PASSAGE ONE

(1)Adopted at birth by a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I was asked from an early age to behave as much like an adult as possible. Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted.

(2)At 5, I sat onstage in the Kingdom Hall in Surrey, England, where my father’s job had taken us. Nervously pushing my memorized lines into the microphone, I faced my mother, who was seated across from me. We were demonstrating for the congregation exactly how a Bible study with a “worldly” person, or non-Witness, should go.

(3)I had played the householder before — the person who answered the door. That was easy: you just asked questions that showed you didn’t know the Truth. Portraying the Witness was harder: you had to produce the right Scripture to answer any questions the householder might ask.

(4)But we had written our parts on index cards and rehearsed repeatedly at home. I was well dressed and shining clean. I said my lines flawlessly and gave looks of concern at the right times. Finally, the householder agreed with everything I had said: her way of life was wicked, and the Bible clearly proved that Jehovah’s Witnesses were the only true Christians who would be saved at Armageddon. Her look was grateful. Then she smiled, becoming my mother again. Everyone clapped, and she glowed with pride. At last I could go out in service.

(5)From the age of 5 until I was 14, I knocked on the doors of strangers each week with memorized lines that urged them to repent. I didn’t play with other children. I didn’t have birthday parties or Christmas mornings. What I did was pray a lot. I knew the books of the Bible in order, by heart, and could recite various verses. My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives.

(6)This bliss wasn’t a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn’t vote, didn’t involve themselves in temporal matters, weren’t activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn’t a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was to obey and wait.

(7)Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker — smoking violated God’s temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents’ marriage dissolved. My mother’s second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul’s letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother’s role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely.

(8)After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that overlooked inequality.

(9)After she finally divorced my stepfather, my mother moved out of state and married another Witness. Our occasional correspondence skates over the surface of our strained relationship. I feel for her struggles. A smart, capable woman, she subjected her will and judgment, as the Witnesses teach, to her husbands’. If she damaged my brother and me or failed to protect us, she did so out of fear and belief. She wanted to save us from certain destruction at Armageddon, from a corrupt and dirty world. She wanted nothing less for us than paradise.

(10)I love my mother, but I also love my modern life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned — to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people — I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her.

PASSAGE TWO

(1)Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974 — he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.

(2)Does it matter? Plenty of languages — among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha — have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to the descendants. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues — from Manchu (spoken in China) to Hua (Botswana) and Gwich’in (Alaska) — are in danger of suffering a similar fate?

(3)Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicize an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and South-east Asia.

(4)Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success.

(5)Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.

(6)But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less ruthless and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language (such as Swahili in East Africa) or a global one (such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games.

(7)The result is a growing list of tongues spoken only by white-haired elders. A book edited by Peter Austin, an Australian linguist, gives some examples: Njerep, one of 31 endangered languages counted in Cameroon, reportedly has only four speakers left, all over 60. The valleys of the Caucasus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region’s baffling tongues, officially expired in 1992.

PASSAGE THREE

(1)London is steeped in Dickensian history. Every place he visited, every person he met, would be drawn into his imagination and reappear in a novel. There really are such places as Hanging Sword Alley in Whitefriars Street, EC1 (Where Jerry Cruncher lived in A Tale of Two Cities) and Bleeding Heart Yard off Greville Street, EC1 (Where the Plomish family lived in Little Dorrit); they are just the sort of places Dickens would have visited on his frequent night-time walks.

(2)He first came to London as a young boy, and lived at a number of addresses throughout his life, moving as his income and his issue (he had ten children) increased. Of these homes only one remains, at 48 Doughty Street, WC1, now the Dickens House Museum, and as good a place as any to start your tour of Dickens’s London.

(3)The Dickens family lived here for only two years — 1837-1839 — but during this brief period, Charles Dickens first achieved great fame as a novelist, finishing Pickwick Papers, and working on Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge and Nicholas Nickleby. If you want a house full of atmosphere, you may be a little disappointed, for it is more a collection of Dickensiana than a recreation of a home. Don’t let this deter you, however, for this is the place to see manuscripts, first editions, letters, original drawings, as well as furniture, pictures and artifacts from different periods of his life. Just one room, the Drawing Room, has been reconstructed to look as it would have done in 1839, but elsewhere in the house you can see the grandfather lock which belonged to Moses Pickwick and gave the name to Pickwick Papers, the writing table from Gad’s Hill, Rochester, on which he wrote his last words of fiction, and the sideboard he bought in 1839.

(4)It was in the back room on the first floor that Dickens’s sister-in-law Mary Hogarth died when she was only 17. He loved Mary deeply, probably more than his wife, her sister. The tragedy haunted him for years, and is supposed to have inspired the famous death scene of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.

