re-Armament group and an unnamed English poet later identified as Stephen Spender.

• 1"Pancake" was the brand name of make-up material Gemini Studios bought in truck-loads; the make-up room was said to occupy the building that had once been Robert Clive's stables.
• 2The make-up department demonstrated spontaneous national integration — headed first by a Bengali, then a Maharashtrian, and assisted by people from Dharwar, Andhra, Madras and Anglo-Burmese backgrounds — long before AIR and Doordarshan promoted it.
• 3The 'office boy' who handled crowd players' make-up was in his early forties; he had entered the studios hoping to become a star, director or lyricist and was a "bit of a poet" who directed his frustration at Subbu.
• 4Kothamangalam Subbu, the studio's No. 2, was a many-sided genius: loyal to The Boss, an endlessly creative story-teller, a poet who "deliberately chose to address his poetry to the masses", the author of the novel Thillana Mohanambal, and a fine subsidiary actor.
• 5The legal adviser of the Story Department stood apart — wearing pants, a tie, and sometimes "a coat that looked like a coat of mail" — and inadvertently ended a talented actress's career by playing back her own outburst.

Chapter 7 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "The Interview", has two parts: Part I is an essay by Christopher Silvester on the history and varied opinions of the interview as a journalistic form, drawing on views of notable writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, and Saul Bellow; Part II is an extract from an interview of Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco, conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu, in which Eco discusses his prolific output, his concept of using "interstices" (empty spaces in daily life) to work, his academic writing style, his identity as a university professor rather than a novelist, and the unexpected worldwide success of his novel The Name of the Rose.

• 1The interview has existed for about 130 years and is described as a commonplace of journalism, with Denis Brian calling it "a supremely serviceable medium of communication" through which "almost everything of moment reaches us".
• 2Negative celebrity views: V. S. Naipaul felt interviews wound people and cause them to lose part of themselves; Lewis Carroll had a "just horror of the interviewer" and never consented to be interviewed; Rudyard Kipling called it "immoral" and "a crime"; Saul Bellow described interviews as "thumbprints on his windpipe".
• 3Umberto Eco is a professor at the University of Bologna, Italy, with a formidable reputation in semiotics, literary interpretation, and medieval aesthetics; his written output covers literary fiction, academic texts, essays, children's books, and newspaper articles.
• 4Eco's secret to productivity is working in "interstices" — the empty spaces or idle moments in daily life (such as waiting for an elevator) — during which he claims he can already write an article.
• 5Eco describes himself as "a university professor who writes novels on Sundays" and identifies with the academic community, not with writers' clubs; he has written over 40 scholarly works alongside five novels.

Chapter 8 of NCERT Class 12 English (Flamingo), "Going Places", is a short story by A.R. Barton about a working-class girl named Sophie who escapes her cramped, modest home life through elaborate daydreams — owning a boutique, becoming an actress, and meeting Irish football prodigy Danny Casey. The story explores the gap between adolescent fantasy and the reality of limited opportunity.

• 1Sophie daydreams of opening "the most amazing shop this city's ever seen", becoming a manager, an actress, or a fashion designer — all dismissed by Jansie as financially impossible for girls heading to factory work.
• 2Jansie is Sophie's grounded, realistic friend who "knew they were both earmarked for the biscuit factory" and becomes melancholy whenever Sophie voices her unrealistic ambitions.
• 3Sophie's brother Geoff is an apprentice mechanic who rarely speaks — "words had to be prized out of him like stones out of the ground" — yet Sophie confides in him first and yearns to share his unknown world beyond the city.
• 4Sophie claims she met Danny Casey, described as a young Irish prodigy with "green eyes" and a "gentle" manner, in the arcade near Royce's window, where he supposedly agreed to meet her again the following week.
• 5Casey scores the second goal for United on Saturday — "a blend of innocence and Irish genius" — and Sophie "glowed with pride", but the story subtly signals her personal connection to him is invented.