Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Every year, around the third week of July, a photograph arrives on our family WhatsApp group from my aunt in Hyderabad. It shows the lane outside her flat with water up to the door handles of the parked cars. The caption changes. The water does not.
The usual explanation is the rain, and the rain is easy to blame. It does fall in fewer and fiercer bursts now, and no drain built for an older climate can carry a month’s share in one afternoon. But this account leaves something out. The Deccan never had water to spare, and the kings and village councils who settled it learnt to hold on to what fell. They dug chains of tanks, each one spilling into the next one downhill, so that a heavy storm was handed on from tank to tank instead of being poured into a street. Hyderabad once had hundreds of them. Bengaluru’s old lakes worked the same way.
Many of those tanks, in both cities, now lie under bus stands, housing colonies and, in one case I know of, a stadium. Nobody plotted this. A dry lakebed in May looks like empty land, and a myopic kind of planning, the kind that reads a map only for the next five years, saw no reason to leave it empty. The tanks were not destroyed so much as forgotten, one plot at a time.
I do not think the answer is to dig them all out again; too many families live where the water used to sit. But I have noticed that the lanes which flood first often have names ending in ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’, the Telugu words for a pond and a lake. The city has kept the names. It has only lost the reason for them.
What does the writer suggest by saying that the city “has kept the names” but “lost the reason for them”?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → The old place names still recall water bodies whose purpose the city has forgotten.
The last lines are about old names that have stayed on after the ponds and lakes were lost.
- ‘Kunta’ and ‘cheruvu’ are Telugu words for a pond and a lake. Many lanes still have these names.
- So the names still carry a memory of the water that once stood there.
- “The reason for them” is the job the tanks did. They held the rain. The city forgot this and built over them. Now these lanes flood first.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 2: People in these areas wish to bring back the old Telugu names of their lanes. — Incorrect. Misread: the old names have not been lost. The city “has kept the names”, so there is nothing to bring back.
Option 3: Lanes are named ‘kunta’ or ‘cheruvu’ because they flood every year. — Incorrect. Result, not cause: the names come from the ponds and lakes that were once there. The flooding is a result of building over them.
Option 4: The names should now be changed, since the ponds and lakes no longer exist. — Incorrect. Not mentioned: the writer never asks for new names. The point is that the names still remind us of the water.