(5)If you walk through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you will come across Portsmouth Street, and a building which, since Dickens’s death, has claimed to be the Old Curiosity Shop itself. It is thought to date from 1567, and is the oldest shop in London, but it seems more likely that the real Curiosity Shop was off Leicester Square. Whatever the truth, the shop makes a pleasant change from the many modern buildings which line the street.

(6)If you know Dickens’s work well, you may like to make your own way around this area, or you may prefer to rely on the experts and join a guided walk.

(7) “City Walks” organize a tour around a part of London which features strongly both in Dickens’s early life and his books. This is Southwark, SE1, an area not normally renowned as tourist attraction, but one which is historically fascinating. When the Dickens family first arrived in London, John Dickens, Charles’s father, was working in Whitehall. He was the model for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, so it is not surprising to learn that within a few months he was thrown into the Marshalsea Prison, off Borough High Street, for debt (Micawber was imprisoned in King’s Bench Prison which stood on the corner of the Borough Road). The Marshalsea Prison has long gone, but you can stand by the high walls and recall the time that Dickens would go into prison for supper each evening, after a hard and humiliating day sticking labels on pots at the Blacking Warehouse at Hungerford Stairs.

(8)Off Borough High Street are several small alleys called Yards. These mark the sites of the old coaching inns where passengers would catch a cart to destinations around the country. In one, White Hart Yard, stood the White Hart Inn, a tavern that Dickens knew well and in which he decided to introduce one of his best-loved characters, Sam Weller, of Pickwick Papers. Mr. Pickwick’s meeting with Sam ensured the popularity of the novel which was then serialized in monthly installments, and made Dickens a famous name.

PASSAGE FOUR

(1)When Arsenal, an English football club, took on Reading in 2007, the cover of the official program featured Theo Walcott, a young football player known for his speed. A copy is on display near the town of Bhigwan in the Indian state of Maharashtra, in a factory belonging to Ballarpur Industries Limited (BILT). It is India’s biggest maker of writing and printing paper, including the glossy stock that Arsenal supporters browse before kick-off.

(2)BILT is part of the Avantha Group, a corporation headed by Gautam Thapar that spans agribusiness, power and manufacturing, among other things. The group has grown at a pace that would shame Mr. Walcott, earning revenues of about $4 billion in 2009, compared with $1 billion in 2003. It provides one example of how corporate India might evolve, as it globalizes its operations, professionalizes its management and modernizes its technologies, while remaining a family corporation.

(3)The group was founded in the 1920s by Karam Chand Thapar, who passed it on to his son, Lalit Mohan. Like many family corporations, it split in its third generation. But it split amicably, leaving Mr. Thapar with the lion’s share of the businesses. Other corporate siblings squabble over the family name. Mr. Thapar dropped it, rebranding the group “Avantha” in 2007.

(4)Mr. Thapar cites a European tradition, where the heirs to family businesses first go off to try their luck elsewhere, before returning to the family fold. By accident, if not by design, he enjoyed a similar upbringing. As the second son of Lalit Mohan’s brother, Gautam grew up “twice removed from any position of inheritance.”

(5)That was probably just as well. Sudhir Trehan, who runs Crompton Greaves, Avantha’s electrical equipment-maker, jokes that when he joined as a trainee in 1972, the management would not drink tea unless it were served with white gloves from a silver pot. That complacent culture could not survive the less sheltered economy of the 1990s. Mr. Thapar became boss of BILT after steering it clear of bankruptcy in the latter half of that decade. Thereafter his uncle left him free to get on with it. Mr. Thapar cultivates a similar relationship with those who work for him, giving promising young executives responsibility for smaller units early on, so they can make their mistakes before the stakes get too big. “You actually believe it’s your company,” says Vineet Chhabra, head of Global Green, a subsidiary which exports foods to 50 countries.

(6)One advantage of a corporation is that it allows the ambitious to graduate from one company to another without leaving the group. When Mr. Chhabra began to feel irritated by Global Green’s small scale, he was given that option. But instead he chose to turn Global Green into the bigger company he wanted to run. With the group’s backing, it acquired Intergarden, a Belgian company three times its size. The purchase illustrates another advantage of the corporation: it gives units access to finance they could not raise on their own.

(7)Indian companies typically buy firms abroad to secure materials, markets, or technologies. Avantha has gone in search of all three. Intergarden, for example, gave Global Green valuable customer relationships. BILT bought a Malaysian firm to gain access to its timber. Crompton Greaves wanted Pauwels, a Belgian company, mainly for its know-how.

(8)Mr. Thapar is unusual among Indian businessmen in seeking inspiration (as well as acquisitions and markets) in continental Europe. In both Europe and India, he points out, the state remains a big owner of enterprise, the capital markets have yet to supersede banks as a source of corporate finance, and share ownership is often concentrated in family hands. Even the group’s new name is an unlikely mix of Indian and European. It evokes both the Sanskrit for “strong foundations” and the French for “advance”— a combination worth trading the family name for.

PASSAGE ONE

PASSAGE THREE

PASSAGE FOUR