Vistas

Chapter 1 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), "The Third Level", is a short story by Jack Finney in which Charley, a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker, discovers a mysterious third level at Grand Central Station that transports him to the year 1894 and the peaceful town of Galesburg, Illinois. The story explores escapism, the anxiety of modern life, and the human desire to flee "insecurity, fear, war, worry" by retreating to an idyllic past.

• 1Charley discovers a third level at Grand Central Station that leads to the year 1894, though the railroad presidents insist there are only two levels.
• 2The third level is identifiable by gaslights, brass spittoons, an old wooden information booth, period clothing, and a copy of The World newspaper dated June 11, 1894.
• 3Charley wants to buy two coach tickets to Galesburg, Illinois, but the ticket clerk rejects his modern currency as fake, calling it not money.
• 4His psychiatrist dismisses the experience as a "waking-dream wish fulfilment" caused by the modern world being "full of insecurity, fear, war, worry."
• 5Charley draws three hundred dollars from the bank and converts it to old-style bills, getting less than two hundred dollars because he had to pay a premium, noting "eggs were thirteen cents a dozen in 1894."

Chapter 2 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), "The Tiger King", is a satirical short story by Kalki about the Maharaja of Pratibandapuram, who is told at birth that he will be killed by a tiger. He dedicates his life to hunting a hundred tigers to defy the prophecy, only to die from a splinter of a cheap wooden toy tiger — making him the victim of the very thing he spent his reign trying to destroy.

• 1Astrologers predict at birth that the Maharaja of Pratibandapuram will meet his death from a tiger; his defiant response is "Let tigers beware!"
• 2He bans tiger hunting by anyone else in the state, vowing to attend to all other matters only after killing a hundred tigers.
• 3When tigers become extinct in his own forests, he marries into a royal family whose state has a large tiger population, killing five or six tigers on each visit to his father-in-law.
• 4After ninety-nine kills, his dewan secretly transports a tiger from the People's Park in Madras to the forest; the Maharaja shoots but misses — hunters kill it quietly to save their jobs.
• 5The 100th tiger's death is staged: "In this manner the hundredth tiger took its final revenge upon the Tiger King."

Chapter 3 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), "Journey to the End of the Earth", is a non-fiction travel essay by Tishani Doshi. She describes her voyage aboard the Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy to Antarctica as part of Geoff Green's Students on Ice programme. The essay traces Antarctica's ancient history as the core of the supercontinent Gondwana, explores the continent's role as a record of half-million-year-old climate data trapped in its ice-cores, and argues that studying Antarctica is essential to understanding the Earth's past, present, and future.

• 1Doshi begins her journey 13.09 degrees north of the Equator in Madras, crossing nine time zones, six checkpoints, three bodies of water, and multiple ecospheres to reach Antarctica.
• 2Six hundred and fifty million years ago, Gondwana — a giant amalgamated southern supercontinent centred roughly around present-day Antarctica — existed; it thrived for 500 million years before breaking apart.
• 3Antarctica stores 90 per cent of the Earth's total ice volumes and holds half-million-year-old carbon records trapped in its layers of ice, making it a vital archive for studying climate change.
• 4Students on Ice, headed by Geoff Green, takes high school students to Antarctica to offer the future generation of policy-makers a life-changing experience 'at an age when they're ready to absorb, learn, and most importantly, act.'
• 5Phytoplankton — 'those grasses of the sea' — use photosynthesis to nourish and sustain the entire Southern Ocean's food chain; further depletion of the ozone layer could devastate them and disrupt the global carbon cycle.

Chapter 4 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), "The Enemy", is a short story by Pearl S. Buck set during World War II in Japan. It follows Dr Sadao Hoki, a distinguished Japanese surgeon, who discovers a wounded American prisoner of war washed ashore at his doorstep and faces a profound moral dilemma: his duty to his country demands he hand the enemy over, but his duty as a doctor compels him to save the dying man's life.

• 1Dr Sadao Hoki is a Japanese surgeon perfecting a wound-healing discovery; he is kept in Japan partly because the old General may need an emergency operation.
• 2A wounded American sailor — carrying a U.S. Navy cap and bearing a gunshot wound in his lower back — is found unconscious on the beach below Sadao's house.
• 3Sadao acknowledges the soldier as his enemy but cannot let a wounded man die: "I have been trained not to let a man die if I can help it."
• 4Hana washes the wounded man and administers the anaesthetic while Sadao operates, removing the bullet; the servants all leave in protest, calling Sadao a traitor.
• 5The General — self-absorbed and dependent on Sadao — promises to send private assassins to eliminate the prisoner but forgets entirely because of his own pain.

Chapter 5 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), "On the Face of It", is a one-act play by Susan Hill about a fourteen-year-old boy named Derry, whose face was burned by acid, and an old man named Mr Lamb, who lost a leg in the war and now walks with a tin leg. Their unexpected meeting in Mr Lamb's garden — where Derry had climbed the wall thinking the place was empty — becomes a turning point: Mr Lamb's warmth, openness, and refusal to treat Derry with pity or fear slowly shift Derry's bitter sense of isolation toward a desire to engage with the world.

• 1Derry (fourteen years old) has acid burns covering one side of his face; he climbed the garden wall because he thought the place was empty.
• 2Mr Lamb lost his leg in the war — children call him 'Lamey-Lamb' — but he says it 'doesn't trouble' him and keeps his gate always open.
• 3Mr Lamb tells Derry: 'Acid only burns your face. Hate would do you more harm than any bottle of acid — you can burn yourself away inside.'
• 4Mr Lamb tends crab-apple trees, grows weeds alongside flowers ('All life, growing. Same as you and me'), keeps bees he hears 'singing', and makes toffee with honey for neighbourhood children.
• 5Derry's mother forbids him to return; Derry insists: 'If I don't go back there, I'll never go anywhere in this world again' — and he runs back.

Chapter 6 of NCERT Class 12 English (Vistas), 'Memories of Childhood', contains two autobiographical accounts: Part I, 'The Cutting of My Long Hair' by Zitkala-Sa (pen name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, born 1876), a Native American woman recalling her humiliation at a boarding school, and Part II, 'We Too are Human Beings' by Bama, a contemporary Tamil Dalit writer, recalling her childhood encounter with untouchability in her village. Together they present the shared experience of oppression and the early stirrings of resistance seen through a child's eyes.

• 1Zitkala-Sa (pen name of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, born 1876) was a Native American writer who began publishing in 1900 and devoted her life to opposing oppression of Native Americans.
• 2Bama is the pen name of a Tamil Dalit woman from a Roman Catholic family; the excerpt is taken from her autobiography 'Karukku' (1992).
• 3On her first day at the boarding school, Zitkala-Sa is disoriented by unfamiliar bells, forced table manners, stiff clothing, and the loss of her moccasins and blanket — all symbols of her cultural identity being stripped away.
• 4Zitkala-Sa resists having her hair cut — hiding under a bed and fighting back physically — because in her culture only mourners wore short hair and shingled hair marked a coward; she is nevertheless forcibly shorn.
• 5Bama initially finds it comically strange that a large elder carries a small packet by its string without touching it; when her brother Annan explains it is caste-driven untouchability, her amusement turns to anger and sorrow.