NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 8 Follow That Dream (letter by Irene Chua) — Reflect and Respond

This is a personal question, so nobody can answer it for you — but a good answer to it has a shape, and the letter you are about to read tells you exactly what that shape is.

Sample answer: My dream is to become a wildlife veterinarian and work at a rescue centre in the Western Ghats. It began when a hurt kite fell into our terrace and the nearest vet said he treated only cattle — I realised there are almost no doctors for wild animals near us. I know what it will cost: five years of veterinary study, a seat that needs a very high score in Biology, and probably living far from Coimbatore for most of my twenties. I have started by keeping a notebook of every bird I can identify and by volunteering at the animal shelter on Sundays.

Answer with a named person and a specific thing they did — “my mother” is an answer only when you can finish the sentence “…because I watched her…”.

Sample answer: My grandmother inspires me. She was married at sixteen and never finished school, and at fifty-two she enrolled in an open-school programme and passed Class 10 with my uncle’s help. I remember her sitting with a torch during a power cut, copying out answers. What it changed in me is small but real: I stopped saying “it’s too late to start” about anything. If she could begin at fifty-two, my excuse about starting Sanskrit “too late” in Class 8 was never an excuse at all.

Answer this one from the letter — Irene Chua lists the qualities almost in order, and reading them off her text makes a far stronger answer than a general list of virtues.

Kalam is redefining the word by contrast. The sentence takes one word, dream, and forces two opposite meanings against each other in a single line — a pun that turns into an argument.

How the line works as language. Kalam keeps the same word and the same sentence pattern on both sides of the comma, so the only thing that changes is sleep — first the place a dream lives, then the thing a dream destroys. That reversal is what makes the quotation memorable; it is an antithesis, the same device the chapter teaches on page 249.

Their role is to lower the cost of the dream — not to choose it. The chapter gives evidence for both halves of that sentence.

What parents can do

• Give permission early. The letter’s first line is “By all means follow that dream.” Ming had clearly written asking; the mother says yes before she says anything else. A child who has to fight for permission spends years of energy on the fight instead of the work.
• Supply the honest arithmetic. “Count the cost in years of effort, financial investments and sacrifice.” A fifteen-year-old cannot know what a training costs or how long a qualification takes. That information is the parent’s contribution, and it is a form of respect, not discouragement.
• Tell the truth about failure without predicting it. Chua describes the Raffles College dream broken by the war and the students who left school to support siblings — and then refuses to draw the obvious moral: “No, I am not going to put a wet blanket on your dreams.”
• Shape what the child thinks is possible. Page 244 gives the classical Indian version: Jijabai told Shivaji tales from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, “which shaped his leadership ideals and bravery”; Queen Madālasa raised her sons on ideas of the soul and detachment. Stories set the ceiling of a child’s ambition.

What the community can do

• Be the support network the letter names. “the winner always thanks a host of people that formed his/her support network. So, you see that for one winner, there is a group of people who stood by him/her.” A coach who opens the ground at 5 a.m., a neighbour who lends a laptop, a teacher who stays back — these are the group behind the one name.
• Remove practical blocks. Scholarships, a village library, a free coaching centre, safe transport for girls, a functioning science lab. Most dreams in India die of logistics, not of talent.
• Show a nearby example. One person from the same street who became an engineer or an athlete does more for a child’s belief than a hundred famous names, because the distance looks crossable.

The four boxes are blank in the book; you fill them. Below are more than four reasons, so you can pick the ones you can defend — a web chart is judged on the quality of each reason, not on filling every box with a slogan.

More reasons you can use, each tied to the letter:

• It converts wanting into doing. Without a dream that is actually followed, everyone stops at “I wish I could be this or the other” — and, as the letter says, “they have never got beyond just wishful thinking.”
• It is the only thing that survives an uphill road. “often you are buoyed up only by the knowledge that you are doing what you love best and are doing the right thing.” On a bad day the dream is the sole reason left.
• It makes sacrifice a choice instead of a loss. Once you have counted the cost and still gone ahead, the money and the years feel spent, not stolen.
• It grows with you. “life itself may change a person’s dreams” — following one dream teaches you the habits that let you follow the next.
• It benefits more than one person. Chua notes that the participants in a mature dreamscape “would be many more”; a doctor, a teacher or an engineer who followed a dream carries a whole neighbourhood with them.