Ranchi, Sept. 22: Sample this. A sentence from an essay by Pearl S. Buck, “ India through a traveller’s eyes”, taught at the intermediate level in Ranchi University, reads: “My life has been too crowded with travels and many people for me to put it all within the covers of one beer...” That’s right. Book has become “beer”, leaving students to ponder on Buck’s “particular brand of beer in an over-crowded India”.

Cut to R.K. Narayan’s “An Astrologer's Day”. He is supposed to have written: “To crown the effect, he would put on saffron-cloured turban...” The word “coloured” has been simplified to “cloured” and remains so till this day.

A team of Bihar scholars compiled their works in an anthology titled — “ New Intermediate Prose and Poetry Selections”— for Plus Two students. The book was first published in 1994 and since then, it has been a part of the syllabus of both Jharkhand and Bihar. But howlers such as these detract, rather than add, to the students’ intellect.

In Walter De La Mare’s poem “Martha”, the poet sets the scene for Martha’s story telling sessions: “Martha would tell her stories… / In the hazel glen.” At the end of the poem, hazel is described as “greenish- brown”. But, Oxford dictionary lists “hazel” as “ reddish brown” while Chambers’ 20th Century describes it as “light brown”. To sum up, green nowhere near the earthy “hazel”. Grammar, too, has its own parameters. Several sentences begin with small letters after a full stop. It recurs with alarming frequency in Swami Vivekanand’s discourse on “Secret of Work”.

While writing the notes on Alexander Pope’s “Ode on Solitude”, the editors explain, “It is a poem of advise also”. The slight change in the spelling of the word when used as a noun— advice— has been glossed over.

The book, however, is under scrutiny.

Special officer of the newly-formed Jharkhand Academic Council I.D.N. Prasad said, “ The erstwhile Jharkhand Intermediate Education Council might have adopted the Bihar intermediate syllabus wholesale or maybe the pirated editions have mistakes. But now that our Academic Council has been formed, we will ensure that such mistakes are not repeated.”

However, a book-seller said, “ These days pirated books are nothing but photocopies of the original. Hence, the mistakes cannot be attributed to fake copies.”